Recession caught up with rural Idaho in 2009
Coeur d'Alene Press | UPDATED 14 years, 10 months AGO
After weathering the first year of recession without losing economic ground, the worst downturn in a generation took a bite out of rural Idaho in 2009, according to estimates released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The value of all goods and services produced outside Idaho's five metropolitan areas dropped $676 million in 2009, or 3.8 percent to less than $16.2 billion, more than erasing the 1.6 percent gain in gross product rural Idaho recorded from 2007 to 2008.
Coeur d'Alene was the hardest hit of the metro areas. It lost 3.8 percent of its gross product, $167 million, in 2009. Only 58 of the 366 metropolitan areas across the nation suffered worse losses, and just 12 of them were in the west.
The other four in Idaho were also in the bottom 150 metro areas. Boise and Coeur d'Alene both had 24 percent losses in construction to rank among the 25 metro areas suffering the biggest declines in that sector. All five areas were in the bottom half of urban centers for manufacturing losses with Pocatello seeing an 18 percent decline and Idaho Falls 17 percent.
By contrast, the five metro areas saw their combined gross product drop by $1.3 billion, or 3.5 percent, to just over $37.3 billion in 2009. The urban areas saw fractional growth in gross product in 2008.
Total gross state product for Idaho was off 3.6 percent in 2009, falling nearly $2 billion to just under $53.5 billion, the first annual decline in over 50 years.
The urban-rural pattern was somewhat similar to the 2001 recession when rural Idaho's gains covered weakness in the urban centers during and after the downturn, then slipped behind the metro areas as the expansion set in. The last recession, which ended in June 2009, was nearly twice as long as the 2001 recession.
Until 2009, rural economic activity as measured by the value of goods and services had been growing at a greater rate than in the metropolitan areas since 2006, when the housing boom began to show weakness. In 2008, rural Idaho accounted for more than half the growth in gross state product for the first time, and in 2009 the urban centers were responsible for two-thirds of the decline.
The bottom falling out of the housing market and the contraction in manufacturing, especially in the high technology sector, were responsible for most of the lost gross product in metropolitan Idaho in 2009. Of the $1.3 billion loss from 2008, $492 was in manufacturing and $457 million in construction. That came on top of the $401 million construction loss in 2008.