Last word is that I’ll pop up on WBT around 9:30pm tonite to talk local stuff with Tara Servatius. Meanwhile, check out Tara’s latest column on Uptown’s not so rah-rah future:
We’re building a center city for the future on a banking industry model of stability that died in the 1980s.
Of the 58,000 jobs in the Uptown zip code in 2007, 16,305 were in finance, insurance and real estate. In other words, many are bank jobs or jobs dependent on banks. Another 24,706 are service jobs, the bulk of which are white collar, according to the Charlotte Chamber. How many of those are bank-dependent is unclear.
While the impact of bank job losses resulting from Wells Fargo’s purchase of Wachovia on the Charlotte economy has been the subject of much public analysis, no one is talking about how they will hit the Uptown economy. And that’s really the key question.
And as Tara points out, we are spreading billions of local tax dollars to pump up Uptown while avoiding the obvious. Those of you with long memories may remember that former CATS honcho Ron Tober said in February 2006 that Uptown needed 100,000 jobs in place in the next 20 years to make our then $6 billion transit plan — now closer to a $10 billion plan, but who is counting? — make sense. Once upon a time Wachovia economist Mark Vinter doubted that even 90K jobs could be reached. “The employment numbers look to be a stretch,” he wrote in 2004.
Then the transit tax repeal argument broke out in 2007, and Vinter conveniently flip-flipped on that point, citing Uptown’s fleeting 24-month condo-building boom as the engine that would drive service jobs Uptown.
Guess what?
Now the condo boom seems a relic of distant past, one that was wholly dependent on lax mortgage lending practices that are never coming back in Charlotte, or anywhere else. Let’s say that again.
Just like it will never again be possible to launch a $100m. IPO based on a PowerPoint gel and a Web address, as was the norm during the Dot Com Boom, we will never again have a financial system so totally indifferent to risk and hooked on speculation. Never.
This means the 100K jobs engine is broken. Worse, even keeping existing jobs in Uptown is no sure thing. In fact, if the number of jobs stays roughly flat in Uptown over the next few years that would be a remarkable achievement given all the upheaval in the financial sector.
This is the new reality we face. One that exactly no one is the local power structure is willing to confront. Changing any of our public spending plans or goals is not remotely on the table. If that does not scare you, it should.