Site Selection Magazine announced last week that Chicagoland has been named the number-one U.S. metropolitan area for corporate relocation and site selection for the 13th consecutive year, extending a streak that the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce described as “historic,” that economic development professionals called “a testament to the region’s structural advantages,” and that several recently relocated companies, reached for comment at their new offices in the West Loop and Fulton Market, described using the longer and more procedurally specific phrase “an ongoing internal facilities and workforce assessment that we’re not in a position to discuss publicly at this time.” The award was presented at a ceremony. Chicago accepted.

The ranking, published annually by Site Selection, evaluates metro areas on criteria including corporate facility investments, job creation metrics, and infrastructure assets. Chicago’s wins in these categories are, on their face, unambiguous: the region is home to the busiest multimodal freight hub in North America, O’Hare International Airport connects directly to more international business destinations than any other U.S. hub, and the city sits at the geographic center of a national distribution network that makes it, as the Chamber’s materials put it, “the connective tissue of American commerce.” The Chicago business activity index hit 57.7 in February — expanding for the second straight month after twenty-five consecutive months of contraction. This is what a turning point looks like in data. Whether it also looks like a turning point in person is a question Site Selection does not measure.

Veridian Supply Chain Partners, a logistics technology firm that relocated its headquarters from Austin to Chicago’s Fulton Market District last September, offered a perspective that was, in their Chief Strategy Officer’s words, “nuanced.” The company moved partly based on Chicago’s freight infrastructure, partly based on talent access, and partly, their CSO acknowledged, on “a Site Selection Magazine article we read in our conference room in Austin that made it sound very compelling in a way that I think we maybe took literally.” When asked to clarify, he said the article had described Chicago’s weather as “continental,” which he had understood to mean moderate, and which he now understood to mean “four distinct seasons experienced at high intensity.” He said Veridian remained committed to the Chicago market and had purchased very good winter coats.

On March 6th — roughly six months into Veridian’s tenancy at their West Loop headquarters — a severe thunderstorm system moved through Chicago, triggering ground stops at O’Hare that resulted in 547 cancellations and average delays exceeding one hour. Midway logged an additional 20 cancellations. Temperatures hit 66 degrees Fahrenheit that afternoon — near record warmth for early March — before dropping 20 degrees over the following 48 hours. Three of Veridian’s senior leadership team were stranded at O’Hare on March 6th returning from a client meeting in New York. When they finally landed, the temperature was 41 degrees and it was raining. Their Chief People Officer, who had been monitoring the situation from Chicago, sent them a text message that read, “Welcome to the connective tissue of American commerce.” She said this was a joke. Two of the three responded with thumbs-up emojis. One did not respond.

The case for Chicago is real — this is not in dispute. The talent pool, fed by a dozen major universities within commuting distance, is deep. The central geography is genuinely unmatched for companies whose operations require physical distribution. The cost of doing business, relative to coastal markets, remains favorable despite property taxes that local executives describe in hushed tones as “structural” and “something you factor in at board level.” A recent survey by the Illinois Business Relocation Council, which is a group that produces surveys about corporate relocation, found that 73% of companies that had relocated to Chicagoland in the last five years rated the decision as “good” or “very good” in retrospect. The remaining 27% selected “it’s complicated,” which is not technically an answer on a four-point scale but which the survey instrument apparently accommodated after feedback from a pilot group. The 0% who selected “bad” either did not exist or, per the Council, “self-selected out of the survey population,” which is one way to describe companies that have relocated again.

Chicagoland’s O’Hare connectivity — cited in every Site Selection ranking as a primary asset — remains, in the words of a corporate real estate consultant I spoke with, “both genuinely excellent and something you appreciate more in the aggregate than on any specific Tuesday.” She moved her own firm to Chicago from San Francisco three years ago and says she does not regret it. When I asked what she would tell a company currently evaluating Chicago as a relocation destination, she said: “I’d tell them it’s the best city in America with the most interesting weather in America and to purchase extremely comprehensive business travel insurance.” She said the last part was not in any official client document. She said clients, in her experience, found out on their own.

The Chamber of Commerce will hold a 13th Anniversary Relocation Achievement Celebration next month, featuring remarks from civic leaders and a “testimonial panel” of companies that have moved to Chicago in the past 18 months. A spokesperson confirmed that the panel will feature remarks from four companies, all of which have been in Chicago long enough to form opinions but not long enough to have gone through a full winter-to-summer transit, which the spokesperson described as “a scheduling thing.” Site Selection Magazine is expected to evaluate Chicago’s 14th-year candidacy later this year. Veridian Supply Chain Partners, asked if they planned to attend the Chamber’s celebration, said they would love to attend but that their Chief Strategy Officer had a flight out of O’Hare that evening, and they were leaving extra time.