In a number of my City Talk columns in recent months, I’ve mentioned a crucial paradox: the downtown area in Savannah is attracting major investment, but local employment has been stagnating.
Consider: Whole Foods and Kate Spade just opened, Anthropologie plans to open here next year, Drayton Tower has been largely rehabilitated, One West Victory is moving ahead, a number of smaller construction projects like the Avenues on 61st are finished or nearly so, tourism is booming, etc., etc.
But all those visible developments don’t guarantee broad-based regional job growth. The Savannah metro area is still several thousand jobs below the peak of employment about six years.
Meanwhile, the state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate has been spiraling upward — an increase of .6 percent since April to 8.8 percent in July. That’s the 5th worst in the nation, tied with Michigan.
Some of Georgia’s smaller metros have posted some really bad numbers lately, while Atlanta is zipping along with annual job growth of over 3 percent.
For more numbers on these trends, check out my City Talk column today Latest Savannah employment data even worse than it seems and my post to Peach Pundit yesterday: Georgia now has the nation’s 5th worst unemployment rate.
From Calculated Risk:
So what gives? What’s going on outside the Atlanta area?
As I have noted ad nauseum, Georgia was always at particular risk from sequestration. The state has a number of federal installations in smaller metro areas; sharp cuts in their funding was predicted by people like me to start showing up in employment data around now. The number of federal employees has fallen about 4 percent over the past year — over half of those positions have been civilian employees in the Department of Defense. Many who are still employed are coping with pay cuts because of furlough days.
And the deep cuts to the state budget in recent years and the really anemic level of transportation funding are surely playing a role too. We have smaller metro areas and small towns that have taken some big hits.
I’m quite sympathetic to the arguments that some of those government cuts were needed, but the sequester has cut some really basic services offered to low ranking members of the military and caused other unnecessary pain.