Tag Archives: unemployment

Business, News, Real Estate

Richard Florida’s “Seattle Boomtown” Source? Seattle Times Columnist Jon Talton

(Photo: MvB)

Since The SunBreak was founded, we have been telling you that Seattle Times columnist Jon Talton writes great stuff about the Puget Sound economy. (Partly we do this to keep him sane, beset as he is by Times comment-section trolls.) But today his work gets validation all the way across the country at Atlantic Cities, where Richard Florida quotes him in his post, “The Secret to Seattle’s Booming Downtown.”

 But the area is in the midst of a true renaissance. As Jon Talton wrote earlier this week in the Seattle Times, downtown Seattle has not only recovered from its slump, it’s thriving. Amazon’s new headquarters could bring as many as 12,000 high-paid jobs to the area. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is opening a new campus. Even Boeing is leasing office space downtown.

Florida emailed Talton for more background, all featured in his Atlantic Cities post, but the upshot is this: “Today, Seattle provides a good example of the back-to-the-downtown trend that is reshaping cities across the United States as workers relocate to formerly neglected urban cores that offer transit, walkability, and central location.”

Florida, it’s safe to say, has a reputation for boosterism when it comes to promoting cities that appear to bolster his case for creative classification. But the signs are definitely pointing to a Seattle that’s poised to take advantage of post-Recession realities. As Geekwire noted recently, while the Washington State jobless rate’s dip, in February, to 8.2 percent was the lowest in three years, Seattle’s unemployment rate was even lower.

On Capitol Hill this week, a light-rail-tunnel-boring machine punched through on its trip from Montlake, leading CHS commenter oiseau to rhapsodize:

The area around Broadway Station is going to be the most convenient place to live in the entire city. A new subway station. A new tram stop. Two new rail lines. A wonderful cycle track. All of the amenities that we already have (restaurants, bars, grocery stores, pharmacies, etc etc etc) plus many more (permanent home for the famers’ market!).

Meanwhile, billionaire Paul Allen donated another $300 million toward brain science. In February, the state’s economic and revenue forecast council noted, “light motor vehicle (LMV) sales were one million units (SAAR) higher than January sales, coming in at 15.1 million units. This was the highest rate of sales since early 2008.”

Jon Talton (Photo: Seattle Times)

Taken together, this does indeed sound like a recovery in progress. But, as Talton says, “Seattle has to keep the momentum going.” Two areas spring to my mind. One: the intersection of central waterfront planning and Seattle’s burgeoning cruise ship industry. “Disney’s decision to return to Vancouver next year is an economic loss for Seattle,” quoth the Seattle Times. Are we ready to talk about a higher-priced downtown cruise ship berth?

And, amid the excitement over light rail, there’s the news that King County Metro is gearing up to make a nearly-$240-million purchase of trolley buses. You don’t have to have much experience with Metro to suspect that the rider experience comes close to last in their calculations, a suspicion borne out by their response to my question about the new trolley bus interiors.

I emailed to inquire about “new interior features: e.g., configurable seating arrangements, cup holders, wifi, electronic displays, accessibility options, power outlets”–the kinds of things that Seattle’s new downtown residents might look for if transit is going to take the place of single occupancy vehicles. Randy Winders, Metro’s manager of vehicle maintenance, was kind of enough to respond, but the news was not heartening: “Exact interior amenities have not been determined. However, they will not have most of what is suggested [by your email].”

The notion that the insides of buses can be left to last has got to change. The inside, after all, is where the passengers are.

News, Politics

Washington’s Unemployed Get Two Months to Turn Economy Around

(Photo: our Flickr pool's Great_Beyond)

Over in the other Washington last week, they cooked up a Christmas compromise that extended access to the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation program by two months. People who had run through their 26 weeks of state unemployment (meaning they lost their jobs back in July and August), and people who had finished the first “tier” of EUC, were granted another 20 months. (There are four tiers, of 20, 14, 13, and 6 weeks’ length respectively.)

Here in the state of Washington, that means some 40,000 unemployed people who were looking at losing benefits on Dec. 31 can now recalibrate their estimated destitution for the end of February. (That’s not counting a further 20,000, who would have been out in the cold sometime between January and February.)

“Combined, that’s the equivalent of every adult in Yakima being spared a sudden loss of income in the next two months,” says the state Senate Democrats blog, The Hopper. They also mention that the unemployment line “shrank” in 2011, by 12 percent. They quote Employment Security Commissioner Paul Trause saying, “Some of the decline is due to an improved economy, and some of it is due to unemployed workers simply running out of benefits.”

“Some” is a questionable word to use when you absolutely know the percentage of people who have dropped off unemployment rolls because their benefits have expired. A record 503,000 people claimed unemployment during 2010, compared to 470,000 in 2011. That’s a difference of 33,000. About 70,000 workers were set to fall off unemployment rolls by end of this year, said the Hopper on Dec. 21. The extension helped 40,000, as noted. So that would indicate that 30,000 “expired.”

Not much room for the improved economy in there. (For those of you keeping track at home, yes, October’s preliminary unemployment rate was revised back up to 9.1 percent.) Perhaps you think that it might be interesting to compare the number of people whose benefits simply expired that month, versus people who found a job? Washington State’s employment security department doesn’t agree–you won’t find that data in their monthly employment report. When you fall off the unemployment rolls, you gain the gift of invisibility.

Business, News, Politics

What is the Sound of Washington State’s Economy Treading Water?

5 Comments
Unemployment data from Washington State Employment Security Department. Terrible Excel graph courtesy MvB.

Washington State’s chief economist, Arun Raha, has updated his revenue forecast for the state for June, and the upshot is that projections for the 2011-13 biennium are down $183 million. It’s become habit the last few years for Raha to trot out an analysis that shows a near-term plateau, with a soft recovery in the offing, perhaps six months or more out. Raha is scrupulous about noting that even a mild recovery is predicated on fair economic winds, it’s just that, regularly, the economic winds do not blow fair.

This time, it’s Japan:

The repercussions from the disaster in Japan have turned out to be worse than we had thought. Not only did it constrain consumer spending by not having enough goods available, but it also put a crimp in the remarkable recovery that had been unfolding in the U.S. manufacturing sector.

It’s high gas prices:

The main reason why the 2% cut in payroll taxes this year has not been as stimulative to the economy as anticipated is because half of that tax cut is going overseas to pay for imported petroleum products.

It’s the chicken-and-egg of lackluster employment and consumer demand:

The economy added 8,400 net new jobs in March and April. There was no job growth in May. Over the three months, we had expected 14,800 jobs in our March forecast.

That means the litany continues as per usual, with construction still feeble, housing prices in a double dip, and foreclosures still high (Seattle Bubble looks into recent dips).

Even so, the news is not all bad: “Aerospace and software are expanding again,” with Boeing announcing a major push in production of 737s. The airplane manufacturer has already hired 4,300 employees since last May. And as Japan rebuilds, it will likely be purchasing from one of its mainstay exporters, Washington State. And without legislative action to increase revenues (and budget cuts), that $183 million reduction would be worse than it is. As it is, reports the Seattle Times, “estimated reserves stand at a relatively skimpy $163 million.” (Seattlepi.com has an amusing–really!–story on the difficulty pinning down a non-squishy number.)

Graph: WA ESD

Raha leaves no room for doubt that we remain in an uncertain position, with downside risks roughly four times that of upside. As the graph up top illustrates, the state has registered unemployment at 9.1 percent or above for the past two years, which contributes to many of Washington’s economic ills: foreclosures, lack of consumer confidence, lack of consumer demand, and lower tax revenues. (Washington’s underemployment rate is worse.) As Raha notes, with no state or federal projects to boost hiring–the opposite is true, as governmental workers are laid off–new hiring will have to be in the private sector.

Business, News, Politics, Real Estate

The Pacific Northwest, Home of Les Misérables

A Stevens Pass avalanche makes a good metaphor for our search for progress. (Photo: WSDOT)

GeekWire tipped me off to the Dow Jones “Misery Index,” which ranks Seattle as the third most miserable city in the country. But it’s worth noting that Portland is number two. Put a bird on that.

The Misery Index tracks just three factors: decline in home value, increase in gas prices, and unemployment. As for the home prices, this headline from the Seattle Bubble gives you some idea: “Case-Shiller: Seattle Home Prices Nearly 30 Percent Off Peak.” Portland, same story. If that’s not enough, economists are predicting a double-dip in housing prices, while even renters are getting hit with increases, thanks to refugees from the housing market deciding to rent instead.

Unemployment remains a chronic problem, despite the media regularly reporting fictitious “drops” in the unemployment rate. The most recent good news for Washington was that unemployment was actually worse than reported in early 2010, not nine but 10.9 percent. Oregon’s unemployment is currently at eleven percent. But a quick glance at Washington and Oregon’s unemployment rate shows the two correspond closely, despite Oregon’s slight lead.

A website that tracks gas prices shows the most expensive gas in Washington at a Chevron up in Blaine: $4.19 per gallon. The cheapest? $3.45, in Ephrata. This too is comparable to Oregon.

Throw in the weather–tell us more about atmospheric rivers, Cliff!–and it becomes tougher to keep singing in the rain. Politicians, even those fighting to save the city from megaprojects, are reviled. Even our tech billionaires can’t put on a happy face.

The thing about this type of misery, though, is that it endures because of the gap between the remembered past and the present. There is pain to losing a job, or losing a home; there is even “pain at the pump” when your grocery budget and your gas budget fight out a zero-sum battle.

But misery derived from measuring home values from the peak of a housing bubble is purely self-inflicted. It’s our “up and to the right” mania that insists on a single standard of growth, rather than a more organic series of developments. So we miss the news that doesn’t correspond to that narrative. We don’t know where to put the fact that driving is declining (along with traffic deaths). We skip mentioning that “net climate warming emissions from the U.S. fell by a whopping 15 percent from 2000 through 2009.”

Good things are happening out there. Just look around.

Business, News

Washington State Adds to Unemployed Rolls, Retroactively

Regular readers of The SunBreak know that I have been conducting a quixotic campaign against the terrible reporting on unemployment statistics–in short, the problem is that media reports monthly statistical noise as “movement,” without including the margin of error from what is a polling process.

Quixotic? Oh, yes. February numbers are out, and here’s how a .001 blip is characterized: “Washington unemployment rate drops to 9.1 percent (Seattlepi.com),” “Washington state unemployment rate falls in February” (Puget Sound Business Journal), “Washington unemployment rate falls to 9.1 percent” (The Olympian).

Why is that crazy? Well, for one, Seattlepi.com reported that unemployment “dropped” to 9.1 percent in January, too.

Virtually every month for a year and a quarter, the media has told you that the unemployment rate in Washington has fallen, without the rate budging at all. (There’s a preliminary and revised rate of unemployment–when the rate has been said to “fall,” it’s usually a reference to the preliminary number. Then the revised rate returns the number to around where it fell from, so that next month’s preliminary number can “fall” again.)

But has the rate really fallen after all? It depends on which direction you look.

“State’s jobless picture in 2010 was worse than thought” is the Seattle Times headline:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which revises its data annually, now says Washington’s jobless rate hit 10 percent in December 2009 and stayed there for the first two months of 2010, topping the U.S. unemployment rate.

Wonderfully, the story goes on to tell you that today’s numbers, based on the same methodology that generated the numbers that needed to be significantly revised, are showing real improvement. (I shouldn’t carp; without the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we’d all be shorter on reasons to use the word “Orwellian.”)

Buried at the bottom of the story is this wisdom that the Times‘ headline writers generally ignore: “Desiree Phair, regional economist for King County, said it’s hard to draw conclusions from month-to-month fluctuations in the jobs numbers.”

Anyway, the state’s jobless picture is still worse than you think: “The unemployment rate, which is based on a household survey, fell in February because more people left the labor force, Wallace said.” Left the labor force.

In a story on January’s unemployment numbers, I chose instead to focus on an actual and alarming change of several percentage points: “Washington’s fullest measure of underemployment and unemployment (the U6 category) shows us leading the national average: the U.S. is 16.7 percent, and Washington is at 18.4 percent.”

The size of the underemployment bulge is a national trend that caught zerohedge’s Tyler Durden’s eye:

And the one indicator that nobody in the mainstream media will touch with a ten foot pole: “Underemployment, a measure that combines part-time workers wanting full-time work with those who are unemployed, surged in February to 19.9 percent.

There you have it. The SunBreak is not mainstream.