It happened so quickly, and its effects have lasted for so long. Two years after the recession ended, upwards of 100,000 people in Brooklyn are still without work. We know the numbers. But who are the people behind them? What do their lives look like after a year, two years, even three years without a steady income? What are their strategies for overcoming economic setbacks that loosened their grip on the “good life,” however they define it?
The Brooklyn Ink reporters set out to tell the stories of some of the people behind the statistics – the ones who lost their jobs during the recent recession, and the struggles of so many to hang on to their place in the American middle class.
After a recession that began in late 2007 and a recovery that’s felt like anything but, Brooklyn’s unemployment rate still hovers near 10 percent in a city that shed more than 16,000 jobs during the past decade.
The 18-month recession hit Brooklyn hard. The unemployment rate was just over 5 percent when the recession began in December 2007. It had doubled by the time it officially ended in June 2009, and kept climbing to a peak of 11.1 percent before starting a slow decline.
Now, after more than a year of weak but positive growth, 9.5 percent of Brooklynites still haven’t found jobs.
Looked at another way, just before the recession, about 57,000 Brooklyn residents – all of whom previously had jobs and were actively looking – were out of work. In 2008, that number increased to 64,000 and peaked at about 115,000 jobless in 2010.
Currently the number stands at almost 107,000, according to the New York State Labor Department. The data convey the magnitude of the problem but not its human reality.
According to available surveys, the typical unemployed person in Brooklyn would be a black man, 28 to 34 years old, who lost his most recent job 40 weeks ago. Chances are that job would have been in manufacturing, construction or government – the areas with the highest job losses citywide.
Today we tell the story of Rick, a Brooklyn resident who left his job willingly in search of a better one, not realizing his timing was grim and that a recession was about to turn his hopes upside down.
And there’s Lance Diamond. Laid off from a good job in a health care organization, Diamond still gets up by 4:30 every morning. Now, his work routine is to look for work.
Next week, we will portray the lives of four other Brooklynites and their families.
Theirs are stories of struggle and stubborn optimism. They are our neighbors, friends, and family members; people whose lives are much different now than they could have imagined four years ago. And the future is anything but clear.
In the city, Brooklyn has the second highest rate of unemployment, behind the Bronx.
Details about the unemployed are available for the city as a whole through the Fiscal Policy Institute. The data is not broken down for Brooklyn, but Dr. Robert Cherry, a professor of economics at Brooklyn College, said there’s “no reason to believe it is any different than the general picture for [New York City].”
Unemployment is higher for men – 9.8 percent – than for women – 7.8 percent. Blacks are unemployed at a rate of 12.7 percent, compared with whites at 6.2 percent, followed by Hispanics at 10.7 percent. Asians tend to fare best in the job market with an unemployment rate of 5.9 percent.
Having a steady job has historically been the path to a middle class lifestyle in the city. Nationally, according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Americans consider the middle class to be those families earning between $40,000 and $80,000 annually.
TheMiddleClass.org, an arm of the Drum Major Institute, defines the middle class as those people who have a secure job, a stable home, access to health care and retirement security, time off for vacations or illness, the ability to save for the future, and the means to have children and provide for their education.
The perch in the middle class has proven most precarious in black neighborhoods, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Henry Butler, the chairman of Community Board 3, which includes that neighborhood, said the mood in his community is one of “fear” and “anxiety.”
“There’s always that fear of slipping back and losing the so-called middle class status that we have,” said Butler. “We fight our hardest to make sure we don’t slip back. But you always have that fear that you can slip back and be poor again one day.”
According to Gallup polling in October, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults now rate their personal financial situation as “poor.” That number has climbed since the recession ended.
There is some good news on the job front in Brooklyn, however, at least relatively speaking. “On an aggregate level, Brooklyn looks like it’s doing pretty well,” said Gretchen Maneval, director of the Center for the Study of Brooklyn.
“Despite [the] turbulence” of the recession, Brooklyn picked up 50,000 jobs during the past decade – an 11.3 percent increase, which leads the city for payroll gains, according to the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. Home health care services added 19,545 jobs, while full-service restaurants added 4,123 jobs and elementary and secondary schools accounted for 4,040 jobs.
That growth is “nothing less than remarkable,” the Chamber of Commerce wrote this year in a labor market report. The gains have not been sufficient to bring unemployment in Brooklyn down to pre-recession levels, however, and pockets of deep unemployment persist at the neighborhood level.
There is reason for some optimism in the most recent national economic picture. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis announced on October 27 that the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) – the output of goods and services – grew at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the third quarter of 2011 – almost double the rate of the previous quarter. And the U.S. Labor Department reported on the same day that New York saw the second largest decrease nationally in initial unemployment insurance claims for the week ending October 15.
The Fiscal Policy Institute remains cautiously optimistic, however. While there has been “some general labor market improvement in New York City since the 2008-2009 recession,” the Institute reported in July that unemployment is still “much higher” than before the recession and said “job growth remains exceptionally weak, in part because public worker job declines are offsetting much of what private sector job growth the economy can muster…”
There is “little reason,” it said, “to believe the near-term future will see more than very slow improvement in the city’s job market.”
For similar stories, see Meet Lance: Unemployed in Bensonhurst and Meet Rick: Unemployed in Kensington
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