Four years later, South Florida’s worst recession only hints at a real recovery - Business Monday - MiamiHerald.com: "Since the 1970s, South Florida has rebounded from five recessions much faster than it has since the so-called Great Recession officially ended in June 2009. Until now, the longest recovery in hiring took 35 months, the stretch of time required to erase the 45,000 jobs South Florida lost in the 1973-75 recession. Forty-four months after payrolls started shrinking during the 2007 downturn, South Florida is still down 207,000 jobs from peak hiring levels in 2008. Anemic job growth is the main problem."
2. Not only has job growth been "anemic," but many "new" jobs have been for lower wages, thereby causing: a) decline in household incomes; and b) decline in housing affordability. As a result, there is continuing diminished consumer demand, which results in a "slow" recovery and "weak" economy--
Despite drop in housing prices, affordability in Florida declines for 'working' households | Tampa Bay business news blog: Venture | Tampa Bay Times: "How can Florida -- where housing prices have dropped like a stone for years -- rank No. 2 behind pricey California as the state with the highest number of "working households" paying at least half of their income on housing costs? According to this new Center for Housing Policy survey, a third of Florida working households pay more than half their income on housing. The trick, of course, is not that housing costs have not dropped in Florida. It is that household income has dropped faster, thus forcing more working households to pay more of a smaller paycheck to cover housing. . . What really damaged Florida in this survey was the greater Miami area where an astonishing 43 percent of working households pay more than 50 percent of their income to housing. That is by far the worst spot in America based on this criteria, even worse than traditionally super-expensive housing areas like San Diego or San Francisco. The housing crush is reinforced in this state by the recent Tampa Bay Times analysis that finds that most of the new jobs being created in this state pay about 25 percent less than the jobs that were lost in this recession. "Despite the fact that we're seeing declining home prices across the country, housing isn't becoming more affordable," says Laura Williams, the study's author and a research associate at the Center, in this Wall Street Journal story. Read more on this from urban economist Richard Florida in this Atlantic piece."
