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Sunbelt City in Grasp of Housing Undertow
When the Fort Myers housing market collapsed, William Coleman lost his $100,000-a-year job and was fortunate to find one paying $60,000. "I had to take the only job that was available. Everybody's looking for work."
(Cathy Kapulka - For The Washington Post)
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William Coleman, 50, who was a senior superintendent at a home builder, learned how quickly things could change. He lost his job in January. Now he's pouring concrete in a parking lot. His income dropped from $100,000 to $60,000. But Coleman says he feels lucky. His new employer had 250 workers last year. Now it has 30.
"I had to take the only job that was available," he said. "Everybody's looking for work."
Permits for new homes in the first seven months of 2007 are down 70 percent from 2005, with housing prices sliding back to their 2002 levels.
The job market followed. The unemployment rate was up to 4.7 percent in July. But the real picture may be worse than the numbers indicate, says Michael Reitmann of the Building Industry Association. The jobless rate does not account for the workers, many of them immigrants who have simply moved away as the economy has softened.
For the past two years, Kelly Fuelcher and three colleagues in the United Way office have answered 50 or 60 phone calls a day from people needing job training, help with bills or other assistance.
Since the beginning of summer, the number of calls has nearly doubled, to a hundred or so per day -- the most ever, except after hurricanes.
When the construction industry was first slowing, much of the demand for social services came from Latino immigrants, laborers who found themselves without an income. Lately, however, "it's everybody," Fuelcher said. "It runs the gamut of economic status."
That has made hiring easy at some stores. When times were good, Baer's Furniture could not find enough staffers. When the retailer recently posted openings for two sales people, it got 170 applicants.
There are signs that these problems are seeping into many regions of the country. Job growth was halted in August as the nation shed 4,000 jobs, stunning economists who had not thought that the housing bust would so dramatically affect hiring.
The weak job market and slumping wages in Fort Myers are triggering a worrisome drop-off in consumer spending, which nationally accounts for 70 percent of the economy.
During the boom year of 2005, the take-home pay of Dawn Shevlin's family reached $350,000. That year, she and her husband bought two pickup trucks and a boat, and started building a custom home on a handsome beachfront lot.
This year, Shevlin, a real estate agent, sold hardly any homes. Her husband's carpentry business is "dead in the water." They have been unable to sell a second home they own.
