By G. SCOTT THOMAS
sthomas@bizjournals.com | 716-541-1618

There are divergent schools of thought about income levels in the two-county Buffalo market:

1. They are substantially below average. Buffalo's current per capita income (PCI) of $37,511 is $3,200 lower than the national norm for metropolitan areas.

2. They are growing with unusual speed. Buffalo ranked 74th in PCI among the nation's 100 biggest markets five years ago. It now ranks 59th.

This story deals with the second point.

Portfolio.com and Bizjournals combed through 25 years of federal income data for the top 100 metros, covering the period from 1984 through 2009. Their study focused on per capita income, a key indicator of earning power and economic vitality, based on figures compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

El Paso, Texas, emerged from the study as the nation's undisputed leader in income growth. Buffalo finished a strong 27th.

Portfolio.com and Bizjournals are online services of American City Business Journals Inc., the parent company of Business First.

They calculated growth rates over 25 different time spans for each market, yielding an overall score for income growth. All of those spans ended in 2009, ranging from the long term (1984-2009) to a single year (2008-2009).

El Paso holds first place in 13 of those 25 spans. Its per capita income, for example, expanded rapidly over the long run - 147 percent during the 20-year period from 1989 to 2009. And it has grown nicely in the short term - 2 percent during the 12 months from '08 to '09. No other market surpassed either of those performances.

Buffalo slipped badly during the 1990s, falling from 57th place in PCI at the beginning of that decade to 77th at the end.

But it has recovered nicely in recent years, allowing it to outperform such major metros as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Dallas and Atlanta in long-term income growth. Buffalo's increase of 45.7 percent since 1999 was well ahead of any of those other places.

PCI is defined as the average amount of money received by each resident of a given area in a given year. It encompasses such diverse sources of income as salaries, interest payments, dividends, rental income and government checks.

Bridgeport-Stamford, Conn., posted the highest per capita income of any major metro in 2009, $73,720. The runners-up were San Francisco-Oakland at $59,696 and Washington at $56,442.

El Paso was mired in 99th place with its PCI of $28,638. The only market to finish lower was another Texas metro along the Mexican border, McAllen-Edinburg, at $19,720.

But Portfolio.com and Bizjournals took a different tack - looking for the strongest growth rates, not the highest income levels.

Five of the top 10 metros actually managed to boost their per capita incomes between 2008 and 2009. Only five of the study's other 90 metros could say the same.

At the opposite end of the standings is Atlanta, the U.S. market with the worst record for long-term income growth. It finished dead last in six of the study's 25 time spans, and next-to-last in another five.

Atlanta's per capita income of $36,482 ranked 69th last year, putting it well ahead of El Paso. But the tables were turned when the spotlight was switched to growth rates.

Atlanta's PCI, for instance, has increased just 87 percent since 1989, and actually declined 4.8 percent between 2008 and 2009. Buffalo's corresponding growth rate since 1989 was a comparatively robust 110.9 percent.

The tail end of the income-growth rankings is a mixture of Sunbelt and Northern industrial markets. The former have been badly hurt by declines in real-estate prices in recent years, while the latter continue to suffer a steady erosion of their manufacturing bases.

Detroit ranks next-to-last in income growth, based on the calculations by Portfolio.com and Bizjournals, with Raleigh, Toledo and Charlotte filling out the bottom five.