Metro Monitor Maps

The Brookings Institution does this thing called a Metro Monitor. It monitors metros, economics-wise, and it comes with some maps. This one shows overall performance:



It's based on four factors: "employment change from peak; unemployment rate change from one year ago; gross metropolitan product change from peak; and housing price index change from one year ago."

This one shows employment change. It explains itself:



And this one just shows straight-up unemployment:



Says the accompanying report:

Nationwide, the recession is over—at least in the view of most economists in light of third quarter 2009 indicators. They revealed a real U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) increasing at a 2.8 percent annual rate, after four consecutive quarters of contraction. Most interpreted that rate of output growth, along with other signals such as increasing housing prices, as indication that the economic recovery is underway.

Yet the recovery seems fragile. The output increase may have resulted largely from the replenishment of manufacturing inventories and from temporary federal policies: the “cash-for-clunkers” program (already over), the first-time homebuyer tax credit (now extended through April 2010), and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s economic stimulus. As the effects of these policies recede, the recovery could slow or give way to yet another recession or a prolonged period of economic stagnation.

Real recovery in the labor market, moreover, remains elusive. Although output grew between July and September of 2009, the total number of U.S. jobs continued to decline. Payroll employment dropped by about 600,000 during the third quarter (about half the decline of the previous quarter), and the unemployment rate climbed to 9.8 percent by September. While the most recent national-level report showed a significant slowing of job losses in November, and a slight downtick in unemployment, the national economy still seems a long way from posting the sustained job gains that would meaningfully lower unemployment and boost incomes.

I'll be honest: this article seemed kind of boring so I didn't really read it. I assume it said what we all know - the economy blows and there aren't enough jobs. But it did helpfully put a few points in bold, so we can skip right to those:

• Metro areas continued to register highly disparate economic performance even as the nation showed early signs of recovery.
• Six metro areas—Albuquerque, Austin, McAllen, San Antonio, Virginia Beach, and Washington, DC—had regained their pre-recession peak level of output by the third quarter.
• Recovery seemed to be underway in most metro areas, but job growth remained spotty.
• The first-time homebuyer tax credit appeared to boost economic growth in nearly all metro areas.
• The “cash-for-clunkers” program boosted economic growth in most metro areas, and probably accounted for the improved rankings of auto production-specialized metro areas.[By the way, it is the official economic analysis of The Map Scroll that the government's efforts to continue to encourage home and car buying is propping up a failed economic model and merely delaying the inevitable transition to a non car-and-sprawl based economy while squandering tax dollars in the process. Our qualifications for making this analysis are various and broad.]
• The rate of metropolitan job losses in construction, manufacturing, and administrative services slowed considerably in the third quarter.
• Home prices stabilized or grew in an increasing number of metro areas, but inventories of real estate-owned properties (REOs) continued to mount overall.

This report is from December. The next update will come out in March, and it will probably show improvement, though according to Paul Krugman, there's a strong danger of the economy taking another brody later in 2010. We'll see. In the meantime, So long, Florida, and thanks for all the fish!

Yikes

Let's check in on the old unemployment picture, shall we?



Oh dear. Not good at all.

Via Mike Lux, the map is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (It can be found here (pdf). Says Lux:

If full employment is defined as four percent, then only nine counties east of the Mississippi River that fit that definition. Two counties west of the Rocky Mountains qualify; one in eastern Washington State and the other covers the North Slope of Alaska.

The bright spots of full employment can be found in the agricultural counties of the Great Plains. Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas seem immune to the wave of persistent joblessness, at least for now.

And this is just average annual employment. Things are worse now, with unemployment having climbed to 9.8%. Nor does it count those who are underemployed or who have dropped out of the labor force altogether; if it did, the national number would stand at nearly 20%, according to Lux.

Curiously, not having a McDonalds nearby seems to correlate with low unemployment. Clearly McDonaldses cause people to lose jobs!

Job Prospects in the 50 Biggest US Cities

Via Matt Yglesias (via Ryan Avent), an interactive map of job listings per capita for US cities:



Washington, DC has far and away the most job listings - more than 132 per 1000 people. And Baltimore easily takes second, with more than 90. As Yglesias notes, "the metro DC economy is in better-than-average shape and I think that may have a distorting influence on how the hill and the press are seeing the national economic picture which continues to be very bleak despite the fact that the financial panic has ameliorated." The media centers of the US, however, aren't doing nearly so well: New York has less than 28 job listings per 1000 people, and LA has less than 24.

The techie cities of San Jose, Seattle, and Austin are all doing relatively well; the Rust Belt not so much - of Midwestern cities, only Milwaukee has more than 40 jp/k, and Detroit has the fewest of any city: less than 15. Miami is in second-worst shape, with just over 17. The full ranking of the 50 metros are listed with the map here.

This is, Now, the Third Unemployment Map of the United States That I'm Posting Here

This map showed unemployment at the county level. And this map showed the unemployment rate over time at the state level. Now, in a sort of Hegelian synthesis of recession cartography, Slate has an interactive and animated map of county-level unemployment rates evolving over time since before the economy went skydiving with a parachute of ornamental cutlery.



Blues are good. Reds are bad. Circle sizes show number of jobs gained or lost.

What's great about this one is that the animation really lets you see how the recession spread - first out of Michigan and the industrial Midwest (which was sort of never out of recession to begin with), then to the bubble-towns of Florida and Southern California, before invading manufacturing areas in the South and other areas on the coasts, and finally pretty much everywhere else in the country that doesn't have an energy-based economy. (I wonder how much of the relative strength of the economies in places like Louisiana, Texas, and Alaska has to do with the huge spike in oil prices during 2008.) And as employment attrition marches grimly across the land, an azure sea of hearty growth becomes, over time, stained a bloody red. The map really explodes with big red vircles in January of this year.

You can also mouse over counties to see their numbers, though the feature is a bit wonky; it seems really determined to make me see that Suffolk County, NY has lost 19,642 jobs since February 2008, but won't let me know what's gone on in New York City, about the job market of which I have more than a passing interest at the moment. Still, a very good map with a ton of information.

(Another) Unemployment Map of the US

Via Matt Yglesias, the Center for American Progress has an interactive map of unemployment and job losses across the fifty states.





It doesn't have the fine-grain data of this unemployment map, but it does have a timeline which allows you to watch the job situation in every state evolve (i.e., deteriorate) over the last four years. And bar graphs for every state, too. Here's Florida:



Brutal - just like the rest of the country, except the Plains, though even there the job losses have started to mount in the past couple of months.

One thing that'll be interesting to watch over the next few years is how the geography of the recession affects population movements. Some places that have been hit especially hard, like Michigan, already had shrinking population shares. But other places that were hit hard by the housing kerblooey had been some of the fastest growing parts of the country - Nevada, Arizona and Florida, especially. Will there be a mass exodus from those states? Meanwhile, the least scathed of the large states so far has been Texas, which was already growing superfast. Will the rate of growth there become even growthier? We shall see.

Unemployment in the US

The New York Times is out with a couple of maps today depicting the state of the labor market in the US. (Hint: it's not great!) This one shows unemployment rates in every county.



They also show the change in unemployment from a year ago:



There are some other maps there as well which allow you to see that the two main areas that have been hit the hardest are those where the economy is dominated by manufacturing (in the midwest and the southeast) and those where the housing bubble reached oscenely bloated proportions (the east and west coasts). The Great Plains region and West Virginia have actually done pretty well so far; surprising, since these areas weren't exactly booming before the recession. But maybe that's the point: people were already trying to leave these areas, so it's not as if there was a housing bubble to pop in like Minot, North Dakota. And in those areas the labor market has been adjusting for decades - since the Dust Bowl, maybe - to a certain lack of economic dynamism, and the excess workers had long since already left.