Jacksonville, Fl.
Net Population Change, 2006-2009: 3.83%
Per Capita Gross Domestic Product: $16,035.65
Change in New Building Permits, February 2007-February 2010: -66.09%
Change in Unemployment, January 2007-January 2010: 227.03%
Change in New Jobs Added, February 2007 - February 2010: -7.74%
Change in Median Home Price from Market Peak: -23%
http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/09/cities-top-ten-lifestyle-real-estate-unemployment-home-prices.html
React to the news, or drive the news.
The choice is our own to make.
an open mouth catches no feet
So basically anywhere where people wanted to move to, but due to a slowed economy cannot or willnot move there as fast as before. Shocking.
Is it just me or is that stating the obvious?
A century ago the turpentine industry was one of the economic mainstays of this city. It went away and we kept on prospering. For the last twenty years, construction has been a mainstay of our economy. It has gone away too. We didn't have to revive the turpentine industry to regain our economic security and we don't have to revive the construction industry to do so either.
Time to retool, re-educate and move on to other things.
Quote from: Dog Walker on April 17, 2010, 10:07:59 AM
A century ago the turpentine industry was one of the economic mainstays of this city. It went away and we kept on prospering. For the last twenty years, construction has been a mainstay of our economy. It has gone away too. We didn't have to revive the turpentine industry to regain our economic security and we don't have to revive the construction industry to do so either.
Time to retool, re-educate and move on to other things.
+2. Golf Clap.
Found this cool article...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,795013-1,00.html
QuoteMonday, Apr. 29, 1940
FORESTRY: Troubled Turpentiners
To the easygoing town of Valdosta on the edge of Georgia's great Okefenokee swamp one day last week went some 2,000 uneasy turpentiners & friends for the annual gathering of the American Turpentine Farmers Association Cooperative. Munching barbecued chicken carefully nurtured for the occasion, they saw Mary Newton, 17, a redheaded, brown-eyed Georgia Peach, crowned Miss Turpentine of 1940, stood by for the cutting of a virgin pineâ€"symbol that a new turpentine year was on.
Because Englishmen in the 17th Century first exploited Southern pine forests for pine tar & pitch (for calking ships' hulls, tarring rope), pine products are called naval stores. Three hundred years later the same timberlands (from North Carolina to Texas) yielded 80% of the world's turpentine (for thinning paint) and rosin (for soap, paper making, varnishes), still called naval stores. By 1900 this industry was turning out annually 600,000 bbl. of turpentine, 2,000,000 bbl. of rosin, hit $63,500,000 in 1921. Of that lush business, some 60% was in exports. In all those years turpentiners had but one worry: to keep ahead of the logging crews. Cheap Negro labor ($4-$6 a week today) slit the trees, drew the sap. Hundreds of individual distillers boiled it down, sold turpentine and rosin to factors who stored them until purchasers came to buy. It was almost too good to be true.
Depression I put an end to the halcyon days. Turpentine prices slumped from better than 50¢ a gallon to 31¢ in 1931, rosin from $8.50 a barrel to $2.95. By 1933 the housing collapse and a shrunken export market reduced the naval stores industry to a pauperish $13,792,000. In March 1936 producers met at Jacksonville, formed the American Turpentine Farmers Association Cooperative to cut excess production, get rid of surplus stocks, undertake conservation.
Chosen to drag the industry out of the woods was a big, burly, hardheaded, quail-hunting Valdosta judge named Harley Langdale. No. 1 U. S. turpentiner, he and his associates grossed better than $500,000 last year from 70,000 owned, 300,000 leased acres of Southern pine. As president and manager of A. T. F. A. he has: 1) borrowed $21,500,000 (1938-39) to tide member producers (over 90% of production) over the industry's rehabilitation; 2) encouraged the building of central stills; 3) produced a standard product, to be marketed in uniform turpentine cans bearing the A. T. F. A. seal and pine tree symbol; 4) cut gum turpentine production 25%; 5) sought new uses for turpentine and rosin.
But the naval stores industry was still worried last week. On its chief market (Savannah, Ga.) turpentine was selling for 29¢ a gallon, rosin from $4-$6.10 a barrel. World War II had crimped exports to a point where factors figured they would be lucky to ship 250,000 bbl. of rosin (50% of '39), 7.000,000 gallons of turpentine (75% of '39) abroad this year. Although surplus stocks of turpentine are down, warehouses groaned with a staggering 1,200,000 bbl. of rosin. Main hope is for a better market in the U. S.
A. T. F. A. also, worried last week over a rival coop, Gum Turpentine Farmers Cooperative Association, formed last year at Vidalia, Ga., by small Georgia producers, to buck the influence of factors in the A. T. F. A. Headed by mild, sandy-haired William Capers Rice, 38, mayor of Vidalia, Gum Turp. last year won an estimated $1,000,000 reduction in factorage interest rates and handling charges. It aims now to get rid of small stills dependent on factors, pool output in a central still system.
Great find! None of those efforts worked either. German chemists had developed methods of extracting solvents from natural gas and oil during the war and welded ships hulls were developed then too. No more turpentine industry.
Go through the woods at Cary State or Osceola State Forests and you can still find the clay pots that were used to catch the tree sap. Talk to some of the older African-Americans in rural towns in the South and ask them to tell you the stories of the turpentine camps, frequently called "turpentine hells" in those days.
Nice article on turpentine. Love these sidebars.
It's a great time to be a building contractor in Florida! New permits down 66%. I wonder what these numbers mean if the bubble is taken out of the equation. It was a frenzy here in 2006/2007. You couldn't even find anyone to sell drywall, much less deliver. Demand was insane. Material prices skyrocketed. You couldn't keep a carpenter around, all they had to do was walk down the sidewalk and a khaki-wearing white truck driving contractor would run over a pretty blonde to get him.
So trying to find some sort of normal to compare to today doesn't work much.
Yeah, I went out in San Marco last night, after going to the Symphony. The symphony was almost sold out, as
was the otherr event at the T-U PAC. Then there was a fun and crazy scene at TAVERNA, one of the newer restaurants that has opened recently. The article about Jacksonville being in "Free fall" is total B.S.!!!!!!!
I dont know about Southside and the beaches, but the Historic Districs are buslting with economic activity.
Also, last time I visited St Johns Town Center, it was packed. These publications also like to tout up and coming areas like Cedar Rapids, Iowa and similar places. I don't think there is a mass migration from Florida to Iowa.
While foreclosures are one piece of the puzzle, you never see headlines these days about the million dollar transactions that are still going on. IF we have 10% unemployment, then we also have 90% employment,
and those folks are still out there spending. Dozens of new businesses open every day here, while many close.
Whenever there is a down trend the poorer areas do suffer while the more affluent seem to dim somewhat, but not the total collapse portrayed in this article. Now DETROIT, that's a free fall.
agreed MusicMan...especially when we just saw a decrease in unemplyment figurs for the Jax. area
I believe all you really need to do is observe the traffic on our local roads. Yes, sure the evil mouse is bringing in tourists, but I have seen a dramatic increase in the number of vehicles on the road, and they are not all here for the mouse. I think things are getting better, we are seeing so in our services business. My wife who is a realtor said prices are beginning to firm and they have been on fire selling houses of late. As the TU pointed out, 200,000 buys a lot more house than it did in 2006, and we still have the river, the jags, and a great town. I think we're on the way back up.
Stephen, It's like the inflation figures. They pull out housing, fuel costs and food cost because they are "volatile". Yeah, and they also make up a very significant portion of every individuals spending.
What the devil are they measuring, the rise and fall of the price of concrete pipe? If the price of that started rising rapidly, they would probably throw out that figure too.
I love fear mongering. It sells. This will make someone money.
Considering most of the shit about Jacksonville originates in Sports Illustrated, a Jacksonville hating branch of Time-Warner, I was worried when I saw this was from Forbes. Had it been a TW Group article it certainly would have been negative, however in the case of Sports Illustrated the story would be so full of holes that one couldn't use the discarded magazine for ass wipe. Should anyone from Jax. get the bright idea to use SI for this purpose, you will probably develop a raging rabid rash in the nether regions of your anatomy.
Forbes is a railroad hating publication with never a kind word to say about Amtrak or US Conventional Passenger Trains, writing them off as a wasteful democrat hay ride for train aficionado's. Writing about cities would be a far more serious and credible endeavor for these pompus, paginal, pontificating, poison pen, parvenues. Once the realization struck me that EVERY other major Florida metropolis was likewise listed in their doomsday economic report I recalled these are the same family folks that own the "Forbes Ranch" development in Southern Colorado. Funny, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Antonito, Alamosa, Chama, Durango or Tao's all dogged their wrath. Once sales pick up in the cryospheric pan arctic ranch, they're likely to back off of Florida, California or Nevada.
OCKLAWAHA
panjandrum deluxe
http://www.businessinsider.com/20-cities-where-the-recovery-never-happened-2010-3#7-jacksonville-fl-14
How silly. We just had a big forum on whether there is any "good news" or not. Whether there is any true "recovery" or not right now is open for debate, though some trends appear to be getting better. This article presupposes that "the recovery" is already over. What hogwash. When you have a bigger boom (like all the cities on that list except for Detroit), you are going to have a bigger bust, meaning you need more "recovery" to get back to the "peak", which was their criteria. A city like Lynchburg, Virginia, where I've been living the past 2 years never moves very much at all one way or the other. Therefore, I guess the recovery happened here already. Now I am reconsidering my imminent move back to Jacksonville...
Quote from: Tripoli1711 on April 19, 2010, 03:35:04 PM
This article presupposes that "the recovery" is already over.
The April 15 edition of
The Economist agrees:
"The American recession is over. In the summer of 2009 real GDP and industrial production hit bottom and resumed growth, and expansion in both measures strengthened as the year ended. Industrial production has continued to grow in early 2010 as, in all likelihood, has output. By the end of the current quarter the American economy may have returned to its pre-recession peak in real GDP."
First, they hedge by using terms such as "in all likelihood" and "may have". Secondly, it does not serve to support the article's presupposition that the fabled recovery has ended. Recovery is an action relative to the organism being considered. Like I said, Lynchburg, Virginia or Eugene, Oregon may have completed their "recovery" already. Just because recovery may be slower in Jacksonville or Phoenix or may not have yet begun doesn't mean the world has passed us by. Does anyone really think Phoenix is going to become Detroit and never recover?
Quote from: Tripoli1711 on April 19, 2010, 03:49:15 PM
it does not serve to support the article's presupposition that the fabled recovery has ended.
"By the end of the current quarter the American economy may have returned to its pre-recession peak"
returned to its pre-recession peak = recovered
I guess its just a matter of semantics. The way the article read to me was like these cities "missed the recovery". In other words, these cities lost out on their chance to get back to where they were before the bubble burst, and are now proper F'd. I just don't see that as following logic given where this nation is right now. It might take Jacksonville and other cities longer to "recover", but like I said, in large part that is because the bubble grew so large here compared with other sleepy places. Yes, the American economy on the whole may "recover" before Jacksonville or Miami or Phoenix or Vegas does, but that does not mean those cities are now foreclosed (pun intended) from ultimately recovering in the near term... it might just take a little longer.
I didn't interpret the article as saying this was some kind of a permanent state.
My own opinion is that the recession is not over. It's not. These ivory tower dwelling academicians can easily spout off whatever statistics support their rosy image of the American economy, but nothing can change the fact that jobless claims are rising, housing prices are falling, banks continue to fail, and any rise in GDP is in some part due to government expenditures funded by treasury bill sales to foreigners, which will eventually cost US taxpayers TRILLIONS.
The only thing I have to ask myself to really figure out whether the US is better off or not is: What problems that caused the crisis have been fixed?
None. In fact, they have been worsened.
The Fed keeps rates artificially low and the government spends more and more, especially subsidizing mortgages that were the problem in the first place.
What is the economy to most people? Its certainly not some GDP figure. Its their job or lack of it. To the people, the recession isn't over until the unemployment is over. That could take a generation for the US.
I am rather certain our opinions about almost every issue surrounding and raised by your last post differ. That being said, I agree 100% with the content of your last post.