INC magazine ran this article"Top 25 Cities for Doing Business in America" March 2004 & Boomtowns '06: Hottest Midsize Cities  published May 2006. Bakersfield moved from the 5th best midsize city to the tenth best city to do business in.

It is not falling as the sentence above states but rather being reclassified entirely.. William Frey P.H.D. (Demographer) who is often cited with the term "Jerseyfication" has definitively proved that  this shift to the periphery of large metropolitan cities has become increasingly obvious when analyzing population & demographic changes.

Over the mountains...

People are moving to Bakersfield. In 2005, land values made Bakersfield the the nation's No. 1 market for appreciation.   Government numbers released in June 2005 document a housing price surge of 33.67% in the last year alone. Now the bottom has fell out of the market and housing values are starting to stabilize. If you spend any amount of time researching why so many people have moved here, it is because of the real estate prices compared to the greater Los Angeles area. Companies move here because they can make great profits by paying employees so much less in labor costs.

But Bakersfield is ranked at # 616 in per capita income ($17,678) according to WikiPedia. If the per capita income is low and the housing values are high that should send a big alert to your brain. There are not enough well-paying jobs to support the residents. The largest amount of jobs are in the agriculture & manufacturing businesses. It is a great city for new businesses to come in and grow.
It is a great city for families. It is not a great city for jobs, so many residents drive over the mountains.

I want to see more fair-paying jobs being brought to Bakersfield. There should not be such a paradigm shift in the way employers see the labor market & job seekers see the job market. There has to be something that can be done to raise our per capita income. It is only fair to the many new residents, and more so to the residents that have been born here or lived here for the past ten years...