For the first time since the recession ended, payrolls are expected to grow in all of America’s cities, according to a new report, a sign of broad-based economic expansion after years of uneven gains.
A study for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, set for release on Wednesday, forecasts all 363 U.S. metro areas will add jobs this year. In 316 of them, gains will exceed 1% of current payrolls, according to the forecast by IHS Global Insight.
By comparison, 211 metro areas saw job growth greater than 1% last year and 51 had declines.
The U.S. concluded its best year of job growth in 15 years last month, with employers adding 2.95 million jobs for all of 2014 and the unemployment rate falling to a postrecession low of 5.6% nationwide.
IHS expects U.S. employers to add another 2.65 million jobs this year.
“The economy in the second half of 2014 really started accelerating,” said James Diffley, a senior director at IHS Economics and author of the forecast. “And what we’re seeing now is a broad-based increase [in payrolls].”
As would be expected, the biggest cities are on track to add the most jobs. Metro areas around New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Washington, D.C., are expected to see the heftiest rise in payrolls this year.
But as a percent of the workforce, urban areas in Florida will post some of the strongest gains, led by Naples, Palm Bay and Cape Coral. Ocean City and Atlantic City, N.J., and parts of upstate New York are among the weakest metro areas.
The forecast’s release coincides with the mayors’ annual meeting in Washington, D.C. One of the group’s recurring themes is to contrast federal gridlock with their own accomplishments. And a survey for the mayors’ group conducted by Zogby Analytics, also out Wednesday, showed 47% respondents think their city is on the right track, while only 29% said the U.S. as a whole is on the right track.
Despite recent economic strength, almost half of all metro areas are yet to regain all the jobs lost during the recession and its aftermath. At the start of 2015, only 164 had returned to prerecession peaks. IHS is forecasting a total of 199 will have regained their peak number of jobs by the end of this year.
That data echoes recent findings from the National Association of Counties, which showed only one in 50 U.S. counties had fully bounced back from the recession.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/01/21/is-2015-the-year-every-u-s-city-adds-jobs/