At his Urbanophile blog, Aaron M. Renn looks at the fastest/slowest growing metros in 2012. The top five are Nashville, Houston, Austin, Salt Lake City, and San Jose (proving that people still know the way). Silicon Valley continues to attract, despite California’s notoriously bleak economic climate. The other cities are in states generally considered business friendly: Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.

We wrote about the metro competition here, pegging off reports that Seattle’s recent successes validated the blue model. And Seattle has done well, coming in as 15th fastest growing. But it’s hard to review the performance rankings without concluding that sensible taxes and regulation play a crucial role in luring growth and development.

P.S. The list at the Urbanophile blog post is alphabetical. I put it into a spreadsheet and ranked the cities by percentage change here.