Tampa Bay ranks among poorest performing economies

No matter how you slice it, the Tampa Bay area is having a tougher time slogging through the Great Recession than most of the country.

Exhibit A comes courtesy of a Brookings Institution analysis being released today that compares economic indicators for the top 100 U.S. metro areas.

The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater region ranks toward the bottom in several key measures: 89th in drop in employment from its pre-recession peak; 89th in drop in economic output from its peak; 89th in drop in housing prices over one year; 93rd in rise in unemployment over the past year.

Brookings didn't rate metro areas overall from 1 to 100.

But Tampa Bay, along with seven other Florida metro areas, made its cluster of 19 weakest performing economies. On the flip side, Texas accounts for five spots among the 20 strongest-performing metros.

David Denslow of the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research found the report disheartening, but not surprising.

"The reason for it is pretty clear," he said. "It's where you had the combination of the big jump in housing prices and a lot of construction. You had both."

Put Denslow of UF in the camp of optimists.

He maintains that predictions of high unemployment in the bay area lasting until at least 2018 are overblown. "I think they're too pessimistic, and once people realize that we're not going to have 9 percent unemployment in 2014, there's going to be a boom for commercial real estate and that will help the residential.

"That's not to say there aren't problems. The improvement will be gradual," he added. "But I think we've kind of bottomed out."

Read Story:
Tampa Bay ranks among poorest performing economies - St. Petersburg Times - March 17, 2010