About a month ago, various analysts around town, including me, were trumpeting a strong 2014 for the regional economy and predicting solid growth in 2015, too.
We were making those judgments and predictions without some key numbers from the end of 2014. Fortunately, the employment data released last week largely reinforced the existing narrative.
According to the Georgia Department of Labor, the Savannah metro area (Chatham, Effingham and Bryan counties) had 166,100 payroll jobs in December 2014, up an impressive 2.7 percent from 161,700 in December 2013.
Gains were especially strong in transportation, warehousing and utilities; professional and business services; and leisure and hospitality.
The number of payroll jobs in the sector that includes construction increased by 300 over the past year. That’s a 5.8 percent gain, but I’d like to see a few more months of data before getting too excited about that trend.
Still, it seems safe to predict that 2015 will be the strongest year for builders since the housing bust.
Some of the other year-end numbers were not quite as strong.
Manufacturing employment was flat in 2014 in the Savannah metro area, as were both state and federal employment.
Compared to December 2013, the number of initial claims for unemployment insurance in the Savannah metro area fell a modest 4.6 percent in December 2014.
Georgia’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in December was 6.9 percent. That’s down from 7.2 percent in November and down from 7.4 percent in December 2013.
The Savannah metro area unemployment rate, which is not adjusted for seasonality, was 6.2 percent in December, down from 6.6 percent in December 2013.
Those are all positive trends, on the whole, but it’s worth adding that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for the U.S. in December was 5.6 percent. Georgia’s unemployment rate in December was the fourth worst in the nation after the District of Columbia, Mississippi and California.
The household survey, which is used to determine the unemployment rate and other characteristics of the labor force, suggests considerably weaker job growth than the estimates of payroll gains from the establishment survey that I cited previously.
A closer look at the data reveals that the December unemployment rates in Effingham and Bryan counties, 5.4 percent and 5.1 percent, respectively, were significantly lower than Chatham County’s 6.5 percent.
Chatham County’s rate continues to be dragged down by the city of Savannah, which had a 7.6 percent unemployment rate in December. That’s down from 8 percent in December 2013 but still very high.
Despite the cautionary notes, there is ample evidence to predict that 2015 will be strong year for job growth and for the regional economy generally.
Chief Lumpkin
re-emphasizes problem of street-level violence
Savannah-Chatham Police Chief Jack Lumpkin addressed the local NAACP last week at St. Paul CME Church. According to coverage in this newspaper by Katie Martin, Lumpkin once again used an important public platform to draw a causal link between street-level drug sales and the city’s ongoing violence.
“The only way to control crime,” Lumpkin said, “is to control gangs, control guns and control street-level drugs or you’re going to have street-level violence and shots fired.”
This isn’t the first time Lumpkin has made these connections clear, and I sure hope it won’t be the last.
Sure, previous chiefs have occasionally said similar things, but the rhetoric has never been so straightforward, at least not in the 15 years I’ve been writing this column.
And policing street-level crime such as drug dealing and prostitution has seemed a low priority in many neighborhoods. Once residents presume that patrol officers aren’t going to do anything about drug dealers and prostitutes wandering their streets, they quit calling.
Last week, in the wake of shooting incidents in neighborhoods that are not accustomed to them, I saw a couple of impassioned pleas on social media to focus on the societal ills that many see as the causes of crime rather than focus on tougher enforcement.
I’m all for better educational programs, mentoring programs and all sorts of other efforts, but we’ve got kids growing up in neighborhoods where criminal activity happens blatantly, right out in the open, on a daily basis.
Many parents have been able to get their kids out of such neighborhoods — and good for them. Of course, as families like those leave, neighborhoods can deteriorate even further.
I live just a few blocks from the Jefferson Street corridor, so that’s the area I’m always pondering, but others of you know different crime-ridden neighborhoods, corridors and blocks.
Over the years, the neighborhood near Jefferson Street has experienced a massive turnover. Many longtime residents have fled the crime and the attendant blight, while, ironically, other residents are slowly being displaced by forces of gentrification.
I actually expect most of the Metropolitan Neighborhood (more or less bounded by Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, Victory Drive, Bull Street and Anderson Street) to be largely gentrified within a generation, as dog walkers replace streetwalkers.
But even if the street-level crime leaves one neighborhood over time, it will just wind up somewhere else if we allow it.
City Talk appears every Tuesday and Sunday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 East 32nd St., Savannah, Ga. 31401.