The Collapse of Manufacturing and the Spread of the Blight

In 2008, while the Recession was still a-brewing some of us tried in vanity and naivete to link the collapse of Manufacturing with the increase in unemployment and the Housing Crisis and then the Financial Crisis. Happily, we can move beyond the anecdotal to the empirical now for data on unemployment over the last decade. Many of us just sort of knew that when you put folks out of good jobs, they lose their houses, then they lose their Banksters.

What the Moody's Elkhart Project shows is how the growth of unemployment starts from the center of the nation where the manufacturing jobs are most numerous in 2005 and spreads outward towards both coasts. As the unemployment numbers increase so do the concentrations of housing defaults in Nevada, Florida, Arizona and California.

Click here to see Moody's regional data in interactive graphs and timeline.

Moody's has created an adversity index,a graphical interactive site, which correlates regional disasters, like Elkhart losing their RV manufacturing, to the economic local conditions, over time.

cities with greater economic diversity tend to show steadier growth. A balance of industries usually means less boom or bust. Cities that put all their eggs in one market basket increase their risk of calamity.

Yet this is also true: Most of the 35 metro areas that have largely avoided recent recessions, and most of the 14 metro areas that still haven't fallen into the current recession, are Johnny One Notes, dominated by a single industry. They're college towns (State College, home of Penn State), government centers (Olympia, Wash.), military bases (Virginia Beach, Va.), or the stray mecca for health care (Rochester) or agriculture (Salinas, Calif., the Salad Bowl of America).

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pretty much

Although Oregon has very high unemployment yet not as many home foreclosures. So, some of the foreclosures can be tied to "bubble" areas as well. I don't know the breakdown of bubble, vs. strategic defaults vs. good ole fashioned "I'm broke" because you shipped my job to China is.

That would be a useful metric.

I fixed your post

meta tags are keywords. You had the title in the meta tags and that's not good because it goes into the database as search queries and also creates URLs from those tags.

Also, you need to format your links. Raw links are not acceptable in blog posts or Instapopulists.

Great site, I had no idea they had done this.

Thanks BoB

The boom and bust is single-industry towns in the midwest, west and south. There are may service economy towns in the Sunbelt that suffered because housing is not seen the way classical economists from Aristotle through Smith saw housing (use value vs sales value).

Burton Leed

saw that

Flint MI and GM, Detroit is way too dependent on the auto evil empire and so on.

That said, in terms of foreclosure maps, one can see these high concentrations even down to town, county, that don't correlate to say manufacturing closing. I really hate to say this because I'm going to get a bunch of crap over it, but the maps almost imply a demographic situation. Oops, but seriously, Riverside, that SW corridor, Sacramento, Inland Empire, S. Florida and so on.