Has the great Mountain region growth machine broken down? It’s looking like it might have.
Not this time is the famous Western engine of plentiful real-estate-driven job creation delivering on its immemorial promise of a rapid snap-back from every set-back.
The first decade of this century was a dud for job creation nationwide. With a weak recovery from the 2001 recession followed by the Great Recession, the nation as a whole gained almost no jobs during the decade (actually, there was a 0.3 percent increase). That made the aughts the first decade since the Great Depression without any substantial job growth.
Like a lot of writers, I have a Facebook page where I post articles that I’ve published. Over the past year or two, I’ve accumulated a few hundred followers--that is, Facebook friends--and, based upon the comments they leave, they tend to see the world the same way that I do. They’re left of center, by and large, and they believe fervently in health care reform.
Now that we’re a full week past the initial high-speed rail announcement, we’ve taken the time to resurvey some of the elements of this massive investment. Demand is one of those elements and it’s critical to projecting ridership.
If you read this blog, you probably want to know the true state of play in the health care reform debate.
Well, join the club. After yet another a round of phone calls on Friday, I've become convinced that nobody really knows for sure.
With much excitement across the country, this week marked the true beginning of America’s recommitment to passenger rail service. Eight billion dollars in stimulus funding was doled out to Continue reading "High Speed Rail Dollars Flow--But Not to the Desert"
Are regional college education rates a stay against metro unemployment in bad times? It sure seems like it. Just take a look at the varied metropolitan area unemployment rates reported last week by the Metro Program’s quarterly MetroMonitor and its companion Mountain Monitor, the inaugural edition of which begins coverage of recession and recovery conditions in the metropolitan areas of the six-state Intermountain West. In that document, we noticed that the Mountain region’s third-quarter unemployment rates seemed to have a lot to do with metros’ college education levels, but we didn’t make too big a deal of it. Here, we thought we would belabor the point a bit more and ask why it’s so.
First, we’ll just note that others like Ed Glaeser have noted this connection before, and observe further that it’s hardly surprising that skills might explain metropolitan unemployment rates during the Great Recession given the huge and longstanding employment gap between skilled and unskilled workers at all other times.
Still, it really is striking to survey the extreme variation in unemployment rates revealed by the MetroMonitor and MountainMonitor maps and connect it to local education levels. Nationally, highly educated metros like Washington DC, Bridgeport, Madison, and Des Moines (with BA attainment rates of 47.3, 42.7, 40.5, and 32.5 percent respectively) have much lower unemployment rates than less educated metros like McAllen, Stockton, and Lakeland-Winter Haven (with BA attainment rates of 14.8, 16.8, and 17.7 percent, respectively), and this is not just because of regional or even state characteristics. Within the same state, there are still large and significant differences between well- and poorly-educated metros. For example, San Francisco, San Jose, and Austin are doing considerably better than their intra-state peers like Riverside, Bakersfield, and McAllen.
Yesterday’s release of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index has economists—and probably the Obama administration—on edge. The reason: an apparent softening of demand in October, which translated into weak home price growth across the 20 markets that the index tracks. That followed stronger, more widespread price growth in the summer months. The news has stoked fears of a “double dip” in house prices and the resulting havoc it might wreak in the mortgage market.
Like the economy itself, though, what you make of U.S. home prices depends on where you look. The latest Case-Shiller data portray an eclectic collection of metropolitan housing markets, experiencing divergent trends in recent months. The 20 metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller seem to break down into five types:
Consistent recovery. The three big coastal California metro areas—San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, along with Phoenix and Detroit, posted price gains in October, following at least three consecutive months of price growth. Prices in San Francisco were up a considerable 12 percent from their trough in April 2009.
Las Vegas…Phoenix…Boise? Say what? That’s a frequent reaction from reporters and others looking this month at the list of especially weak performers in the first edition of the Mountain Monitor, our new Intermountain West companion of the Metro Program’s national MetroMonitor recession and recovery index. It underscores how easily it is to miss things when it comes to regional economic health.
The interesting thing, in this respect, is how different Boise’s reputation has been during this decade from that of its southerly neighborhoods.
Readers, after all, have seen the forlorn photos of Sun Belt “For Sale” signs and empty dining rooms in newspapers, and so they get it that Las Vegas and Phoenix represent Ground Zero of last year’s real estate crack up. What they haven’t fixed on, however, is the equally brutal breakdown up north, in part because neither the media nor regular people have tended to view northerly, technology-oriented Boise as also a real-estate-focused Sun Belt location like those other metros.
In a nice phrase, the western writer Wallace Stegner called the Mountain West the “native home of hope.” However, for a while now at least parts of the region are also going to need another virtue as well: patience. Or at least, that’s the way it looks given the release of yesterday’s inaugural edition of the Mountain Monitor, a companion product to the Metro Program’s national MetroMonitor recession and recovery index and the first production of our new Brookings Mountain West initiative, a partnership of Brookings and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
Drawing on data covering the third quarter of 2009 (ending in September), the new Monitor suggests that no multistate region has been hit harder by the last year’s economic crisis than the six-state Intermountain zone, but that that impact has not been even.
Just look at our map (after the jump) of metros’ overall performance during the recession.
What's going to happen to Las Vegas if temperatures keep rising? The city needs water, after all, and most models predict that the Colorado river will start shriveling up if the West keeps getting hotter—runoff from mountain snowpack could drop anywhere from 5 percent to 25 percent by mid-century. And that, as Lauren Morello reports, could spell trouble:
After four quarters of decline, GDP finally grew, and at a pace--3.5 percent annually--not seen since the summer of 2007. As my colleagues Alan Berube and Bill Galston point out, and as I argued last month, signs of economic growth don’t necessarily mean a rapid recovery, a sustained recovery, or even a recovery that feels meaningful to the vast majority of Americans. But that’s not the horse I want to ride today. Instead, I want to read the tea leaves (the details of the GDP numbers for the third quarter of this year) to see what they suggest about the geography of the recovery--which metro areas are likely to be recovering and which aren’t.
First, the obvious.
Now, the not-so-obvious.
A month-old labor dispute in Boston has taken a curious twist. It began when on August 31, a hundred housekeepers at three Hyatt hotels in Boston were fired and replaced by workers from a Georgia company, Hospitality Staffing Solutions. The housekeepers, some of whom had worked for Hyatt for over twenty years, were making between $14 and $16 an hour plus health, dental, and 401(k) benefits. Their replacements were to make $8 an hour with no health benefits. To make matters worse, Hyatt had earlier gotten the fired workers to train their replacements. Hyatt told them the workers would filling in for them during vacations.
Hyatt’s move has drawn demonstrators and a threat by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick to bar state employees from using the Hyatt for state business. In Chicago, the home of the Hyatt Corporation, hotel workers were arrested at a demonstration in front of the Park Hyatt; and one of the fired hotel workers flew to Chicago to appeal to Penny Pritzker, whose family owns the Hyatt Corporation and who was Barack Obama’s national finance chairman. Appealing to Penny Pritzker may seem like overkill, but wait.
So it looks like the housing sector will soon start contributing--a little, in some places--to the economic recovery after contributing mightily to national breakdown.
The Wall Street Journal reports this morning, based on new figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that unemployment rates continued to climb in July in metropolitan America.
It’s probably true, based on BLS estimates that the nation overall shed another 247,000 jobs in July.
But BLS’ metropolitan data don’t exactly show us what’s going on from month to month.
That’s because they don’t take account of the natural fluctuations in employment levels that occur everywhere due to seasonal labor market changes. Or, in data-wonk terms, they’re not “seasonally adjusted.”
Why does this matter for July unemployment figures? Well, school’s out. And more young people on the labor market generally translates into higher unemployment rates in June, July, and August. You can see the seasonal pattern in national unemployment figures over the past few years in the chart linked below. (The article acknowledges this distinction implicitly, by comparing metropolitan rates to the national unadjusted figure for July.)
The other seasonal unemployment trend comes at the end of the year, when people are hired for retail positions over the holidays, then resume looking for work in January.
'Yes, sometimes I go into the room with my advisers and I start shouting. And then they say, 'And then what?'" The question hangs in the perfectly cooled air in Sa'ad Hariri's marble-floored sitting room, where Beirut appears as a sunlit abstraction visible at a distance through thick windows. Hariri's father, the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, martyr of the Cedar Revolution, arches his black eyebrows from a giant poster near the sofa, looking out at his son with a sidelong, mischievous glance. "It hasn't been a joyful trip," Sa'ad Hariri is saying.
Some people keep talismans in their wallets to remind them of those they love: a romantic letter, a set of dog tags, a family picture. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has such a token--but it's to remind him of the people he hates.
Mark Feest is doing all he can to get John McCain elected. Unfortunately, the McCain campaign hasn’t always made that easy. Feest is the chairman of the GOP committee in
The first thing I learned from driving around Nevada with Ron Paul for a couple of days: People really hate the Federal Reserve. This became clear midway through a speech Paul was giving to a group of Republicans at a community center in Pahrump, a dusty town about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. Pahrump is known for its legal brothels (Heidi Fleiss lives there), but most of the people in the audience looked more like ranchers than swingers. They stood five deep at the back of the room and listened politely as the candidate spoke.
For a long time now, whenever I've gone to Los Angeles, I've been alarmed by how impossibly tall the palm trees have grown. Whether I'm driving in Santa Monica or Venice, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, or Pasadena, the familiar sight of row after row of palm trees, their thin, fibrous trunks topped by rough-hewn, yet shimmering fronds stretching hundreds of feet into the broad, shadowless light, has come to fill me with gloom.
After an hour in Italy, I wish I'd become an architect. After a week, I begin to think it's not too late. When I gel home, I'll take some stones, pile them up, cover them with stucco, paint my wall a nice earth color, let it age, plain a vine to spill over the top, have a fountain bubbling nearby, and invite everyone over for an aperitivo. The spell of those old stones can hold me clear across the Atlantic.
