I posted some graphs on employment for Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati over at the Recession thread. 

 

Here is maybe another way to take an economic pulse.  Housing permits for single and multi-family units by metro area.  The source is the Texas A&M Real Estate Center  The aggies have annual permit records going back to 1980, so a good 28 years of data to trace things.

 

So you can get a long term look at one measure of a local economy.

 

Graphing out the 3-Cs and laying in the three recessions of the era (too early for the current one)…the “Double Dip Recession” of the early 1980s, the “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” recession of 1990 that got Clinton elected, and the 9-11 recession, or dot-com bust, of 2001.  “Black Monday” stock market bust of 1987 is also shown (maybe it shouldn’t have been).

 

Single Family Permits 

 

The later 1980s seem to be pretty good for housing in all three metros, but maybe so more for Cincinnati.  The late Robert Bartley of the WSJ editorial page called this era the Seven Fat Years (after the Bible passage), and they seemed to be for awhile in urban Ohio, especially Cincy, spiking around the time of the 1987 stock market crash.

 

 

 

 

Cincinnati was considered a top sprawl place in the US by the Sierra Club during the sprawl debate of the late 1990s, and one can see this was a good era for single family permits (with a few hiccups)..  Alan Greenspan referred to the 1990s boom as “Irrational Exuberance”, and you can really see this with Columbus. It seems that the 1990s single family growth trend for the 3-Cs blew right by the 9-11 recession before crashing…really crashing…later in the decade. 

 

I think what’s interesting is how deep that crash was.  Permitting activity has crashed to the lows of the double dip recession of the early 2000s by 2008.  This is really worth remarking on as it wiped out any upward trends…or even low slope plateaus (like for Cleveland) for the past 20-30 years. 

 

Multi-Family Permits

 

Permit activity was considerably more spiky, especially for Columbus, with two big spikes corresponding to peak years of the 1980s & 1990s expansions. 

 

 

I guess an interesting line here is for Cleveland, basically a slow decline and dwindling of permit activity after the 1980s expansion.  None of these metros had strong numbers for multi-family permits in the 2000s.

 

Anyway, for what its worth.  I guess you all can draw additional conclusions for these graphs.  I am not that familiar with Columbus and have nearly no familiarity with Cleveland, so maybe others have more knowledge of what might be behind the numbers.

 

 

 

Columbus seems to push multi-family developments as they have leapt outward. If you drive around you can usually identify the Columbus boundaries by apartment complexes even where the adjacent neighborhood is single family or even commercial.

Obviously this is only one indicator, but these graphs certainly are interesting.  Thanks for mapping this data out for us.

Very interesting.  Thanks for posting this.

The Cincinnati numbers are not including Hamilton, Oh.

^

Yes they are.  I added the Hamilton/Middletown MSA (Butler County) to the Cincinnati numbers

could you do this just for each 3C city too?

The numbers are just for the metro areas.  I can't disaggregate them to show the core city.

 

 

The numbers are just for the metro areas.  I can't disaggregate them to show the core city.

 

 

 

humm.  that would the real tell tell sigh.