On the front page of today's NY Times there's an article about Silicon Valley (Version 2.0) Has Hopes Up by Gary Rivlin which tries to figure out if our region is on the way back up. Some interesting quotes:
Indeed, conditions do look relatively good because things have been so bleak for so long. The area lost nearly a fifth of its jobs after the end of the bubble in 2000, said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at the consulting firm Economy.com. Looking strictly at job losses, he said, the San Jose metropolitan area, which includes much of Silicon Valley, suffered the worst collapse of any metropolitan area in the United States since the Great Depression, surpassing Detroit, which lost 13 percent of its jobs in the early 1980's.Since 2000, the region has added one new job for every 15 jobs lost, according to data provided by Mr. Levy, and added roughly 13,000 jobs over the last four months. "At that rate a jobs recovery is going to take a long, long time," he said, maybe through the end of the decade. Silicon Valley's unemployment rate of 5.9 percent does not sound extremely high, but as Mr. Levy points out, tens of thousands of workers left the area after the collapse.
Office vacancy rates in the region were below 4 percent during the boom, but reached 18 percent in the second half of 2003, according to BT Commercial Real Estate/NAI. That figure now stands at 17.6 percent, even though office rental rates are at their lowest level in more than seven years, according to that firm's Silicon Valley Office Report. (Home prices in the area, however, are at record highs, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a real estate data firm based in San Diego.)
In 2000, according to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, 55 percent of the region's major freeway miles were snarled in traffic during commuting hours, compared to less than 40 percent in 2002, the latest year with data available. The traffic was far worse for those commuting to and from the area, whether over bridges or via a route like State Highway 17, which runs southwest from Los Gatos, Calif., through the Santa Cruz Mountains. Traffic on more than 8 in 10 miles on that highway slowed to a crawl at rush hour in 2000, compared with 3 in 10 miles in 2002.
[I live off of Highway 17]
Someone at knitting group on Sunday, who was working on her umpteenth baby blanket for friends and colleagues, made an interesting observation that everyone was having babies because their careers weren't going anywhere. She found that since they're careers were stuck anyway, they might as well have a good excuse for it and step off the track and have a baby.
I continue to hear about people who have lost their jobs but no one has come in reporting landing a cool new job... so I wouldn't say things are looking all that optimistic for most people yet.
Posted by Emily at June 22, 2004 07:40 AM