First CNN.com insults Mobile, then calls it the mecca of the South.

Thank the Lord, Southerners are forgiving.

Mobile and Montgomery were listed among the top 10 bounce-back housing markets in the country by CNN.com this past week.

CNN called Mobile "a low-wage backwater" just 10 years ago, but said it is now "emerging as the South's next boomtown and magnet for mega projects."

The city was praised for all the jobs that will be created by the $3.7 billion Thyssen-

Krupp steel mill in north Mobile, the new container terminal at the Port of Mobile and the Airbus North America engineering center that will employ 150 people at Brookley Field.

Executives running industries around the world often base their perceptions of the South on the civil rights era, according to David Bronner, chief of the Retirement Systems of Alabama, a $28 billion set of pension funds.

"If they haven't visited Alabama since then, the people we take around are blown away by Montgomery, and it's the same in Mobile," he said. "What we've accomplished in the last 14 to 15 years is quite phenomenal."

RSA has invested $220 million in the newly opened, 35-story RSA Battle House Tower and 238-room Battle House Hotel in downtown Mobile. It also bought and is investing $60 million in renovating the 375-room Riverview Plaza Hotel at 64 S. Water St., and built and manages the Alabama Cruise Terminal at Mobile.

Those downtown improvements have prompted other business owners to update their buildings and drawn investors looking for properties to buy and fix up, according to Realtors.

Companies looking at Mobile like what they see, according to Bronner.

"Companies are not coming in to save your town," he said. "They want a good environment and a chance to make money. And they want somebody else in there eyeball-to-eyeball with them. They don't want to look at themselves as being there to provide manna for your city to survive. They can go somewhere else where there are good schools, parks and recreational activities."

CNN.com also said the city's housing market was "heating up" because of the 7 to 9 percent appreciation rate, which had caught the attention of investors from as far as California and Colorado.

Mobile's growth rate has been even better than that, according to Lee Metzger, president of Mobile Area Association of Realtors. "I think we ran about 12 percent last year and this year it's 8 percent. When it's us versus the national market, we're running way above the rest of the world."

Even if not perfect, added Metzger, such publicity "is great for people to take a look at the big economic development growth we've had."