PITTSFIELD, a city of 43,000 on the Housatonic River in western Massachusetts, is a quintessentially American place, but in many ways an unlikely spot for a housing boom. The 255-year-old former industrial hub boasts the country’s earliest written reference to baseball. Its economy was dominated by General Electric for much of the 20th century. But by 2000 it had experienced ten years in which hardly any new jobs had been created. Incomes were 12% below the national average. The city’s population had been shrinking for decades. And yet between 2000 and 2007, amid a nationwide, credit-fuelled property boom, house prices in Pittsfield jumped by 70%, or 8% per year.
These days, such rapid growth in economically struggling cities is rare. Whereas local housing markets rose and fell together during the housing bubble and bust, the housing recovery which began in America in 2012 has been patchy. Cities and towns with growing economies have seen big gains; places like Pittsfield have stagnated (see chart 1). Such trends are contributing to a widening of America’s already unequal distribution of wealth.
According to an annual...Continue reading
from Economics http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21709974-prices-are-diverging-geographic-social-and-ethnic-lines-those-have?fsrc=rss
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment