Imbalance

Here’s a post by Davd Damron of the Sentinel, UCF economist: Orlando will lead Florida’s slow rebound

With a Wall Street meltdown, international credit crunch and real estate free fall still clearly visible in the rear view mirror, Florida can expect its housing market to stabilize, but commercial properties face a wave of foreclosures and the labor market will remain in a “funk,” said Snaith, director of UCF’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness at the College of Business Administration.

I tweeted this post last week but thought I’d comment a bit on the matter. The piece has Sean Snaith*, a leading economist with UCF delivering Orange County’s annual economic forecast. (You can read UCF’s full Florida/Metro economic forecast here.)

Of note, you’ll see he predicts Orange County to lead the state in job growth during the slow recovery period. And Orlando will lag only Lakeland and Ocala in population growth. Do you see an imbalance there? I do.

I guess my point to Lakeland and Polk is this: The message here should concern us. Our unemployment rate consistently tracks a full percentage point worse than our surrounding reigons, but we keep relying on the “good news”…population growth. We simply have to learn to work better with Orlando and Tampa to grow this super region if we ever expect to grow the right jobs. Seems we may be good at growing people, but have a long way to go in growing jobs.

More to come…

*Sean Snaith, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institute for Economic Competitiveness within the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida and is a widely recognized economist in the field of business and economic forecasting.

photo credit: Kel Patolog