The Geography of Jobs data visualization we first created in the spring of 2008 has been updated through November 2011. The animated map shows the net change in jobs over a rolling 12-month period in the top 100 metropolitan areas (by population). In layman’s terms, the size of the bubbles on the map represent the net change in jobs from April ’09 to April ’10 (for example), and so on.

About the Map
This animated map provides a striking visual of employment trends over the last business cycle using net change in jobs from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on a rolling 12-month basis. The animation highlights a number of concurrent trends leading up to the Great Recession, as well as evidence of a recovery.

The Dot-Com Bust & Recovery
The timeline begins in 2004 as the national economy recovered from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. At first, broad economic growth was apparent across most of the country. Two notable exceptions are the Bay Area — the hub of the tech boom that drove job growth during the prior decade — and several metropolitan areas within the Midwest. The map reveals that much of the industrial Midwest never fully recovered: manufacturers shed jobs while other parts of the country were adding them.

The Housing Bubble & Hurricane Katrina
The nation’s appetite for new homes is also evident. During the middle of the decade, job growth related to construction and real-estate occurred in Sun Belt states, such as California, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. The map also captures dramatic job losses in New Orleans in 2005 as a result of Hurricane Katrina, as well as the city’s slow recovery driven largely by construction-related employment.

The Downturn Begins
By 2007, regional evidence of the coming economic downturn began to appear. Employment growth in California and Florida waned, with actual losses becoming evident in Los Angeles and Tampa. Layoffs also accelerated in the nation’s manufacturing heartland. By the first quarter of 2008, job losses in the Southeast and Midwest spread, setting off a chain of losses in neighboring areas. The same pattern was seen on the West Coast, with the epicenter in Los Angeles marching eastward to the Front Range of the Rockies.

Manhattan is an Island. Or is it?
As much of the nation was showing clear signs of entering a recession, New York City continued to boom as the flow of easy credit stimulated employment growth in the nation’s financial center. In late spring 2007, however, the financial bubble burst and New York experienced severe losses. Texas benefited from the run-up in oil prices through the middle of 2008, but began to recede by January 2009 as the energy and construction sectors weakened.

The Great Recession
Through early and mid-2009, job losses intensified across the country with layoffs peaking in August. At that time, the nation’s largest metropolitan areas New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago had also shed the greatest number of jobs from the previous year. For example, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had seen a net decrease in employment of 426,000. None of the top 100 MSAs had been immune to mass layoffs. The map shows that the bleeding had begun to stop in the fall of 2009.

A Reticent Recovery
In early 2010, the first signs of over-the-year job expansions emerged along the Texas-Mexico border and in Central Texas. By May, gains were seen along the I-95 corridor in D.C., New York, and Boston, and momentum spilled over the Appalachians into the nation’s industrial heartland in June. Net increases also appeared in San Jose and San Diego that summer. Most of the nation’s major metro areas were enjoying net job gains for the first time since before the recession that fall.

As of January 2011, only a few metros, including Atlanta, Memphis, Las Vegas, Sacramento, and Albany were still experiencing net job losses. Notably, many of the remaining red bubbles are in state capitals where budget shortfalls are having a negative impact on their recovery.

Are We There Yet?
While it is encouraging to have visual evidence of our national economic recovery, this does not indicate that all jobs lost during the course of the recession have been regained. Nor does it mean that all those seeking employment can get a job. In the chart below, we see that the total number of unemployed workers remains near a record high as more than 13 million Americans are seeking work.

Chart: Total unemployed in the US (in millions), seasonally adjusted

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics (Current Population Survey)

The bad news: six million more people are seeking jobs than at the start of the recession.

via NYTimes

PARMA HEIGHTS, Ohio — The poor population in America’s suburbs — long a symbol of a stable and prosperous American middle class — rose by more than half after 2000, forcing suburban communities across the country to re-evaluate their identities and how they serve their populations.

The increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities. The recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010.

“The growth has been stunning,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis of census data. “For the first time, more than half of the metropolitan poor live in suburban areas.”

As a result, suburban municipalities — once concerned with policing, putting out fires and repairing roads — are confronting a new set of issues, namely how to help poor residents without the array of social programs that cities have, and how to get those residents to services without public transportation. Many suburbs are facing these challenges with the tightest budgets in years.

“The whole political class is just getting the memo that Ozzie and Harriet don’t live here anymore,” said Edward Hill, dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.


This shift has helped redefine the image of the suburbs. “The suburbs were always a place of opportunity — a better school, a bigger house, a better job,” said Scott Allard, an associate professor at the University of Chicago who focuses on social welfare policy and poverty. “Today, that’s not as true as the popular mythology would have us believe.”

Since 2000, the poverty roll has increased by five million in the suburbs, with large rises in metropolitan areas as different as Colorado Springs and Greensboro, N.C. Over the decade, Midwestern suburbs ranked high; recently, the rise has been sharpest in communities the housing collapse hit the hardest, like Cape Coral, Fla., and Riverside, Calif., according to the Brookings analysis.

Nearly 60 percent of Cleveland’s poor, once concentrated in its urban core, now live in its suburbs, up from 46 percent in 2000. Nationwide, 55 percent of the poor population in metropolitan areas is now in the suburbs, up from 49 percent.

Poverty is new in Parma Heights, a quiet suburb of cul-de-sacs and clipped lawns, and asking for help can be hard. The Parma Heights Food Pantry, which began serving several dozen families a month in 2006, and now helps 260, draws a stream of casualties from the moribund economy. Many never needed food relief before.

Like Mary W., 59, who has worked all her life, most recently at a tire company in Cleveland, and was always the one to remind colleagues to donate to charity. Now she is the one who receives it.

When she first came to the pantry, “I cried my eyes out,” said Mary, who asked that her last name not be used because she did not want her children to know about her financial troubles.

At Vineyard Community Church in Wickliffe, another Cleveland suburb, Brent Paulson, the pastor, said he had to post an employee in the driveway the day the church’s food bank was open to coax people inside, they were so ashamed to ask for help.

In a sign of just how far the economic distress had spread, one volunteer saw his former boss come to the pantry, Mr. Paulson said.

The Cleveland Food Bank, which serves six counties, doubled its distribution between 2005 and 2010. “There’s this sense of surprise,” said Anne Goodman, the director, “this feeling that this has got to be a mistake. It has got to be a bad dream.”

Calls to the United Way social services hot line from suburban areas in northeast Ohio more than doubled from 2005 to 2010, outstripping the increase in cities. “We are seeing a rise in need in places we never expected it,” said Stephen Wertheim, director of the hotline, First Call for Help.

Poverty has been growing in the suburbs for years — along with the population. But the 53 percent increase in poverty far outstripped the 14 percent population increase in the past decade, speeding the change in their status as upper-middle-class enclaves. They have been attracting immigrants following construction jobs and families from cities seeking inexpensive housing as suburbs aged.

Federal vouchers to get poor people into private housing also contributed, Ms. Kneebone said. Cleveland was No. 15 among the country’s top 100 metropolitan areas for increase in suburban share of vouchers.

Urban problems have appeared. In Penn Hills, a suburb of Pittsburgh where people have always driven, poor residents walking near yards and bus stops have created trouble with litter, said Alexandra Murphy, a Princeton doctoral student studying suburban poverty.

Warrensville Heights, a suburb southeast of Cleveland, was pristine when Fran Matthews moved there in 1987, with good schools, manicured lawns and middle-class neighbors, she said. Now for-sale signs dot overgrown yards. Break-ins are on the rise, though crime is still far lower than in the city. Over all, the suburban poverty rate — 11.4 percent in 2010 — is still far below the city rate of 20.9 percent, according to Ms. Kneebone.

“Now when you come home, you have to look around before you get out of the car,” Ms. Matthews said.

The changes have affected the school system, she said, and her grandson now attends a charter school in Cleveland.

The double punch of the recession and the foreclosure crisis — which hit Cleveland and its suburbs particularly hard — has dragged middle-class people down the income ladder. As defined by the Census Bureau, the poverty line for a family of four was $22,314 last year.

“This community is middle class, but right on the line,” said Brad Sellers, a retired professional basketball player who grew up in Warrensville Heights and is running for mayor. “Any dramatic downturn can send you over the edge.”

The unemployment rate among black Americans was 16 percent in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — nearly double the national rate, a painful statistic in a suburb that is majority black.

“Where’s that 9 percent?” Mr. Sellers asked. “Not here.”

Some communities resist the idea that poverty exists. When Ann George, who runs the Parma Heights pantry with stalwart volunteers, speaks at churches and community gatherings, “I see the skepticism on people’s faces,” she said. “They say, ‘This is Parma Heights, not Cleveland.’ ”

Other suburbs are adapting. In Maple Heights, Mayor Jeffrey Lansky embraced the idea of a food bank, setting aside a space for it in 2008 and having the Fire Department help renovate it. The Cuyahoga County Public Library now runs after-school homework centers with snacks from the food bank, aimed at the growing population of poor children.

Edward FitzGerald, the executive of Cuyahoga County, argued that the increase in the suburban poor population could help lead to a fundamental change in local government. For years Cleveland had most of the population — and resources — but policy should reflect the flip in favor of the county, he said.

And with the state slashing funds, counties and the suburbs they contain will have to ramp up social services and economic development on their own, many for the first time.

“You’re talking about governing systems that have never really done this before,” Mr. FitzGerald said.

via NYTimes




When the unemployment rate rose in most states last month, it underscored the extent to which the deep recession, the anemic recovery and the lingering crisis of joblessness are beginning to reshape the nation’s economic map.

The once-booming South, which entered the recession with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, is now struggling with some of the highest rates, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.

Several Southern states — including South Carolina, whose 11.1 percent unemployment rate is the fourth highest in the nation — have higher unemployment rates than they did a year ago. Unemployment in the South is now higher than it is in the Northeast and the Midwest, which include Rust Belt states that were struggling even before the recession.

For decades, the nation’s economic landscape consisted of a prospering Sun Belt and a struggling Rust Belt. Since the recession hit, though, that is no longer the case. Unemployment remains high across much of the country — the national rate is 9.1 percent — but the regions have recovered at different speeds.

Now, with the concentration of the highest unemployment rates in the South and the West, some economists wonder if it is an anomaly of the uneven recovery or a harbinger of things to come.

“Because the recovery is so painfully slow, people may begin to think of the trends established during the recovery as normal,” said Howard Wial, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program who recently co-wrote an economic analysis of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. “Will people think of Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona as more or less permanently depressed? Think of the Great Lakes as being a renaissance region? I don’t know. It’s possible.”

The West has the highest unemployment in the nation. The collapse of the housing bubble left Nevada with the highest jobless rate, 13.4 percent, followed by California with 12.1 percent. Michigan has the third-highest rate, 11.2 percent, as a result of the longstanding woes of the American auto industry.

Now, though, of the states with the 10 highest unemployment rates, six are in the South. The region, which relied heavily on manufacturing and construction, was hit hard by the downturn.

Economists offer a variety of explanations for the South’s performance. “For a long time we tended to outpace the national average with regard to economic performance, and a lot of that was driven by, for lack of a better word, development and in-migration,” said Michael Chriszt, an assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s research department. “That came to an abrupt halt, and it has not picked up.”

The long cycle of “lose jobs, gain jobs, lose jobs” that kept Georgia’s unemployment rate at 10.2 percent in August — the same as it was a year earlier — is illustrated by Union City, a small city on the outskirts of Atlanta.

It suffered a blow when the last store in its darkened mall, Sears, announced that it would soon close. But the city had other irons in the fire: a few big companies were hiring, and earlier this year Dendreon, a biotech company that makes a cancer drug, opened a plant there, lured in part by state and local subsidies.

Then, this month, Dendreon said it would lay off more than 100 workers at the new plant as part of a national “restructuring.”

Union City, with a population of 20,000, now calls itself the place “Where Business Meets the World” and has been trying to lure companies by pointing out its low business taxes, various incentive programs and proximity to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Steve Rapson, the city manager, said that the challenge there, as in much of America, has been to get employers to hire again. “It’s hard to get your mind around what can you do as a city to encourage future jobs and jobs growth,” he said.

The reordering of the nation’s economic fortunes can be seen in the Brookings analysis, which found that many auto-producing metropolitan areas in the Great Lakes states are seeing modest gains in manufacturing that are helping them recover from their deep slump, while Sun Belt and Western states with sharp drops in home values are still suffering. The areas that have been hurt the least since the recession, the study said, rely on government, education or energy production. Places that were less buoyed by the housing bubble were less harmed when it burst.

In Pennsylvania, the analysis found, the Pittsburgh area — which is heavily reliant on education and health care — is weathering the downturn better than the Philadelphia area. In New York, areas around long-struggling upstate cities like Buffalo and Rochester are recovering faster by some measures than the New York City metropolitan area. And the rate of recovery in Rust Belt areas around Youngstown and Akron, two Ohio cities that were hit hard, has outpaced that of former boomtowns like Colorado Springs and Tucson.

In a sign of how severe the downturn has been, the Brookings analysis found that only 16 of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas have regained more than half of the jobs they lost during the recession.

The toll on the nation’s millions of unemployed people has been harsh, with the Census Bureau reporting that the United States had more people living in poverty last year than in any year since it began keeping records half a century ago.

Joblessness is taking a toll on states, too. This month, 27 states will have to pay $1.2 billion to the federal government in interest on the $37.5 billion that they borrowed in recent years to keep paying unemployment benefits.

What is most striking about the high unemployment rates, several economists said in interviews, is how they continue to afflict wide parts of the country.

“It just seems to be so pervasive across the country — except for the breadbasket area — that it’s hard to pick out anybody who is bouncing back,” said Randall W. Eberts, the president of the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Michigan.

Dr. Eberts pointed to another feature of the downturn: people are much less likely to leave their jobs voluntarily. Before the recession, he said, about three million people voluntarily left their jobs each month. Now, around two million people do — leaving fewer openings for job seekers.

So what happened in South Carolina? Richard Kaglic, a regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Va., said the state’s lingering troubles reflect what happened when its construction and manufacturing industries were hit hard by the recession. Mr. Kaglic, who is also a pilot, used an aviation metaphor to explain what he meant.

“If your nose is high, if you’re climbing faster and your engine cuts out, you fall farther and it takes you a longer time to recover,” he said. “The conditions we experienced in late 2008, 2009, are as close as you come to an engine-out situation in the economy.”

But Mr. Kaglic said that the recent return of manufacturing jobs was giving him hope, and that one reason for the high unemployment rate was that more people were now seeking work.

“I would look at it as our dreams are delayed,” he said, “rather than our dreams being denied.”

SPRING HILL, Tenn. — When General Motors stopped building cars here two years ago, as the auto industry hit rock bottom and tens of thousands of assembly-line jobs evaporated nationwide, Chad Poynor packed up and moved to Michigan to keep working at another plant.

Mr. Poynor said he made the nine-hour drive back to Tennessee to see his wife and three children 24 times in the first year alone. “I’d go back tomorrow if I could,” Mr. Poynor said Wednesday after finishing his overnight shift in Lansing, Mich. He and hundreds of other autoworkers may get that chance.

In a glimmer of light in a mostly downbeat economy, G.M. and the United Automobile Workers union have agreed to give the plant here a second chance as part of a tentative new labor contract. It is highly unusual for an automaker to bring jobs back to a factory all but left for dead, and several G.M. plants, including Spring Hill, will be adding work that had been headed to Mexico.

“I actually have a smile on my face today,” Mike O’Rourke, the president of U.A.W. Local 1853 in Spring Hill, said after learning the details of the contract. “It was very much gloom and doom. I lost all my hair and gained 50 pounds.”

The resurrection of Spring Hill would be another milestone in the fortunes of the domestic auto industry and, in particular, G.M.’s comeback from its government bailout and bankruptcy in 2009. The promise in the new contract of 6,400 jobs over the next four years, including 1,700 here, is being seen as a vote of confidence that autoworkers in the United States, even unionized ones, can compete with lower-wage nations.

Some of the jobs here will go to current G.M. workers at full wages of $28 an hour, but many of the workers will be hired on G.M.’s second-tier pay scale, which would start around $15 an hour in the new contract.

“We’re bringing back a lot of work that left this country,” the U.A.W.’s president, Bob King, said of the contract, which is subject to ratification by G.M.’s 48,500 workers in the United States.

Perhaps nothing better symbolizes the ragged journey of Detroit’s Big Three in recent decades than the Spring Hill plant, which was built in the 1980s as the launching pad for G.M.’s highly promoted Saturn division. In the 1990s, thousands of Saturn owners traveled here for “homecoming” parties to celebrate their bond with the vehicles and the workers who made them. The plant became known to TV viewers after G.M. hired the advertising agency famous for creating President Ronald Reagan’s upbeat “Morning in America” re-election ads. Commercials featured the plant and its workers with the slogan, “A different kind of company, a different kind of car.”

But the Saturn brand never lived up to its promise and is now a casualty of G.M.’s bankruptcy. The only work being done at the plant here, 30 miles south of Nashville, is a much smaller operation making engines. James L. Bailey, the mayor of Maury County, which includes Spring Hill, described the past two years as “a time of trauma.”

Unemployment in the county rose as high as 17 percent after the plant closed; the rate is now about 13 percent. In nearby Columbia, where many G.M. workers lived, downtown storefronts emptied and homes went into foreclosure. The Santa Fe Cattle Company, a steakhouse with a U.A.W. flag in its foyer, closed, and this year’s graduating high school class lost 85 students after the plant shut down.

“They bought a lot of things, they did a lot of things,” Mr. Bailey, who works out of a cramped, century-old courthouse in Columbia’s town square, said of G.M. workers. “When they went away, it affected a lot of businesses here.”

G.M. declined to publicly comment on the Spring Hill decision. The company has avoided discussing specific terms of the agreement until it is approved by members. People with knowledge of the negotiations said that union leaders pressed hard in the final stages of the talks for Spring Hill to be reopened. Michael Robinet, an analyst with the research firm IHS Automotive, said the company saw an opportunity to make inroads with the U.A.W. while bringing back a facility at a relatively low cost.

“The Tier 2 workers definitely changed the economics of the plant,” he said. “It’s definitely a win for the union. I can’t recall the last time a plant of this size was brought back after it was closed.”

How quickly workers may be able to return to Spring Hill is not known, and for some the situation is complicated by relocation agreements they signed requiring them to spend a certain length of time at another plant. Union officials said that about 600 jobs would be created by the end of next year, followed by 1,100 more in 2013. G.M. said it planned to invest $419 million in the plant so that it could build two new midsize vehicles. The sense of anticipation in Spring Hill, whose population increased twentyfold in the two decades after G.M. began making Saturns amid rolling farmland near a Civil War battleground, was palpable this week.

“I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now,” said Todd Horton, a G.M. worker who stayed after being laid off in the hopes of getting called back. Mr. Horton, a married father of two, turned down a transfer offer two weeks ago, even though supplemental unemployment benefits from the company were about to run out and there had been no word that the plant would reopen.

“My hope is just that the economy can sustain it and they can follow through with the plans,” said Mr. Horton, whose final responsibility in the plant’s training department was helping his coworkers move elsewhere.

Many of them are in Lansing, Mich., having followed production of the last vehicle built in Spring Hill, the Chevrolet Traverse Crossover. Glenn Tucker, who is a little more than a year away from being able to retire from G.M. with full benefits, is waiting to learn how quickly he can come back. His wife, Danean, stayed in Tennessee to keep her job managing a restaurant and so that their son could graduate from high school.

“There was no hope for most of us that it would ever reopen,” Mrs. Tucker said.

Said Mr. O’Rourke, the local union official, “All you got to do is drive around any big city — Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago — and you can see a lot of empty factories that have never reopened.”

NYTIMES By NICK BUNKLEY and BILL VLASIC
Nick Bunkley reported from Spring Hill, Tenn., and Bill Vlasic from Detroit.

By Stacey Vanek-Smith
Marketplace, Wednesday, September 7, 2011

A big labor shift is underway as 42 million Americans settle for contract work and freelance gigs amid a shortage of traditional 9-to-5 jobs.

KAI RYSSDAL: This week, we’re doing something a little special. A week of jobs: where they’re going to come from, who’s going to pay for them, and today, what happens when people don’t have them. Best guesses are that in the face of 9 percent unemployment, as much as a third of the American workforce has some kind of non-traditional job. That’s a shift toward freelance gigs and contract work that’s nothing less than a structural shift in how our economy works.

Marketplace’s Stacey Vanek Smith reports the idea of working 9-to-5 for 40 years is going the way of the pension and the gold watch.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: Thirty-four-year-old Melissa Holsinger has a law degree from New York University. She has several years of corporate law experience and did a clerkship for a federal judge. But since she and her husband moved from Tennessee to New York last year, getting a job at law firm has proven impossible.

MELISSA HOLSINGER: I thought I would be snapped up, that I had good credentials and I wouldn’t have a problem finding a job. And for the first six months, I don’t think I had a single interview.

So Holsinger took a job at a coffee shop, where a customer told her about some contract work at his law firm. She’s worked for several firms now, with stints varying from a week to several months.

HOLSINGER: I just sort of just tripped into it. It wasn’t anything I’d planned to do.

More Americans are tripping into the world of contract work and out of the traditional workplace. Some 42 million people are freelancing, juggling part-time assignments and going from gig to gig. It’s part of a major shift in our labor market, says Sara Horowitz. She’s CEO of the Freelancers Union, which offers members access to health care and other benefits. Horowitz says 10 years ago, most of her members worked in areas like media and graphic design, but these days freelancing is a fact of life in every profession.

SARA HOROWITZ: It’s finance, it’s health care, the nonprofit sector.

The trend started as technology changed employers’ needs, but the sour economy has made contract work especially attractive to companies, says economist Ken Goldstein.

KEN GOLDSTEIN: It not only relieves them of having to pay for the whole benefit package, but also, if things indeed worsen, they can let these people go, because there’s no commitment to keeping these people. With less opportunity for real job security, many job hunters expect they’ll have to cobble together several gigs. Work and culture expert Andrew Ross hears that from his students at N.Y.U.

ANDREW ROSS: They’re terrified, quite frankly. Ross says students are preparing themselves for the freelance economy by becoming spreading themselves thin.

ROSS: More and more students are doing double majors or cramming in as many minors as they can to equip themselves with as many skills as they can amass. Twenty-seven-year-old filmmaker Malcolm Wallace Murray has been freelancing for four years. Between shoots, he writes and edits in his kitchen. He says he loves the freedom of the freelance life, but the lack of security can be hard.

MALCOLM WALLACE MURRAY: Especially now that I have friends who are settling into career trajectories and they can see 10 years out what their life is going to look like. And there still is quite a bit of risk in mine. And risk is the real problem a growing number of people face in the contract economy, says Sara Horowitz of the Freelancers Union. She says these workers have to take responsibility for their own health care, their own training, their own retirement savings.

HOROWITZ: We’re putting all of the risk and the cost onto the worker. So when you have enough gigs, you’re doing fine. When don’t have enough gigs, you’re not doing fine and to top it off, you’re not entitled to unemployment insurance. From her Brooklyn apartment, lawyer Melissa Holsinger says she’s one of the lucky freelancers. She gets health insurance through her husband’s job. Even so, she says the instability wears on her.

HOLSINGER: There are definitely times that I’ve said, what else can I do in my life and law school was a huge mistake. But I still really enjoy the work when I’m doing it, so, you know, just keep plugging along and eventually that full-time position will come through. Holsinger has an interview for yet another part-time position on Friday.

In New York, I’m Stacey Vanek Smith for Marketplace.

Bill Marsh/The New York Times
Sources: Robert B. Reich, University of California, Berkeley; “The State of Working America” by the Economic Policy Institute; Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics, and Emmanuel Saez, University of California, Berkeley; Census Bureau; Bureau of Labor Statistics; Federal Reserve