St. Louis continues to outperform many regions in recession. Will that last in recovery?
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
March 17, 2010
by Tim Logan
As the economy began to rebound toward the end of last year, St. Louis bounced back a little higher than many other places.
So says the Brookings Institution. The Washington think tank has been tracking the performance of the nation's 100 biggest metro areas in the recession and today issued a report that finds St. Louis faring better than average.
Economic output grew 2.1 percent here in the last three months of 2009, well ahead of the national average of 1.6 percent. And St. Louis was one of just 21 regions where employment grew in the quarter, albeit by just one-tenth of one percent.
Those factors, plus measures of the housing market, led Brookings for the second straight quarter to rank St. Louis within the second quintile -- between 21st and 40th -- of the 100 regions it tracks. It's faring worse than farm and energy belt towns like Omaha, Neb., and Dallas, but far better than housing hotspots like Las Vegas and Phoenix or hard-hit Detroit.
Still, the news isn't all sunny.
At 9.8 percent, the unemployment rate here remains a bit worse than the national average. And Brookings estimates it will take 11 years to regain the 59,000 jobs that have been lost in the last two.
That's because of St. Louis' slow, sedate growth over the last decade -- the very thing that protected the area from the worst effects of the Great Recession. Whether that slow, sedate economy will also slow St. Louis down in the recovery remains to be seen.
