Unemployment rate easing across upstate

The state has gained 47,200 non-farm jobs since February 2010, not seasonally adjusted. The educational and health services sector continued to top the industries with job gains by percentage in February, while the construction industry showed the steepest decline.

In February, 480,400 people in the five-county region had jobs while 43,600 were out of work and looking, according to new state Labor Department numbers. That's more people working and fewer jobless than either a year earlier or a month earlier.

“It appears that we’re headed in the right direction again,” said John Slenker, the Labor Department’s regional economist in Buffalo. But he also noted that jobless levels remain stubbornly high and that the region’s sluggish pace of job growth will need to accelerate to bring unemployment rates back down to the 5 percent and 6 percent range that was common from the mid-1990s until the recession began battering the local job market in 2008. Employment data released last week showed that the region has gained 1,500 jobs over the last year—a0.3 percent increase — as a pickup in hiring by private-sector employers offset cutbacks in government jobs.

The falling jobless rate locally "is probably the most significant decline we've seen since the recovery began," said Christian Harris, senior economist at the department's office in Glendale Technology Park, Union. That recovery began locally last summer, when the region began experiencing "a stemming of loss and some general gains," he said. Still, private-sector jobs totaled 81,500 last month, down 400, or 0.5 percent, versus the same time a year ago.

The dip in the unemployment rate coincided with an increase in the number of jobs in the Syracuse area. There were 1,600 more jobs in the area in February than in the same month last year, despite the loss of 800 government jobs.

“Confidence has slipped from January’s high, and once again has settled into a trough in which nearly half of New Yorkers say that their financial lot has declined over the last year, and only one in four expect to be better off in a year,” said Douglas Lonnstrom, founding director of the institute and a professor of statistics and finance at Siena College in Loudonville. “New Yorkers are far more optimistic about the future than the national number, but about half still expect poor business decisions to persist for the next year.”

How miserable are consumers now? A 1980s index would total 11.0%, but recent inflation reports haven’t totally captured the pain drivers are suffering at the pump. Plus, any measure today would have to include the weakness in real estate. The January S&P/Case-Shiller report showed the fall in home prices is accelerating again. Declining home values make homeowners feel especially miserable. One way to construct a current misery index would add the 12-month change in the jobless rate (to gauge improvement in the labor markets), the percent change in gas prices since the end of 2010, and the inverse of the yearly percent change in home values. That U.S. misery index would stand at 20% now, and up from 8.3% a year ago. The national number, of course, masks the divergence across regions since some cities and real estate markets are recovering faster than others. Local misery indexes are possible using city unemployment rates from the Labor Department, local gas prices from gasbuddy.com, and home prices from the S&P report.

The Buffalo Niagara market is not included in the index. The region’s average home price rose 4 percent from December to January to $142,169, while the median price rose 3.4 percent to $120,500. Real estate professionals have said home prices in the Buffalo Niagara region never saw the surge upward, so the region was saved the crash back down that so many other communities have suffered. The housing market remains the heaviest burden on the economy, which is showing signs of strength elsewhere. Unemployment benefit applications are at prerecession lows, consumers are spending more money, and manufacturing activity is growing at its fastest rate in seven years.