Rust Belt makes a comeback - study
Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Newark add jobs; West Coast cities lose
By G. Scott Thomas
PITTSBURGH BUSINESS TIMES
What a difference five years make. Just ask people in San Jose. Or San Francisco. Or Seattle. Or Portland, Ore. Those were prosperous places in the late 1990s, when the Pacific Coast’s economy was expanding more rapidly than the national economy as a whole.
BUT NOT NOW.
San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland are no longer boom towns, having lost a total of 178,000 jobs during the past five years. Rust Belt metros such as Buffalo, Newark and Pittsburgh, despite all of their problems, seem robust by comparison, having added jobs over the same span. [..]
The decline along the Pacific rim has been as dramatic as it once was unthinkable, as shown by an American City Business Journals analysis of employment trends in the nation’s 100 largest labor markets:
San Jose has ranked dead last in U.S. job growth each of the past three years. Silicon Valley was rocked by the sudden collapse of the information technology sector in 2000, and the entire San Jose area has been struggling ever since. It had 96,000 fewer jobs in the third quarter of 2003 than in same quarter of 1998, a decline of 10 percent.
San Francisco also was buffeted by the IT downturn. It was floating high in 2000, ranking ninth of 100 markets in terms of job growth. Then the bubble burst, and San Francisco plummeted to 99th place a year later. Its losses in the past five years: 50,000 jobs, or 4.9 percent.
Seattle has watched 14,000 jobs slip away since 1998, a drop of 1 percent. [..] Portland lost about a quarter of its high-tech manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone. Its decline for the entire five-year period was 18,000 jobs, or 1.9 percent.
Employment numbers, to be sure, are also depressed in many Eastern and Midwestern metros. The three Rust Belt metros mentioned above — Buffalo, Newark and Pittsburgh — added just 62,000 jobs since 1998, yielding a collective growth rate of 2.4 percent over five years.
That may be uninspiring, but it’s still dramatically better than what’s happening along the Pacific coast. Portland, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle, taken as a group, lost 4.2 percent of their jobs during the past half decade.
Over the decade, Pittsburgh job count grew from 1,032,200 in 1993 to 1,109,300 in 2003. During the first half of the decade, the city’s job growth of between 0.5 percent and 1.4 percent was anemic when compared to the rest of the nation, with the city ranking in the 80s out of the top 100 metros for annual job growth each of those years.
But from 1998 through 2002, Pittsburgh held its own, ranking 59, 77, 32 and 49 in job growth, despite never having a year with better than 2 percent growth. In fact, barely discernible growth of 0.3 percent placed the Pittsburgh 32nd among the top 100 metros for the 2000-2001 period. As an indication of how poorly the economy was creating jobs over the past two years, 56 metros lost jobs in the 2002-2003 period, with Pittsburgh losing 1.4 percent of its employment. Pittsburgh also posted job losses for 2001-2002 of 0.8 percent. The region lost almost 25,000 jobs from its recent high of 1,134,100 jobs in 2001 to 2003.
For comparison, the Cleveland metro ranked between 47th and 89th between 1993 and 1998 and ranked between 75 and 94th from 1998 through 2003. Cleveland posted job losses the past three years of 2.3, 2.5 and 1 percent.
Again, San Jose, once the beacon for everything that was seemingly going right in the U.S. economy, offers the bleakest perspective. San Jose employment peaked in 2000 at 1,043,700. Three years later, the metro had 862,400 jobs, a loss of a whopping 17.4 percent of its work force.
Nearly three-quarters of the nation’s 100 largest markets — 73, to be exact — have more jobs now than in 1998, despite the recent recession. Leading the pack are Las Vegas and Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., two Western metros that successfully bucked the negative trend in their region. Despite recent losses, Pittsburgh has gained 17,200 jobs over the past five years.
Over the decade, across metros, the hardest hit was the manufacturing sector. For example, while the Pittsburgh metro had a net gain of 77,100 jobs between 1993 and 2003, it lost almost 9,000 manufacturing jobs during this period. The city gained 9,000 manufacturing jobs from 1993 to 2000 before losing 17,800 jobs since.
But those trends were occurring across the country. For example, Pittsburgh lost 5.7 percent of its manufacturing employment between 2000 and 2001, but 57 of the 100 largest metros fared worse. In 2001-2002, Pittsburgh lost another 5.5 percent of its manufacturing work force and did better than 71 competing metros. Last year’s 3.5 percent job loss in the sector ranked Pittsburgh 52nd.
Moment.
