Editorial: Midyear report: How far back is our economy?
Editor's note: Last in a series.
If the Great Recession was the darkness of night for Southwest Florida’s economy, then 2018 is proving to be a year that Collier and south Lee counties are basking in daylight.
At the beginning of the year, our editorial board identified seven ways that 2018 someday might be viewed in the region’s history books for its successes and failures. One of our seven priorities is to analyze how far back we’ve come from the darkness of the Great Recession a decade ago.
After a subprime lending crisis and a real estate market bubble that burst, Southwest Florida — like the nation — headed into a downturn. When that recession peaked is subject to debate. We chose 2008 because gross domestic product had declined for three quarters and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 7,500 that autumn after it had once crossed 14,000.
How far into daylight are we now? During the past 10 days, our editorial board has reviewed progress on our other six 2018 priorities. We’re not suggesting there are signs of another recession on the horizon. Rather, we suggest there are lessons we still can learn from that prior experience.
Lessons
What did we learn from the boom years and the bust that followed during the first decade of the new century? Stated another way, what needs to be addressed now before the inevitable next downturn arrives?
• Workforce housing. Housing prices escalated to a point before the Great Recession that workers couldn’t find affordable, safe places to live and businesses struggled to find employees because jobs were plentiful. Sound familiar? Back then, government agencies and major employers tried to solve it by jointly building rental housing. That approach failed. Now we have a better answer in a community housing plan that gives current Collier County commissioners a chance to take their place in history by successfully addressing this issue. Interestingly, a vacant tract near Golden Gate that was identified for an affordable housing complex for the workforce some 15 years ago is a county-owned site once again being considered for attainable housing.
• Workforce training. As the recession arrived, Collier’s economy wasn’t diversified so there weren’t adequate job opportunities to cushion the blow. The over-reliance on the hospitality industry wracked our economy when people weren’t traveling domestically. Major Collier employers of the era were NCH Healthcare System and government agencies, yet local elected leaders were forced to eliminate hundreds of taxpayer-supported government jobs during the recession. Foreclosure cases hit record levels in Collier and Lee counties to the degree that a so-called “rocket docket” was created and in Lee there were 2,132 foreclosure cases resolved just in March 2009. Today, workforce training is a critical part of the conversation that must be brought to fruition. We’d be remiss to underappreciate medical device manufacturer Arthrex, a major private employer that better positions the region’s economy if it hits a bump.
• Planned growth vs. environmental protection. We’ve touched on these issues in the past few days. They’re among our seven top priorities for the community to focus on in 2018. The conversation about these is eerily similar to what we heard 15 years ago before the recession.
• Hurricane hardening. The response we saw after hurricanes Charley and Wilma in 2004 and 2005 pales to the committed response by local government leaders we’re seeing post-Irma. The onset of the recession set the area back in preparing for its next big storm, which eventually came Sept. 10. With our economy now basking in the light, state and local leaders must follow this initiative through to its conclusion.