They absolutely did, and that's the entire point: the growth-begets-growth tautology of land (and job) development in the US; a subtly-hyped gold rush for milqu

They absolutely did, and that's the entire point: the growth-begets-growth tautology of land (and job) development in the US; a subtly-hyped gold rush for milquetoast everymen wherein people tired of high costs of living are trying to catch their lucky break by moving to the handful of areas at the exact right time where you can still buy a big house and snag a semi-rare high-paying job. They read 'metros with the highest rates of income growth' and they think their incomes, but strangely not their costs, would grow too. People do want this, because they've done it with Raleigh, Nashville, and Boulder, and Austin before that, and Portland before that; and the article's point is that there's always another metro somewhere where growth can be jumpstarted for a few years before it fizzles out. Established and mostly well-functioning metros like Chicago and DFW don't qualify in their entirety, because individual suburbs or exurbs within them fulfill the same role that Boise now plays. Boise is being used here because it's remote from other cities of comparable size, so it's riding solely its own coattails, and the failures of regions far away that draw people in.