In new recession ranking, St. Louis is thoroughly average
If you want to know how the recession is playing out in the average American city, you’ve got a front-row seat right here in St. Louis.
A report out today by the Brookings Institution ranks the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas by their performance on four key economic indicators since the recession began. St. Louis ranked 49th. The only place more average is Nashville.
What it means to be in the middle of the economic pack these days is that 2.3 percent of the region’s jobs have vanished, and its unemployment rate is up by 3.2 percentage points. It means a relatively steep 4.6 percent fall in our "gross metropolitan product" — the sum value of everything that gets made here — and a much shallower 0.2 percent drop in housing prices, adjusted for inflation.
In other words, the economy here is lousy.
But the Brookings report also illuminates where things are lousiest, and where they are less so.
The best performing regions, it found, are largely in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma — the energy belt — followed by Northeastern cities with strong higher education, health care and biotech sectors and manufacturing that’s not tied to the auto industry.
The hardest-hit cities were housing boomtowns in Florida and inland California, and auto-making hubs such as Toledo, Youngstown and Detroit — which sits at the bottom of the list.
Now, as thoughts turn to recovery, those places that have fallen the furthest likely will take the longest to recover, said Howard Wial, a Brookings fellow who co-authored the report.
Meanwhile, a few lighter-hit regions such as Baton Rouge, La., and McAllen, Tex., already are beginning to bounce back.
"This is, regionally, going to be a tremendously varied recovery," Wial said free credit score online.
He thinks St. Louis likely will track the national economy, which many experts think will start growing again late this year or early next — though the job market will take longer to revive. Auto sector cuts have hurt here, Wial noted, but St. Louis’ economy is diverse and other, more-stable sectors have helped cushion the blow.
Still, St. Louis long has been slow-growth, and if it wants to jump ahead of the pack coming out of the recession, Wial said, it must build on its strengths in health care, advanced non-auto manufacturing and biotech.
That last one — biotech — is what brought dozens of local business leaders to Creve Coeur on Tuesday for the grand opening of the Bio Research and Development Growth Park. The $40 million building, next door to the Danforth Plant Science Center, will house plant sciences companies that are trying to turn their research into products they can sell.
As the center opens, it is 63 percent leased, said President Sam Fiorello, and two more buildings are planned. He envisions a campus with 400,000 square feet of offices and labs and more than 1,100 scientists, technicians and entrepreneurs, building new companies and making the region a real hub for plant sciences.
"Those are really good jobs," he said.
And it’s the kind of thing St. Louis must do, Fiorello and others at Tuesday’s ribbon-cutting said, if it hopes to get someplace after the recession that is, economically speaking, a little better than average.