Davenport, Quad-Cities, Makes #29 Out of America’s 100 Best Small Cities
Davenport is ranked 29 out of 100 small cities in the latest America’s Best Small Cities Report.
Davenport at night
The top five small cities as ranked by the consulting firm Resonance were Reno, Nev.; Naples, Fla.; Santa Fe, N.M., Savannah, Ga., and Asheville, N.C.. Earlier this month, Resonance completed a master tourism plan for the Quad-Cities, with Visit Quad Cities, which will work to implement its recommendations.
Dave Herrell, president and CEO of Visit Quad Cities, is thrilled that Davenport made the list for the first time – in the first year the report measured 100 metro areas between 100,000 and 500,000 population. The Quad-Cities has 380,106 residents in the region.
“The fact that Davenport and the Quad-Cities was recognized, and to be ranked 29 I think is a great thing,” Herrell said Thursday. “The Quad-Cities is a family of communities with each having authentic and distinct characteristics which make our region compelling and a must-experience destination.”
Dave Herrell
“This report really delves into place equity and they’ve got these cornerstone things they’re looking at. To be number 29, I think is fantastic. There’s a lot of wonderful communities that were 1 to 28, and 30 and beyond, but just to be recognized I think is a silver lining for us. It’s exciting.”
America’s Best Cities ranking (now in its sixth year) is billed as the most comprehensive city ranking in the U.S., based on original methodology that uses the opinions of the people who matter most: a city’s visitors and its residents. The index ranks the success of a city by analyzing and comparing 28 factors grouped in six key categories to identify a cities competitive identity.
The categories are place, product, programming, prosperity, people and promotion. The Quad-Cities ranked 8 in the prosperity category, based on employment and corporate head offices, including Fortune 500 companies and household income.
The entry on Davenport’s Best Cities ranking calls it “the economic powerhouse” of the Q-C area thanks to the presence of companies such as Kraft Heinz, Nestle Purina and John Deere. Davenport ranked #32 in the product category, notably due to the Q-C International Airport with four airlines serving 11 nonstop hubs.
With educational services and health care, arts and entertainment are a significant employer, the report said, as the region ranked #10 in nightlife, #21 for museums (noting the Figge Art Museum) and #22 for culture (noting the annual Riverssance fest). Resonance also mentioned the construction of hundreds of downtown apartments (going on for years) for those being drawn to the city.
“It’s always great to have our region recognized as an economic powerhouse at a national level, acknowledging what Quad Citizens know and love about our area,” said Paul Rumler, president/CEO of the Quad Cities Chamber.
As the area is marketed as a prosperous regional economy, the new report is “one more ranking we can add to our promotions – one of America’s Best Small Cities,” he said.
Modern Woodmen Park home of the River Bandits baseball team
“Davenport is honored to be recognized as one of the Best Small Cities in America,” said Davenport Mayor Mike Matson. “We appreciate our diversity and all of our citizens. We work hard to make Davenport a safe, stable, and welcoming community.”
Resonance Consultancy – based in Vancouver, B.C., and New York City — compiles annual World’s 100 Best Cities rankings; London is the current champ. While this is the sixth year for America’s Best Cities, its first five years measured the 50 top large cities (of over 1 million people) and 50 small cities (1 million or less).
To get more smaller towns involved, the firm created a separate list for cities 500,000 and under, and added a mid-size category for those between 500,000 and 1 million, said Tom Gierasimczuk, Resonance vice president for business development.
In the past, all cities under 1 million faced hurdles like: “You’re competing with Honolulu, all these bigger cities,” he said. The 2019 Small Cities report put Des Moines at 29, and last year’s top two were Honolulu and Omaha.
“Let’s measure this not as a tourist; we make sure we are looking this not only as places to visit, but places to visit, to invest in, to live and work,” Gierasimczuk said,
This year, the Q-C (examined as a region) bested Champaign, Ill. (home of the University of Illinois), ranked 35; and Iowa City (home to University of Iowa), which was 40.
“I think what’s unique, when we were working on our destination vision and strategic plan and our tourism master plan, there are some communities in here that we’ve been looking at,” Herrell said. “As an example, we looked at aspirationally, Asheville, N.C. We’re not necessarily a similar market, but there are some things there we can really look at.”
Asheville was ranked number 5. He also praised Fargo, N.D. (at 44), of another bi-state metro area (with Moorhead, Minn.), and Kalamazoo, Mich. (at 43) “The fact we’ve got a whole bevy of communities in this report that we can draw from. The fact that we’re ranked number 29, and to be in that top third is compelling and something we can really use as a leverage opportunity.”
“What I thought was surprising, things I loved to see, when you’re looking at these other communities that you admire and you look toward for inspiration and ideas and thoughts, I liked the fact we were 29,” Herrell added.
The main categories the report looked at are:
- Place –The perceived quality of a city’s natural and built environment, including the sub-categories of Weather, Safety, Neighborhoods & Landmarks, and Outdoors.
- Product– A city’s key institutions, attractions, and infrastructure, including the sub-categories of Airport Connectivity, Attractions, Museums, University Ranking, Convention Center, and Pro Sports teams.
- Programming –The arts, culture, entertainment, and culinary scene in a city, including the sub-categories of Shopping, Culture, Restaurants, and Nightlife.
- People –The immigration rate and diversity of a city, including the sub-categories of Foreign Born and Educational Attainment.
- Promotion –The quantity of stories, references and recommendations shared online about a city, including the sub-categories of Google Search Results, Google Trends, Facebook Check-ins, Instagram Hashtags, and TripAdvisor Reviews.
Herrell said the report and Resonance – which works worldwide in tourism, real estate development and more – represent big wins for the region.
“Communities look to it every year; I know that we do and that I do. I think it’s something we can use as best practice, and hopefully a little bit of a competitive edge as we look at these other markets and see who’s out there,” he said.
“It’s a good publication and a good work product for us to really glean from.”
The downtown riverfront
It also helps that Resonance frequently partners with National Geographic and its publications, in assembling stories on things like America’s best food cities or friendliest cities, using the consultant’s data, Herrell said.
“The legitimacy is extremely strong,” he said. “When you’ve got a flagship brand, and publication and organization like National Geographic and the work Resonance does around the globe in a lot of different sectors – it’s not just sectors like ours. They specialize in real estate development, a lot of place-driven insights as well, and when this is put out, it already had a legitimacy to it.”
“The Best Cities rankings are composed of experiential factors that people consider most important in choosing a city to live and visit, as well as empirical factors that business decision-makers consider important in choosing where to invest,” Resonance president/CEO Chris Fair aid this week in a release.
“America’s small cities have never mattered more to the future of the country,” he said. “The nation’s small cities face particularly pivotal months ahead. Small-center urban growth was already rising before the pandemic. Now with millions of workers increasingly able to work remotely, many may choose to move to these smaller cities.”
“At the same time, we expect travel to drive-to destinations to recover first,” Fair said. “As American travelers hit the road, they’ll likely look to small cities to satisfy their travel desires.” In other words, the demand for America’s small cities — from travelers, investors and families looking to settle down — will likely grow over the next 12 months. This ranking is their playbook for where to consider next.”
Fair wrote in the report intro: “If there is one thing that social distancing has taught us, it’s that the shared spaces we were asked to close and avoid, from parks to restaurants to sporting venues, museums and galleries, are what we cherish most about the cities we live in or love to visit.”
The 2020 best large cities are New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Jose, according to bestcities.org. The best mid-size cities are Honolulu, Omaha, Charleston, Colorado Springs, and Albuquerque.
Implementing a resonant plan
On June 10, Visit Quad Cities released its tourism master plan, completed with Resonance, and available on the visitor group’s website.
“Resonance was thrilled to assist Visit Quad Cities in its pioneering effort to create a Tourism Master Plan that reflects the engagement, contributions and feedback of Quad Citizens,” said Richard Cutting-Miller, the firm’s executive vice president.
The 86-page plan is “a testament to the region’s forward looking perspective and sets forth a vision for the future with strategies, recommendations and plans for the collective region to build its economy, tourism experiences/activities and quality of life for residents,” he said.
“The master plan is our organization’s number-one priority and we are extremely grateful for the support and engagement of our stakeholders throughout this process,” said Mo Hyder, board chairman for Visit Quad Cities. “And we look forward to next steps as we begin sharing it with the community and working on implementation.”
The plan recommendations are divided into six areas of focus: Destination Promotion, Destination Development, Destination Programming, Destination Stewardship, Governance, and Implementation.
Some of the recommendations in the new plan include:
- Engage Quad Citizens to build resident pride and activate destination advocates.
- Develop a shared riverfront vision and development plan.
- Develop a cultural tourism plan to enhance the vibrancy of both the tourism and creative economies.
- Prioritize diversity and inclusivity in tourism development and promotion,
- Prioritize investment in the visitor economy to remain competitive.
Tourism will be an integral force for the short- and long-term economic recovery in the Quad-Cities, due to the significant non-resident revenues it drives along with the community branding, promotion, and business development platform it provides, according to a Visit Quad Cities release.
“Charting our regional destination’s long-range course is vitally important to the Quad-Cities visitor economy, driving tourism, and community positioning” said Dave Herrell, the group CEO. “Our region’s new Tourism Master Plan sets the stage for our collective approach as we come together to shift culture by prioritizing tourism and the Quad-Cities brand as a guiding force for good and as a shared common value for all Quad Citizens.”
Davenport at night
Community stakeholders identified and prioritized the following strategic goals for the destination vision and strategic plan: brand identity, growth, visitor experience, economic impact, investment, collaboration, quality of life and sustainability.
As part of the plan’s research, thousands of Quad Citizens and visitors completed a survey, developed by Resonance, to provide their valuable input on the destination. The research is available on VisitQuadCities.com.
Resonance found that with $880 million in annual visitor spending, the Quad-Cities visitor economy ranks 10th among the competitive set of similarly-sized markets — ahead of Peoria, Rockford, Rochester, Fargo and South Bend, according to a Q-C destination assessment.
In comparison, Cincinnati boasts the largest visitor economy in the group with $5.3 billion in visitor spending. Because of this, the Q-C performance improves in most categories when the data is indexed to measure the total number of quality experiences against visitor spending, the report said, noting the Q-C’s strongest visitor category is theater and concerts, and the lowest performing category is vacation rentals.
The local tourism industry (pre-Covid) supported 8,240 jobs, including hotels, restaurants, bars and attractions. The Q-C area has more than 6,500 hotel rooms, and in 2018, it attracted 1.69 million visitors.
The region lies within a 300-mile radius of 37 million people, with close access to major markets like Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Des Moines, Omaha, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Indianapolis.
To see the report on small cities, visit bestcities.org (under Rankings).
