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Brookings: Economic picture not looking strong for Tampa Bay area
Tampa Bay Business Journal

The economy is no longer in a freefall but that hasn’t stopped three metropolitan areas in the Tampa Bay region to be included among the 20 weakest performing areas in the country.

A new report from the Brookings Institution shows that Tampa-St. Petersburg, Bradenton-Sarasota and Lakeland are among 20 metro areas that combined have sustained an average employment decline of 8.2 percent and an average home price drop of 11 percent over the last year. They join five other Florida metros: Cape Coral, Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando and Palm Bay.

Bradenton-Sarasota is 12.5 percent below its peak employment levels before the start of the current recession, worse than the 7.3 percent fall from Tampa-St. Petersburg and 4.1 percent drop from the country as a whole. Florida dominates the list of metro areas experiencing the largest job losses from their peak, joining Ohio and California.

The Tampa, Bradenton and Lakeland metros, however, are losing jobs at a slower rate in the second quarter than they did in the first quarter, a statistic Miami and Palm Bay can’t latch on to since their job losses were greater in the second quarter than in the first quarter. Only Akron, Ohio; Buffalo, N.Y., Columbia, S.C.; Madison, Wis., and McAllen, Texas, gained jobs in the second quarter of 2009 compared with the first quarter.

Housing prices played a big role in the report’s results. Florida metros make up nearly half the bottom 15 in year-over-year house price index changes.
Tampa metro prices were down 11.4 percent compared to the second quarter of 2008. Bradenton metro prices were down 14 percent.

Miami-Fort Lauderdale had the biggest drop of all the metros in Florida with a 19.3 percent decline, but none could top Las Vegas, where home prices have fallen 24.4 percent over the last year.

The number of bank-owned properties, or REOs, per 1,000 mortgageable properties between March and June rose in most Florida metros, but Bradenton led the nation in reducing its number of REOs by 0.43 percent. Cape Coral-Fort Myers, on the other hand, had the worst change among the top metros, gaining 2.88 percent in REOs.

The quarterly MetroMonitor study from Brookings is designed to peek “beneath the hood” of national economic statistics to portray the varied metropolitan landscape of recession and recovery across the country, a release said. MetroMonitor tracks employment, gross metropolitan product, housing prices and REOs as a basis for its conclusions and covers any metro area that had at least 500,000 residents in 2007, which collectively contain two-thirds of the nation’s jobs and generate three-quarters of GDP.