Where Should You Ride out the Recession? Irvine

Pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow in Irvine? | Photo by paper or plastic? via Flickr

In a BusinessWeek study published this week, they found that cities with strong health care, education, law, energy and government industries would feel less of an impact during the country's current economic woes. In general, they say California will especially not do well if "things get really bad." That's because we're "buried under a growing mass of foreclosures" (after all, 70% of top 10 highest foreclosure congressional districts are here in California).

But within the state, Irvine ranks the 16th best city in the country to ride out the recession in. One of the main contributing factors is UC-Irvine since "colleges don't necessarily flourish in bad times, but they don't go out of business either." They also cite Orange County as one of the areas not hit as hard in the subprime crisis compared to other California regions, even though the 44th congressional district in Orange (and Riverside) county rates as the 8th highest foreclosure district in the country.