If a picture’s worth a thousand words, this chart has to be valued more than 10 times that. Detroit is literally off the chart. The big losers, other than the Motor City, are sprawling Sun Belt metros: the Miami, Tampa, Orlando, So-Flo Triangle; So-Cal’s once-vaunted Inland Empire, L.A. and San Diego; Las Vegas; Portland; and Rustbelt cities Buffalo, Rochester, and St. Louis.
The big winners: D.C. and Baltimore. NY and Boston also do well, along with Silicon Valley and San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Denver. Salt Lake City and Oklahoma City are also in very good shape, as well as, surprisingly, certain Rustbelt Cleveland and Milwaukee.
Chart from 
November 17th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Although things are not great in Cleveland, they could be much worse. Most of the firms and municipalities that I work with have had some good-sized layoffs but most have gone with a four day work week or mandatory week long furloughs every quarter to mitigate the need for future layoffs.
November 18th, 2009 at 11:32 am
We can see where the Stimulus money is really going – look at the extreme left of the pciture …