Quote Originally Posted by bchris02 View Post
I've never liked the "CSA" metric for comparing metro areas. There are actually only a few metro areas in the country where using the CSA makes sense eg. Raleigh-Durham. It doesn't for OKC or Tulsa in my opinion and is simply just a way to inflate the numbers.

It is surprising that Tulsa continues to under-perform. Given the oil downturn and the improvement in the national economy, these numbers for OKC are about what should be expected.
CSA's tie together the larger MSA to adjacent micropolitan areas that have an employment interchange of at least 15%. They also represent a region that shares the same labor and media market.

The only reasons I can think of for Tulsa's tepid growth is a lack of dynamic industries creating lots of jobs and the continued oil downturn which affects Tulsa as much as OKC. Lack of a large state university in the metro is likely another factor. There is a lot of positive momentum currently in Tulsa but it hasn't yet translated into higher growth, hopefully next year's numbers show a better return especially with O&G activity picking back up. The city itself has been growing and is now over 400,000 for the first time ever and the MSA has been so close to 1 million for the past several years but just hasn't been able to get over that hump.