Seattle World TourIn this East Coast vs. West Coast battle, it looks like the West Coast is winning.

According to a review of data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bloomberg found that the tech boom is shifting the richest cities in America to the West Coast. Three out of the top five land here with San Jose topping the charts.

Bridgeport, Conn., an ultra-wealthy suburb outside New York City where many in finance live, comes in No. 2, but San Francisco and Seattle follow, with Boston rounding out the top five.

Bloomberg looked at the nation’s 100 largest metro areas to crunch the numbers to see which city had the “highest output per resident” in 2014.

Apparently, tech is the new gold rush, with the gross metropolitan product, or GMP per capita in Silicon Valley at $105,482 — which Bloomberg cites is “more than double the national average.”

Seattle’s GMP came in at $75,874, but our neighbor to the south, Portland, is also seeing a large jump.

See the map of U.S. cities below:

Photo via Bloomberg/U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
Photo via Bloomberg/U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis

“Tech cities outside the Bay Area have also benefited from the industry’s boom. Helped by not only Amazon Inc. but also newer Internet companies like Zulily Inc., Seattle’s GMP per capita grew by a cumulative 7.9 percent since 2009, when the economic recovery began,” Bloomberg noted.

“That helped the Washington city catapult to No. 4 from its No. 6 spot in 2008 through 2011,” the report continues. “Biotech hotbed Boston also jumped two places since 2008, while Portland, Oregon (sometimes called Silicon Forest) climbed six spots.”

The Bloomberg report also states that these areas have “some of the densest concentrations of educated workers,” which helps drive GMP.

Of course, like yin and yang, here’s the bad news that comes with the good — “These emerging tech hubs will probably expand even more in coming years…Sky-high rents in northern California force workers and businesses to look elsewhere.”

Look forward to more traffic, and rising housing and commercial real estate costs to go along with that boom.

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