NCAAbbs

Quote:Birmingham
The University of Alabama at Birmingham anchors this city’s economy, operating an 18,000-student campus and major medical center whose recession-proof demand has helped the local economy weather the current downturn. And even the manufacturing sector is relatively healthy here: About 40 miles outside Birmingham, two auto plants—for Mercedes and Honda—employ workers whose textile jobs moved offshore over the past couple of decades. The city’s low labor and land costs attract businesses to locate here rather than in rival cities elsewhere in the region like Atlanta or Charlotte. Birmingham holds its own in the culture department as well: It boasts two restaurants with chefs nominated for James Beard Foundation Awards, in addition to the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Opera Birmingham and the Birmingham Museum of Art, whose popular Art on the Rocks programs draw young professionals to sip cosmos amid the Cassatts.

The region’s attractions have helped cushion the impact of the national housing slump. Median home prices in the area that encompasses Birmingham’s Jefferson and three other counties have held up well. “We have avoided the peaks and the valleys,” says Russell Cunningham, president of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce. The suburb of Mountain Brook has fared particularly well, with a median home price increase of just under 5 percent in the first half of this year. The affluent community’s three villages, most of them laid out in the 1920s and ’30s, form a leafy triangle in the Appalachian foothills. At $535,000, Mountain Brook’s median home price for the first half of 2008 is well above the region’s median of $163,500. And the area lies less than five miles from Birmingham’s downtown business district, so residents are anything but cut off from the city’s amenities.