Brown County, South Dakota

• Income gap: Households earn meaningfully less than the national median, which directly affects retail demand, housing absorption, and tax base.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 1.9 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest sector: Health Care and Social Assistance employs 3,183 workers (21.3% of the top displayed sectors), at an average wage of $60,760.
• Wage stratification: Finance and Insurance averages $82,822 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $20,675, a 4.0x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Printing and Related Support Activities concentrates at 6.68x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 10 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, suggesting an interconnected industrial base rather than reliance on a single employer or sector.
• Attraction whitespace: 8 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• In line with national: Home value to income ratio of 3.1x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• Broadly affordable rents: All 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom tiers sit below the 30%-of-median-income affordability threshold (~$1,772/mo), a clear cost-of-living advantage for workforce attraction.

• Succession risk is real: 22.2% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Strong participation: 92.5% labor force participation among working-age residents indicates an engaged, available workforce.
• Short commutes: 13.9-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 6 local institutions feed the workforce; the top three combined produce 5,653 annual credentials.

Brown County shows strong potential for printing and related support activities attraction, with a 6.68x concentration and 304 jobs in this sub-sector, it ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 22.2% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

The interconnected base across printing and related support activities, animal production and aquaculture, and gasoline stations and fuel dealers creates supply-chain attraction leverage rather than single-employer risk, a structural advantage for industrial recruitment.

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