Bristol Bay Borough, Alaska

• Income premium: Households earn well above the national median, supporting strong retail and housing markets.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 14.8 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 634 workers (81.4% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $66,270. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 214 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $179M (2024).

• Top specialization: Food Manufacturing concentrates at 46.92x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 4 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 78.8% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: goods manufacturing. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.

• Affordable market: Home value to income ratio of 2.6x is well below the ~4.1x national average; supports talent attraction and family settlement narratives.
• Elevated vacancy: 63.5% of housing units are vacant, above the Alaska rate of 17.6%, and down from 67% in 2019.
• Mostly second homes: seasonal, recreational and occasional-use units are 73.6% of vacant units, so the headline rate is not available supply.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 5.6% of the vacant stock, or 3.5% of all housing units against the 63.5% headline vacancy rate. That is the figure to plan an incoming employer's housing against, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Broadly affordable rents: All 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes shown above sit below what a household on the median renter income of $98,125 can pay without cost burden (~$2,453/mo), and 8.1% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened; a cost-of-living advantage for workforce attraction.

• Succession risk is real: 27.2% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Healthy participation: 68.3% labor force participation reflects a steady, available local workforce.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in Bristol Bay Borough per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

Bristol Bay Borough shows strong potential for food manufacturing attraction, with a 46.92x concentration and 634 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 27.2% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Goods manufacturing accounts for 78.8% of it, all of it in food manufacturing. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.