How's the recession where you're at?

**Thevail** · 05-07-2010, 03:55 AM

Our little community in Washington state right up near the border with Canada held out for a long time, but finally got knocked flat between March and July of 2009.

The inflation on food here has been awful, and the state and local governments are raising taxes like nobody's business.

(To be fair it's not like they have much of a choice.. there's a law saying that the budget HAS to balance and less businesses making money and paying taxes means more citizens paying more to make up the difference.)

On the other hand we seem to be seeing at least a bit of a re-birth up here. Businesses are popping their little heads up over the edge of the hole they're in and looking around..

I'm just hoping that they don't see their shadows and go to ground again..

**NewLeaf** · 05-07-2010, 07:43 AM

Our little town in Virginia is the same way. We thought the recession had missed us. But groceries and gas are sky high now. Our housing market has been almost unaffected. We just had our home appraised and have great equity. Businesses are slow to start around here, I hope to see some new ones soon.

**larabelle** · 05-07-2010, 07:57 AM

Well, here in the city things are tentatively looking up. We still have a 7% unemployment rate. Houses are starting to sell but there are still quite a few on the market. Businesses are picking up and hiring. The foreclosure rate is still the highest in the state and there were 13,637 houses receiving a foreclosure filing during the quarter, or one in 176 houses.

**mek42** · 05-07-2010, 08:03 AM

We've been in a recession in most of upstate NY for the past 20 - 30 years. The "Great Recession" hasn't been too much different than business as usual up here. Maybe a few businesses failed due to the "GR", but it's hard to say whether they'd have failed anyway, especially not being privy to their books.

**druthb00** · 05-07-2010, 08:20 AM

I can't say too much about where I'm at in FL now, since we've only been here for 4 months. There are definitely businesses hiring, but I'm pretty sure the housing market has been hit hard.

Back in Indiana, we got hit pretty bad. The city I'm from is less than an hour from Elkhart (I'm sure some of you saw the 'Elkhart Project' on MSNBC, the RV industry nearly died.) I worked for 5 years at a plumbing/heating wholesaler and kitchen/bath showroom. New construction stopped cold and has been that way for over a year. The wealthy people up in Long Beach on Lake Michigan stopped renovating and spending $1,200 on a toilet (I'm serious) like they did for the first few years I worked there. We hung on but many of our plumbers and contractors disappeared and even more went bankrupt. From what my mother tells me (she manages the kit/bath showroom & is a designer there) things are starting to pick up. Our truck is out on the road doing more deliveries, and some of the contractors are actually starting new projects. Many of them had a spec house or two that sat on the market for 2 or more years, and several finally sold this winter/spring. I hope things continue to pick up. It was just too sad to watch people I built relationships with just disappear off the grid.

**mek42** · 05-07-2010, 09:18 AM

Oops. Was using "Today's Posts" that I learned about yesterday and didn't notice this was a regional forum. Good luck up and over there!

**druthb00** · 05-07-2010, 09:48 AM

Originally Posted by mek42

Oops. Was using "Today's Posts" that I learned about yesterday and didn't notice this was a regional forum. Good luck up and over there!

LOL I did the same. OOPS.

**frugalfoster** · 05-07-2010, 09:55 AM

Well I'm on the coast in your state and things here still really aren't getting much better. Unemployment rate is high 12-13 %. We have 2,000 people losing their unemployment benefits at the end of June...the towns around us are running very nervous. Less sales tax colleccted as no one is spending or if they are they are doing it out of town...My dh works for the city and nearly 100 homes are on the water shut off list every month..and this from a very very small town...I own a business and I see a feast or famine kind of economy and am thankful to be as busy as I am because I truly am one of the lucky ones...

**Thevail** · 05-08-2010, 03:20 AM

Hey, no worries you guys from elsewhere. I think it's good to get a perspective from real people. The media went kinda nuts years ago...

Frugalfoster..

My parents live out on the peninsula near Oregon and they're saying the same things. Our unemployment here is still nearly 10% which is pretty bad, I can't even imagine 14%.

I'm worried we're going to get a whole new inning of foreclosures when all the unemployment runs out. And a lot of the people laid off weren't working minimum wage jobs to begin with, so picking up a job at the local burger shop just isn't going to cut it when it comes to trying to pay the mortgage.

**pollypurebred39** · 05-08-2010, 03:54 AM

In this corner of the world things have been rather bleak.

*My husband's in commercial construction which is dependant on consumer spending. DH has been laid off for almost 3 years now. He's running pizza and doing odd jobs.

*My Sister and her husband own a haul it business. Basically they get paid clean out peoples homes that are being foreclosed. They keep what they haul away for profit and get paid to do the job. They are doing 2-3 houses a day!

*unemployment numbers are up, but not as high as I believe them to be. I think more people are just getting dropped off the rolls so they are not being counted anymore.

*more and more people standing at the local bus stop. Loosing their cars? Can't afford to run them?

*weekly you see 1 or 2 apartment contents emptied on the sidewalk for failure to pay rent. Small one stop light town.

*Food pantries are overwhelmed

*A few towns over the SA has closed it's shelter to men because of lack of space. It's now open to women and children only.

*Our churches in the area have been swamped with requests for help. They banded together and now each church offers a meal once a day. One church on mon, one church on Tues. etc. so at least people get a meal in their stomach once a day.

*a lot of restaurants around have shortened their hours, many were 24 hours a day, now closing by 9pm.

* Food prices, H&B prices have sky rocketed.

* Electric, oil and fuel for cars has had a big jump.

*People are swallowing their pride and not only taking any job for any hours, but are willing to put up with a lot of crap to keep their job. The local water ice place pays just over $4 an hour and their NOT the only ones. Seems there's some law about not having to pay min. wage if you only have X number of employees per store. My son's work just fired a manager because she refused to work over 70 hours a week. Her salary works out to just a dollar over my sons X's a 40 hour week! If you're not willing to be slave labor you just might not hang on to your job out here, too many people are begging for those jobs and the employeers know they've got the workers over a barrel.

* Every week on the news we get a list of the companies and how many employees they are laying off. It never ends, you can count on it just like the sun rising and setting.

Things are not looking up out this way, we have a long way to go out here.

**frugalfoster** · 05-08-2010, 09:36 AM

Wow Polly...I thought we were the last to get hit by the recession and therefore would be the last to recuperate. It's not sounding very good in your part of the country either....I was hoping things were starting to look up!

**mek42** · 05-08-2010, 10:10 AM

I'm getting laid off sometime this summer. My layoff isn't related to the recession, but my greatest fear is that I get laid off a day after Congress turns off the extensions.

Filtering what pollypurebred39 wrote through both the Machiavelli and Marx portions of my brain, I wonder if things would improve if a bunch of workers snapped and killed upper management people. Hopefully folks like Carl Icahn will find good deals and remember that reasonably happy workers produce better, leading to better profits and fire management doing things as pollypurebred39 described. I almost used "give them the ax" instead of "fire" but figured it might be taken too literally after my earlier musing.

**pollypurebred39** · 05-08-2010, 11:24 AM

You'd think employeers would know that, but I'm positive that since they've seen profit on a skeleton crew, and since so many are so willing to step into others shoes nothing will change.

I think it's been a long time coming around here. This area was ripe with factories and steel plants. People made a decent living, not great but you could raise your family, buy a modest house, and retire in relative comfort. The factories shut down due to outsourcing as did the steel factories due to cheap imported steel. People scrambled to recover but frankly it was futile. They built 2 huge pharmacuetical plants swearing it would infuse the area with jobs, but most people who work there are from China and USA relocaters, really brillant people!

Developers bought out a lot of the farmers who were now struggling to keep their heads above water due to cheap food imports and built these huge multi million dollar homes. Also were told how much work that would bring to the area. Construction was available till the homes were built and of course low paying part time service jobs to handle the influx of pharm customers. Pharms have now shut down one plant and are relocating to another area. All that money from rich pharm people now no longer circulating in area=jobs lost, even if they were crappy jobs it was still work. The other pharm has let go 5000 employees and says there will be more. Pharm reps are scrambling, they got big severence packages because as one of them told my DIL (she's her hair dresser) it's the end of the road, their jobs are gone and will not be coming back. All those home that the 5000 (now jobless) relocaters bought are now going into foreclosure. Dropping like flies I tell ya!

It's not hard to follow the dotted line and see what went wrong out this way. Take away our factories and give our jobs to other countries, make it almost impossible for the farmer to farm and this is what you get. Last I heard America loses 500 farms a week! We are reaping what our government has sown.

**Luckybustert** · 05-08-2010, 11:21 PM

Unemployment is ridiculously high, seeing a lot of empty retail space, and a lot of "for sale/reduced price" signs on homes that aren't selling. And if I hear one more public official using their scare tactics that we won't have police services, the inmates will have to be let loose, no social services, etc. unless they raise taxes asap, I'll gag. Maybe if they first tried to effectively manage the funding they get? Take some salary cuts? Balance some budgets? Do away with the non-essential? But nooooo.....let's scare people into paying even more in taxes by threatening to cut the essential services first!

**mek42** · 05-08-2010, 11:46 PM

Originally Posted by Luckybustert

... And if I hear one more public official using their scare tactics that we won't have police services, the inmates will have to be let loose, no social services, etc. unless they raise taxes asap, I'll gag. Maybe if they first tried to effectively manage the funding they get? Take some salary cuts? Balance some budgets? Do away with the non-essential? But nooooo.....let's scare people into paying even more in taxes by threatening to cut the essential services first!

I hope it's ok for this white boy to simply say, "Word."