[Vision2020] Stress Map Breaks Down the Recession

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (May 18, 2009) Spokesman Review.

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Through the voices of its people, the map shouts.

>From Atlanta, Ga., listen to Marian Chamberlain — 65, jobless, and no
longer eligible for unemployment: “I will never be able to retire.”

>From Shakopee, Minn., listen to Bruce Paul, 56, a vintage car mechanic
laid off in January and unemployed for the first time since Richard Nixon
was president. Today he and his wife spend their days in the public
library to reduce energy costs at home. “You go out and they say, you
know, you need a resume. And I say, `A resume? What’s that?”’

>From Broomfield, Colo., listen to U.S. Marine and construction worker
Simon Todt, 27, a combat-arms specialist who returned from three tours in
Iraq only to be laid off from his construction job in December. He smiles
wanly as he sums up his situation: “There’s not a big calling in the
civilian world for explosives.”

The republic is brimming with Americans like these. And the Associated
Press Economic Stress Map helps us find their voices and tell their
stories.

For generations, maps have told tales that words and numbers alone cannot.
Maps guided us to the New World, helped us navigate from its edges into
its interior. Vague, undefined maps showed Lewis & Clark where to go next
— and in turn gave us fresher, more accurate maps that fueled further
explorations. Maps outlined the frontier for settlement and showed us
where to find the silver, the gold and the coal that made us prosperous.
Computer mapping helps businesses expand, prosper and find new customers.

The interactive Stress Map offers insight into the American recession,
translating it into misery and geography using an equation, the Stress
Index, that shows us — state by state, county by county — just how
uncertain and battered around we actually are. It takes the numbers, the
pronouncements, the big plans for recovery and illustrates what they mean
on Main Street USA, or what passes for it in 21st-century American
communities.

The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By
factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and — most
painfully — unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the
comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark
economic days.

Here are some fleeting examples of what the Stress Index tells us:

•The current recession spread like an epidemic from isolation to ubiquity,
marching from sequestered pockets of foreclosure to a nationwide explosion
of misery as unemployment overtook foreclosures as the dominant misfortune
of this recession.

•Places with technology-based economies were recession-proof for a while
but aren’t now.

•Places with large numbers of government jobs — state capitals, university
towns, communities with concentrations of hospitals — remain fairly
recession-proof. These are places like Columbia, Mo.; Madison, Wis.; the
Raleigh, N.C., area; and Athens, Ga.

•State government is not hurting that much — at least, not yet.

•The regions we look to for our traditional sources of energy, for our
coal and oil — Wyoming, West Virginia and the like — have generally not
been hit as hard.

•While bankruptcy declarations are happening everywhere, they tend to be
higher in the South because of such things as low wages, state laws that
give power to creditors and a culture that’s more familiar with the
bankruptcy option.

•Among counties with 25,000-plus residents, no place has been hit harder
than Elkhart County, Ind., and that 15 of the 20 American counties hit
hardest by the recession in the past year are in six states — Indiana,
Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

The Stress Index is not merely a map of misery, though. When recovery
comes, it can be a map of optimism as well, a welcome harbinger of better
days approaching. Going forward, it can track the recovery we hunger for —
show us where it is poking its head up, where it is spreading and who it
is leaving behind.

The map, and the numbers behind it, cannot tell us everything. No single
number can track Americans’ net worth, no monthly barometer indicates the
pain factor of people who lost retirement funds, whose stocks vanished out
from under them, who dutifully set aside nest eggs that now amount to
little or nothing.

But it can help compare and contrast places, then find the people who
breathe life into the numbers that characterize their regions and their
hometowns. It can illustrate emerging trends — why are certain areas
starting to recover while others are lagging behind? — and offer early
hints to where the tightness of economic stress might be starting to
loosen.

Where can we go with this map? It can carry us to Los Gatos, Calif., one
of the high-tech regions that seemed to be escaping the worst of the
recession but is now clawing to keep pace. It can point us toward
Champaign, Ill., an example of the trend that communities with government
institutions tend to be more recession-proof than other places.

It can highlight Burlington, N.C., where the manufacturing jobs that
disappeared might never be coming back, and Myrtle Beach, S.C., where
unemployment and foreclosures have locals wondering when the dividends of
the American vacation economy will shine upon them once more.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the problem was that we didn’t
have enough information. Now, you can argue, we have too much — dizzyingly
so. And instead of being tasked with accumulating enough data to
understand our world, now we spend our jumbled days shuffling through the
information that’s out there, struggling to make sense of it and harness
it to improve our lives.

For the immediate future, the AP Economic Stress Map will attempt to do
just that for the United States. AP reporters will be fanning out across
the land, telling regular stories based on the monthly numbers — stories
of people like Ron Edo, 42, an aircraft maintenance worker from Temecula,
Calif., who has sent out more than 1,500 resumes since he lost his job a
year ago.

“Luckily I saved when I was young,” he says. “My parents used to always
tell me to save for a rainy day. And it’s pouring.”

There are many more like him. The map shouts — and in doing so, points us
to the stories of the most wrenching economic conundrum of our age.

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The Stress Map

Search the color-coded interactive map that allows users to see the Stress
Index in counties across America, along with foreclosure, unemployment and
bankruptcy rates.

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_national/stress_index/

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"The Pessimist complains about the wind, the Optimist expects it to change
and the Realist adjusts his sails."

- Unknown