Areas recovering from the crisis
The Texas’ major metro areas, like Austin, Dallas, Worth, Houston and San Antonio, are coming out of the crisis better than cities from many other areas of the country.
Texas flourishes in many different fields, like technology, corporate operations, oil ad military industry. The places that are likely to recover faster are the places that have suffered the least during the recession and those that are helped by a fiscally stable government. This is the case of Texas, whose economic growing is sustained by oil and gas revenues which are quite stable compared to other areas. The “MetroMonitor” by Brookings publishes every few months a report on how the 100 largest metro areas in the United States are coming out from the crisis, and Texas is one of the highest ranked. A lot more interesting than that is the prognosis over the next few years which we find on Moody’s Economy.com, which published an analysis on annual growth prospects for employment and economic output for the period 2010-2014. The 25 largest metro areas from the four regions of the country were analyzed and the results were stunning.
One of the best rated areas is Des Moines from Iowa because it has a relatively low cost of living, an educated workforce and it is an important financial and insurance center with lots of banks. The average housing price from 2008 was around 152,400 dollars, and has dropped only 4 percent since then. Another metro area that is managing to get out of the crisis is Raleigh-Cary, which is relying on the tech and biotech industries, which means that it has a highly educated workforce. The housing prices in this area seem to grow, not to drop and the employment rate is likely to grow by 2.9 percent the next years. Mark Zandi, the chief economist and cofounder of Moody’s Economy.com, says that manufacturing and distribution areas (like Atlanta and Dallas) will be the first to recover and that more jobs are likely to appear in the services sector, like accounting and management consulting.
Some of the metro areas will recover slower than others including Las Vegas, where unemployment is 14.2 percent and the average housing price dropped by 60 percent since 2006. The tourism will probably recover by 2012, and many people that want to buy a house will take advantage of the low prices from the Sin City area and the abundance of real estate on the market.
