MetroMonitor: Tracking Economic Recession and Recovery in America’s 100 Largest Metropolitan Areas
Cities, Regions and States, U.S. Economy, Unemployment, Housing
The Brookings Institution
June 2006 —
Beneath the constant drumbeat of headline numbers emanating from Washington on U.S. jobs, national unemployment, GDP, and home prices lies a complex, diverse set of 366 metropolitan economies. While no metro area has been immune from the current economic downturn, the pain is unevenly distributed. Some have felt only modest effects, and a few show early signs of recovery, while others are undergoing a wrenching restructuring that may fundamentally alter their economic trajectory.
The MetroMonitor, an interactive barometer of the health of America’s metropolitan economies, looks "beneath the hood" of national economic statistics to portray the diverse metropolitan landscape of recession and recovery across the country. It aims to enhance understanding of the underpinnings of national economic trends, and to promote public- and private-sector responses to the downturn that take into account metro areas’ unique starting points, weaknesses, and strengths—the potential "grassroots green shoots"—for eventual recovery.
This edition of the Monitor examines indicators through the first quarter of 2009 (ending in March) in the areas of employment, unemployment, wages, output, home prices, and foreclosure rates for the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. It finds that:
The recession has had highly varied impacts on different metropolitan areas, even within the same broad regions of the country. In March 2009 the unemployment rate ranged from 5.1 percent in Provo to 17.5 percent in Modesto. From the beginning of 2008 through the beginning of 2009, home prices fell by 30.6 percent in Stockton but rose by 4.7 percent in Houston.
A few metropolitan areas are beginning to showing signs of economic recovery, although none has completely recovered. McAllen is the only metropolitan area that saw growth in both employment and output during the first quarter of 2009. Employment also rose in New Haven and Baton Rouge, while output also increased in Seattle, Austin, Virginia Beach, Washington, Richmond, San Jose, and Riverside. Still, none of these metro areas has yet returned to its pre-recession levels of employment or output.
There are two distinct "Manufacturing Belts." Economic pain is widespread in Midwestern metro areas that depend heavily on the auto industry and its supply chain. Most metro areas in Michigan and Ohio have experienced employment and output declines exceeding national averages. Several, including Dayton, Detroit, and Youngstown, began losing jobs two to three years earlier than the U.S. economy as a whole. At the same time, job losses have been more modest, and housing prices have risen slightly, in many Northeastern metro areas that have less auto-oriented manufacturing sectors (e.g., aerospace in Hartford, photonics in Rochester, plastics in Scranton).
There are also two distinct Sun Belts. Large swaths of the South and West, particularly metropolitan areas in Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and inland California, have suffered severe employment, output, and home value declines over the past year due to the broader housing fallout. Wages in those metro areas have risen rapidly, most likely due to a slowdown in less-skilled migration to those areas, and to disproportionate losses of lower-paying jobs. Yet parts of the Southwest and Deep South—including metro areas in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana—have performed relatively well, experiencing less severe job losses, relatively large wage gains, and modest home price increases. Specializations in energy and government, large amounts of federal hurricane recovery funding for the Gulf Coast, and smaller increases in housing prices during the early and mid-2000s may all help to account for their better performance.
Concentrations of jobs in "eds and meds" and government seem to have shielded some metro areas from dramatic job losses. Compared to a national employment decline of 3.7 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2009, metro areas with specializations in education and health care saw employment drop by an average of only 2.0 percent, and those specialized in government/military employment saw average job losses of 1.3 percent. Specialization in these less volatile economic activities may help account for the relatively stable performance of educational centers like Boston, New Haven, and Provo; health care centers like McAllen, New Haven, and Springfield; and government/military centers like Honolulu, El Paso, and Washington, D.C.
Tourism-specialized metro areas suffered relatively large employment declines. Metro areas with job concentrations in arts, entertainment, and recreation, such as Orlando, Las Vegas, and Bradenton, experienced 4.0 percent employment declines on average—reflecting not only the sensitivity of tourism to the recession, but also that many of these same areas had severely overpriced housing and high proportions of their pre-recession employment in real estate and related industries such as construction.
A few banking centers have been hard hit, but metro areas specializing in insurance have suffered less. The New York and Charlotte metro areas, the nation’s two foremost banking centers, have suffered in different ways during the recession. Charlotte has suffered deep recent employment losses and its unemployment rate rose dramatically since early 2008, while New York has actually shed jobs at a lower rate than the national average but has experienced steeper declines in output and housing prices. Meanwhile, metro areas specialized in the less-affected insurance industry, such as Des Moines, Hartford, and Omaha, have experienced very modest job losses and have performed relatively well on most other economic indicators.
38 of the top 100 metro areas avoided declines in home prices over the past year, even as prices nationwide dipped 6 percent. Most of these metro areas also experienced below-average employment declines, and lie in the less-affected parts of the "Manufacturing Belt" (Pennsylvania and upstate New York) and Sun Belt (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana). They also exhibit below-average shares of properties in REO (real estate-owned) status due to bank foreclosure.
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