In the 2014 election cycle, about $411.5 million, or 25 percent, of campaign contributions from individuals who gave $200 or more to federal candidates, parties and political action committees came from people in New York City and Washington, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, almost twice the $212.7 million given by San Franciscans and Angelenos.

“Boston, New York and Washington together support a $3 trillion economy with 50 million people,” said Richard Florida, a Miami-based founder of the Creative Class Group, which advises companies on location strategies. “Maybe it’s not growing as fast, but wages are extremely high.”

So-called millennials, though, overwhelmingly prefer western cities such as Houston and Denver, according to William H. Frey. a demographer at Brookings. The New York City region lost 20,369 millennials from 2010 to 2012, Census Bureau data show.

Access to such workers prompted Layer3 TV Inc., a two-year-old cable company, to choose Denver over Boston in 2014 for its headquarters. The company is working on a product that combines television, social and digital media and plans to fill 312 jobs paying an average salary of $92,083.

“The driving decision to move to any location is the people,” said Eric Kuhn, the firm’s marketing director.

Throughout the West, the boom hasn’t come without pain. It faces headwinds from the collapse of oil prices and California’s record drought. Housing prices depressed by foreclosures in the mid-2000s are rising, causing a shortage of single-family homes and driving up rents.

“Any place where you really get your economy going fast, you also begin to see this dramatic increase in housing prices,” Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper said in an interview.

Metro Denver charted the greatest one-year rise in home-resale prices in January of the 20 U.S. markets on the S&P/Case-Shiller index, with the average price up 8.4 percent from a year earlier. Christopher Gomez, a 35-year-old business-development specialist, said condos in the mid-$200,000s price range garner cash offers after mere hours on the market, leaving him unable to compete after an eight-month search.

“I don’t know how this housing market is sustainable for the young professionals that are moving here,” Gomez said.