Best places to do business in America? Think Boise and Olympia

Forbes has a new listing of the best places to build a business or a career. and the surprise local leader is Boise, which came second (after Raleigh, N.C.). Seattle finished 20th, while Portland was 35th. Update:A related survey in Puget Sound Business Journal looks at housing affordability in 50 top cities. In this one, Seattle comes in 11th worst, with Portland a close contender at 14th. The cities are ranked in the Forbes.com survey of business attractiveness according to three factors: cost of doing business, job growth, and educational levels. Seattle, as you might expect, does very well in education, ranking 15th of the 200 cities surveyed, and poorly (158th) in cost of business. Tacoma, finishing a respectable 43rd on the list, is the reverse of Seattle: 152nd in education levels and 84th in cost of business. In Boise, the numbers are 17 for cost of business, 13 in job growth, and 87 in education. Portland's three numbers, respectively, are 134, 55, 52, with a little surprise in the education figure. Regional cities are ranked by the Forbes survey as follows: Boise (2), Olympia (8), Spokane (9), Seattle (20), Denver (31), Portland (35), Euguene (36), Tacoma, (43), Salem (60), Boulder (77), Anchorage (146), and San Francisco (197). That shocking San Francisco figure, demonstrating how soaring costs of business are really starting to penalized the "hot" cities, is a warning for Seattle, despite its currently high rating in the Forbes index. Boston (160th) and Cambridge, Mass (155th) are also signals in this regard. Another intriguing aspect of the survey is that only Atlanta and Seattle, of all the country's major cities, make it into the top 20. The best places for business are decidedly small, as is clear from the list of the top ten: Raleigh, N.C., Boise, Fort Collins, Colo, Des Moines, Lexington, KY, Atlanta, Richmond, VA, Olympia, Spokane, and Knoxville, Tenn. As for the housing affordability index by the Business Journals network, the shocking figures are how high some cities are in terms of median housing payments as a percentage of income. LA is the worst, at 75.46 percent, followed by San Francisco at 69.8 percent. Seattle's is 41.9 and Portland is 37.8. Here's the list of the 15 least affordable cities for housing, with the worst ones listed highest: Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, San Diego, San Jose, New York City, Sacramento, Riverside-San Bernadino, Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Boston, Providence, Seattle, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Portland, Oregon, and Orlando.