BusinessWeek Names Spartanburg #2 In Top 30 Housing Markets

That’s right, Spartanburg was named #2 of the 30 strongest U.S. housing markets, right behind Boulder, Colorado. As BusinessWeek sees it, houses in Spartanburg are a better buy than in better-known cities like New Orleans, Fayetteville, Pittsburgh, Little Rock and Oklahoma City.

Their logic?

Spartanburg, about 75 miles west of Charlotte, is home to the world headquarters of Denny’s restaurant chain and three colleges—Converse College, Spartanburg Methodist College, and Wofford College. It has the state’s highest per capita college student population. College towns such as Boulder, Colo., and Spartenburg have been somewhat buffered from the downturn because the schools provide solid jobs and a steady flow of apartment and home renters.

Incidentally, neighboring city Greenville also made the top 30, ranking in at 24. That’s right: Spartanburg has a MUCH better housing market than Greenville according to BusinessWeek. (Get used to it, Greenville. Sparkle City is about to shine.)

Of course, as a word of warning, this kind of “top 10″ reporting tends to be kind of shallow and without much greater context. But there’s no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth here, even if our fair city — ranked second in the nation, mind you — didn’t actually merit a mention in the accompanying article.

And, if you want to get all technical, it doesn’t actually mean that Spartanburg’s housing market is great. Mostly, it means that Hub City was relatively protected from the bursting of the housing bubble. The homes here never had time to become wildly overvalued, and as a result, many of them are actually still quite undervalued. As the city revitalizes — something that is almost impossible to prevent as the USC Upstate business college opens downtown, the Spartanburg Community College relocates downtown, RJ Rockers’ brewery opens — housing prices within the city will start to creep upward.

Spartanburg made it into the number two position in the race simply by not being involved in the massive crash that took everyone else out. We’re the silver lining in the recession’s storm cloud.

MSN also picked up the story, giving Sparkle City’s not-crappy housing marked even more exposure.

Props to Lucas Patterson for passing this link along.