Word: jonesboro
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...know what to talk about,' " says David Arp, who led an empty-nest training session with his wife last month at the annual Smart Marriages conference in Orlando, Fla. Carmen Hough, 55, who this spring completed a 12-week workshop in Jonesboro, Ga., puts it more bluntly: "You only have 18 years with your children. Then it's you and your husband, and if he's not your best friend, it's going to take an adjustment...
Back in December the unemployment rate in five of those cities - from 2.7% in Morgantown to 5.5% in Jonesboro - was not only well below the national average of 7.2%, but also lower than it had been 12 months earlier; in the sixth, Casper, the rate held steady from a year ago. That put them starkly at odds with the other 363 metropolitan areas tracked by the BLS, all of which were seeing unemployment rising, in some cases sharply. Unemployment in Boise, Idaho, for example, jumped from 3.0% to 7.1% during 2008. In Fresno, Calif., it went from...
...more. Each of these cities - Casper and Cheyenne, Wyo., Charleston and Morgantown, W.Va., Bismarck, N.D., and Jonesboro, Ark. - is now suffering the effects of the economic slump. "In the beginning, it was the manufacturing areas, the high-foreclosure areas, the places with the construction jobs and the banking and financial industries," says Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) economist Lisa Williamson. "Now, there's a ripple effect throughout the economy." (See pictures of Americans in their homes...
Meanwhile, in northeastern Arkansas, Jonesboro was getting word of some 1,800 new jobs from companies like wind-turbine-maker Nordex. Outside of Charleston, the Toyota plant was bringing down production but avoiding major layoffs by giving workers other tasks like training workshops. Going into the recession, each of the six cities had at least one built in advantage: either being a state capitol (Bismarck, Charleston and Cheyenne), hosting a big university (like Arkansas State in Jonesboro and West Virginia University in Morgantown) or sitting on top of a valuable natural resource (natural gas in Casper, coal in West Virginia...
...protection against recession, however, couldn't last forever. January marked a dark turning point for each of the cities. Unemployment claims started ticking upward in Jonesboro. In Cheyenne, unemployment hit 5.9%, up from 4.7% the January before, as layoffs in its warehousing and retailing industries started to filter through. Owing partly to an aluminum plant shutdown, unemployment in Charleston rose to 4.9% from 3.9% 12 months before. In Morgantown, the rate went to 3.9%, from 3.2%. Lower energy prices helped drive up the percentage of unemployed people in Casper to 4.2% from 3.4% year-over-year, and will likely have...