Well, the Union-Tribune ran that article the other day on the relocation of Buck Knives. In it, they quoted some economist as saying that the number of jobs leaving the state were somewhere below 1% of the employment, which obviously isn’t going to be a biggie. How San Diego’s employment stacks up might be another thing, though.
One thing that I keep wondering about is how the mix of jobs will trend. I mean, I don’t think that simply counting heads in terms of employment is all that meaningful when it comes to forecasting the number of wage earners who make enough to buy San Diego property. If only 10% of the households in the county earn enough to pay the mortgage (at a fixed rate) on a median priced home then in a way it almost doesn’t matter what’s happening with the other 90%.
Take Buck Knives, for instance. I think it was 85 out of 225 jobs that relocated, and they were talking about average wages on the factory floor at $15/hour. Okay, some are making more and some are making less but I’ll bet that there weren’t many of the 225 (non-family) employees who were making in excess of $50k.
When the economists and politicians talk about job growth, I’m more interested to see what type of jobs are being created than how many the total is. I wanna know how many $70k+ jobs are being created – my suspicion is that it’s nowhere close to the 10% of the total new jobs coming online.
Another thing to consider is the stability of employment at those salaries. I don’t think an MD would have a problem replacing an employment situation, but there are a lot of incumbant job holders in those salary ranges that wouldn’t be replaced at the same salary range right now. When one of those employees leaves town and their job gets replaced there is no loss of the job but there is a loss of a home buyer’s salary. There are so many variations of the employment vs. homeowner game it makes my head swim.
