cities
Have you seen us in…
Recession Dispatch from… New Orleans
What an amazing town. The people… The music… The energy… Ahh, it’s so nice and personable, and fun! I love the character in the buildings, too.
I was surprised to get so many stories in New Orleans, especially because so many people told me the city was doing well now. Upon entering the town, I spoke to a dark-skinned man who explained that a lot of the jobs that resulted in stimulus funding went to people who moved to New Orleans to fill those positions. I got the impression he was referring to light-skinned people.
This morning, I met a man from Detroit named Bernard, who lost his job manufacturing nuts and bolts for the auto industry. He moved to New Orleans to look for work, but he hasn’t had any luck. Although he maintained a professional outlook and wore respectable clothing, he explained that he is homeless for the first time. He’s been on the streets for about a month, and it’s extremely difficult, he said…
We Get It, Traffic is Down!
If ever there was an upside to this downturn, it just might be the easing of rush hour traffic. But for goodness sakes, we know, we know.
The Washington Post is the latest to discover that there are fewer cars on the road – drivers in the D.C. area drove 600 million fewer miles in November than in the same month a year earlier. If you’ve ever suffered the pain of Beltway traffic (around holiday time, two hours to cover 13 miles, ugh), you’re probably almost thrilled about the recession’s reckless purging of jobs to which people must commute and the gas they can’t afford.
It’s not just in D.C., as you probably well know (there’s already a growing archive of breathless stories). Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that across the nation, 8.6 billion fewer miles were covered in January and February of this year compared to the same time last year. Rush hour traffic in major metropolitan areas fell 29% from 2007 levels…
Public Sector Jobs: Going, Going…
The New York Times reports today that states are using furloughs to save money, and save jobs. But in our daily Screwed report, we’re seeing a different trend: public sector jobs are dropping off by the thousands – by our count, of those we reported, which were mainly in the biggest cities, schools, states and cities have laid off 12,000 people in the last two months. And that’s a low estimate, since we haven’t captured them all.
Slate has attempted to capture them all by taking unemployment data reported by counties across the country – this is the raw data that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses, several months after the fact, to estimate the number of job gains and losses.
In an interactive chart that uses that data (not seasonally adjusted), Slate seems to show some good news: Would you believe 2.7 million jobs (in all sectors) gained since January 2006? We wouldn’t. So take another look: Press the play button on the chart and month after month, those gains drop off, hitting a low of 97,000 jobs gained in June 2008, to be followed by the more familiar trend — 44,000 jobs lost in July 2008, and falling. And the biggest pain came in September, when the number of jobs lost jumped from 89,000 in August to 730,000. Ouch.
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