Welcome to the second edition of Market Facts, the younger sibling of The Business Journal’s Book of Lists. In the following pages, you’ll find facts that define our region, from demographics to wage data to housing and retail information. New this year is a section on data gathered from a 50-mile radius of Tri-Cities Airport, the center of the Tri-Cities region. We often preach that economic developers don’t care much about city, county or state lines. This data eliminates those considerations completely. Our thanks go out to the organizations who helped us bring this data together: East Tennessee State University, the First Tennessee Development District, NetWORKS Sullivan Partnership, the Northeast Tennessee Regional Economic Partnership, and our own staff. Special thanks in particular go to Ken Rea at FTDD and Michelle Black at NeTREP, who researched the 50-mile radius data.
