It's Got To Get Better--Right?

The other night I took a walk and encountered a neighbor of mine walking his dog. We’re not great friends, but we always greet cordially. I hadn’t seen him for months. In fact the last time we really talked was in 2006 when I wanted some work done on the house.
He’s a contractor who builds houses and does occasional remodeling. I just wanted to explore putting a small addition on my house. When I came to him to ask if he would consider the job, he apologized and explained that he was so busy building he didn’t even have time to look at what I needed.
A year or so later he was still busy. Last summer someone told me that he was staying busy by doing mostly remodeling. The other day he seemed very willing to stop and chat. I asked how things were going, and he quickly jumped into a long, rather sad explanation.
This year he’s down to doing remodeling jobs for friends and relatives. The problem here, of course, is that they expect a bargain (translation: he gets to pay for materials used and skip eating). And then, when the work is done, they either cannot pay or don’t feel they need to any time soon.
“It must be like loaning money to relatives,” I suggested. He agreed heartily. As we turned to walk on he suddenly said, with a pathos I’d never before heard in his voice or associated with his family in all the years I’ve known them:
“It’s got to get better—don’t you think?”
I wanted to comfort him and say, “Yes”. I suppose at some time in the future it will get better. All wars end; all depressions do. (There was a war between France and England that lasted a century in the 1300s. A depression in Germany in the 1400s lasted a hundred years or so. But they ended.)
Bernanke suggests this downturn might be over by the end of this year. Others say not until the next year or the next. In any case it’s liable to be a long, chilly summer for a lot of people. I even saw in the news that Disney is thinking of shuttering its Hong Kong Disneyland, and it’s laying off lots of people in Orlando.
Twenty-five years ago we had a recession around here that put a lot of small contractors into another line of work. On my street—which at that time had been a fast and high growth area—things got silent and I didn’t hear another hammer for four years or so. I can point out the last house built in 1982 and the first house to go up in 1986.
Contractors went to work in places like the local utilities, and there was a huge paper mill down along the waterfront. It stunk (they would give you a token for a free car wash if you lived in the immediate neighborhood), but it hired.
For decades it was one the bastions of the area economy. High wages, lots of hours. Any trees you wanted to chop down, they would come, pick up and turn into pulp. Two weeks ago the paper mill announced it was shutting down for a “six month trial”.
If business improves, we are promised, they will “consider” reopening next fall. No one around here is holding his or her breath waiting for that to happen. So my friend doesn’t even have the paper mill to fall back on—and the utilities have been paring staff for decades.
Another huge brick and mortar industrial corpse dotting our landscape. When the mill closed it was already down to a tiny workforce of 190 people. Just another one of many, many manufacturing plants to wind down over the last half century.
People keep telling high school students around here, “You have to go on and get some kind of college degree so you are qualified to do something beside factory work”—or construction.
What? I keep asking myself. My sons haven’t really nailed down any firm plans for the future—but they both know one thing for sure: it won’t be anything around here. That’s a shame, actually. It can be a beautiful area if you like lakes, boating, fishing, hunting, just sitting on your rear watching nature. Traffic isn’t too bad, public parks are plentiful.
But when the hammers stop and the mills and factories shut, what do you do? A recession like this just makes bad things happen faster. And, please, dear reader, do not delude yourself into thinking ANYBODY is going to put a large “high tech” facility anywhere near here. Or in most of the industrial mid-west. Weather, transportation, unions—all are major negatives.
Even the medical field doesn’t look so rosy. They’re laying off. Talk to your doctor about what happens to his income when patients have no more insurance. My physician told me that his income has gone down 40% in just the past few years. Schools and colleges are outsourcing everything they can; administrators visibly shudder when they consider the next few budgets.
I mouthed a pleasant nothing to my neighbor and we walked our separate ways.