Print edition: 
WASHINGTON — Call them the Final Four: The four large cities that have made it through the recession with the smallest increases in unemployment.
Minneapolis, Buffalo, Oklahoma City and Rochester, N.Y., don't have much else in common. But a government report shows they've had the smallest increases in joblessness over the past two years among cities with at least 1 million people.
None of the four relies on heavy manufacturing industries, such as autos or steel, which have been hit hard by the downturn. And all have avoided the extremes of the housing boom and bust that devastated much of California, Florida and Nevada.
Minneapolis was the city with the smallest rise in unemployment among the nation's 49 largest metro areas, according to Labor Department data released Friday. Its jobless rate rose by only 2.8 percentage points from January 2008, a month after the recession began, through January 2010. Its rate reached 7.7 percent that month.
Nationwide, the rate rose by nearly 5 points during those two years, to 9.7 percent in January, up from 5 percent. Employers cut 8.4 million jobs, the most in any downturn since the 1930s.
Minneapolis benefited from a medical equipment industry that's fared better than other manufacturers during the downturn, according to Jeet Dutta, a senior economist at Moody's Economy.com.
Oklahoma City's January unemployment rate of 6.7 percent, meanwhile, is the lowest among large metro areas, the Labor Department said. It's risen only 2.9 percentage points in the past two years. About a fifth of the city's workers are employed by state or local government, said Russell Evans, a regional economist at Oklahoma State University.
In addition, booming oil and gas prices leading up to the recession and a growing aerospace maintenance industry led to strong income gains for the region's workers even as the recession took hold in other parts of the country, Evans said.
Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y., by contrast, didn't suffer so much in the recession partly because their economies had already been struggling beforehand.
