The Anecdotal Economy
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been helping my girlfriend try to sell her condo and incrementally move into a new apartment unit. Since both the old place and the new place are within 100 yards of my own dwelling, there’s nowhere to run and hide even if I were – ahem! – the kind of rotten selfish boyfriend who might be occasionally tempted to flee under the circumstances. Unfortunately, there has been no movement after a month on the market, and her spacious, remodeled, reasonably-priced one-bedroom in a charming building, street and neighborhood remains unsold. This afternoon is another open house (following a second reduction in price), and hopefully the offers will come pouring in. In the meantime, the situation is getting to be like going to the dentist every day to have the same tooth drilled.
Last year at this time, this would have been unthinkable. The housing market in Seattle has been so hot for the last five years that serious buyers needed to overbid the asking price to even have their offers considered. Now, despite miniscule interest rates, almost every neighborhood is a forest of “For Sale” signs. The vacancy rate for rentals in our artsy downtown-fringe area must be astronomical: the managers of my girlfriend’s new apartment lowered the already-reduced rent on her unit by nearly 20% with hardly any negotiation. Last year, there were waiting lists to get into these buildings. All of this is creating horrible anxiety about unloading the condo before the market completely collapses.
On the employment front, things remain much worse than they appear in the official statistics. In my circle of friends, I count the following situations:
- A retail copy writer with 20 years of professional experience is applying for a job as a city bus driver
- A trained librarian with numerous academic qualifications and a Masters in Library Science (Arizona, 2000) is teaching a night class at the local community college and considering shipping out as crew on a merchant vessel this winter
- A former retail display designer (e.g., shop windows) for Nordstrom, now working as a waitress in a neighborhood bar
- Former copy editor at the Seattle Times and certified technical editor, now organizing for the Teamsters (and loving it, luckily for him)
- An MBA is scraping by with occasional assignments as a substitute teacher for the school district
- A former Microsoft Vice President, stock options long gone in an ugly divorce case, (unsuccessfully) looking for work as a consultant
- Former VP of a successful audio production software firm, out of work for over two years
- A building contractor who spent 2 years obtaining a technical certification in network administration, doing odd jobs and day labor after sending out hundreds of resumes in a fruitless job search
Sure, most of these people still have jobs of a sort, but nothing like what they’re qualified for. Incomes are shrinking. Expectations are narrowing. Desperation is palpably rising. The entire economy seems to be sucking people down the income and occupational scale.
Perhaps it’s worse here in a busted boomtown than somewhere that didn’t have as much of a bubble in the 90s, and perhaps my small, idiosyncratic sample isn’t representative of what’s going on outside my narrow demographic. Nevertheless, what I’m seeing is scary, and it’s scarier because it seems to be happening completely under the radar of the government, the media and other people whose job it is to know what’s going on. Political animal that I am, I’m hoping that the great silent majority will say in the voting booth on Tuesday what they haven’t been saying to pollsters and analysts. But whatever way the election goes, things look like they are going to get much much worse before they get better.
12:53:52 PM 
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