Quote:
Originally Posted by Justin_Chicago
I fly to Texas a lot for work and I come across many people visiting family that recently moved there from the South or Westside of Chicago. I am told family members moved there looking for a better living situation (lower crime) but did not necessarily have a job lined up. In fact, my last two uber drivers in Houston and Las Vegas were former Chicagoans from the Southside (Roseland and Chatham) and uber is their only source of income. I personally believe we will see a slight pick up in unemployment as this trend continues. If Texas employment picks up, it will mostly be technical jobs in Oil & Gas to support the growth of LNG exports.
I hope Rauner and Rahm aggressively pursue the next Tesla Gigafactory. Illinois has some of the lowest energy prices in the entire United States. It will be a battle between Michigan, Illinois and Indiana for the Midwest location.
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Not really surprised. The south especially Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix is a hot bed for Chicagoans who were unemployed, got tired of it, and left. A lot of them seemed to be the ones who might be working in more factory type jobs. The people who are coming into the city are more educated on average and make more.
As far as Texas and energy goes, that's lagging behind which is one reason why Houston is one of the bottom 3 largest cities in unemployment percentage right now. I have a coworker in NY whose wife worked in that industry as an executive for awhile for a F100 company. I remember asking why they moved to NYC and they told me they knew the industry was going to hit the fan and they wanted out, and in a new city. This was months before it actually started happening - funny thing is I posted it on another forum and people from Houston called me crazy. Anyway, I'm not confident about Houston being like it was for a few years after 2010. I think those days are past. They'll continue to grow but at a much lower rate.
As far as Chicago's unemployment percent goes, it'll probably decrease slightly with the next data release. Chicago area is the majority of the state. Downstate is pretty stagnant/losing and if the state has decreased its unemployment percentage again, it means that the metro area in the least probably slightly decreased for April too. The Chicago metropolitan division data for April is out (
https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/il_chicago_md.htm) and has the unemployment rate staying the same as March - 4.2%
Interestingly enough, you can see this map of states. The darker means higher unemployment percent. You can see that Arizona going all the way east along the border/coast to Georgia is all 5% unemployment and over. Only three states outside of that have at least 5% unemployment percentage - Kentucky, Alaska, and Ohio (and DC the city). Every other state is below 5%
https://www.bls.gov/charts/state-emp...rates-map.htm#