The One-Two Punch of Job Losses and Falling Home Values

Housing devaluation and job loss are the two major problems affecting America's urban areas. But as this article from Governing explains, those two problems are playing out in drastically different ways from metro to metro.

1 minute read

April 22, 2010, 6:00 AM PDT

By Nate Berg


"States and localities are recovery-challenged. The problem for policymakers who would like to give states and localities a helpful push up the recovery ladder is that the troubles that bedevil those economies are not evenly distributed.

A report in March from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia indicates that states are recovering from this recession at greatly different speeds. In February, the bank's coincident index (an index that combines four state-level indicators to summarize current economic conditions in a single statistic for each state) increased in 21 states, decreased in 22 and remained unchanged in seven."

Governing's Penelope Lemov writes that the "double trouble" of job losses and home value losses are posing serious challenges for some cities, but many experts suggest focusing on jobs and letting the housing market right itself.

Monday, April 19, 2010 in Governing

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