Studer Community Institute

Shannon's Window: Invest in all our citizens

May 18, 2015
/ Shannon Nickinson
/ community-dashboard

There’s the kind of economic growth we want, and the kind we’re going to get. When Rick Harper speaks, most folks in Northwest Florida listen. Harper is an economist at the University of West Florida, former economic adviser to the Florida Senate, leader of the Center for Research and Economic Opportunity at UWF and senior research fellow at the Studer Community Institute. Every year he gives the local chapter of NAIOP, a commercial real estate developers trade group, the economic lay of the land. Among the highlights he hit this year: — The Pensacola economy is growing at a rate that is pushing 5 percent. “That is a very good rate,” Harper said. “Historically, (it is) one of the best rates we’ve seen.” — Pensacola metropolitan statistical area housing starts “off the bottom” but “still not what we would call normal,” Harper said. — Pensacola area economic indicators are on an upward slide, “but there is still plenty of room to run in our local economy,” Harper said. — Overall, the South is a hot spot for industrial growth. Also hot: Port cities. Yea, us! — The direct impact of the anticipated 10,000 jobs in 10 years at Navy Federal Credit Union’s Heritage Oaks campus in Beulah accounts for about one-third of the growth in the Pensacola metro area’s economy, Harper said. — When businesses look for spots to set up shop, in general, the top three criteria are highway accessibility, skilled workforce and low labor costs, national data show. And that’s where the worm starts to turn for us. Because one-fourth of our residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher. In communities where that number is higher, per capita income is higher, Harper’s data showed. Because the median household income has been losing ground for more than two decades. Income from wages, Harper said, peaked in 1970 at 83 percent; by 2010, it was 61 percent. “That has implications about what kind of commercial development you’ll be doing over the next several decades,” Harper told the developers. What replaced that income from a work-week paycheck was a check from transfer payments — government money from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “You would think that transfer payments go to eliminate poverty, but that can be misleading,” Harper said. “It’s to alleviate poverty among old people because old people vote, and their voice gets heard in Congress more than impoverished children.” We know that workforce readiness is an issue for this community. We should know that having a population where 25 percent of the adults over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher is not a recipe for economic success. We know that Escambia County is among the worst places in America to be a child in poverty. Children who grow up poor in Wayne County, Mich., — whose county seat is Detroit — have better prospects than Escambia County’s poor children. Poor children in Cook County, Ill., — Chicago — have better prospects. So do poor kids who grow up in Memphis. In today’s economic development world, image is everything. And this is one of the images that is being broadcast into the world about our community. It is a hard truth, but the data don’t lie. If we are to build a community with a strong, diverse economy, we have to invest in our greatest untapped resource, our deepest well of capital, the asset that will make us the kind of place where businesses want to set up shop or expand — our citizens. ALL of them.

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Shannon's Window: Invest in all our citizens

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