• 16% unemployment
• 1.8% into bankruptcy proceedings in the past 12 months
• 4.8% of real estate affected by foreclosures

Residents of Kern County in the heart of California could not have been happy when they woke up the other morning, and tuned into their favorite news station to learn that they were now living in the 15th weakest economy anywhere in the States. That’s not good news for a region where the first oil well was hand-drilled back in the 1890s and Kern-sians seemed set to follow the rest of the continent in into a bright new future.

Associate Press publishes monthly statistics on the nation’s financial strain in terms of unemployment, foreclosures, and bankruptcy filings. For May 2010 Kern County, California was awarded a stress index of 21.14. But what does that mean in real terms?

• The rate of unemployment in Kern County stands at almost 16% according to the Californian Employment Development Department
• Analysis of tax returns and court filings indicates that proximately 1.8% of Kern-sians filed for bankruptcy in the past 12 months
• Nearly 4.8% of the County’s residential and commercial real estate is currently somewhere in the foreclosure cycle according to reliable reports

This is not the first time that Kern County has featured high in American rankings for the wrong reasons. Richard Chapman (President of Kern County Economic Development Corporation) explains:

Kern will never compete easily in an index that places high emphasis on unemployment. Some places in Kearns have had thirty percent unemployment for the last fifty years.

But that does not mean that the news in Kern County, California is all bad – according to Richard Chapman the region has had the second highest rate of private sector job growth over the past ten years within the cluster of America’s largest 100 metropolitan areas.

But we’re still battling with unemployment. Since boom turned to bust in 2007 we’ve continuously had among the worst foreclosure rates in the country, Chapman concluded.

I learned later than day that the region had absorbed two separate foreclosure surges – the first when the housing boom turned to housing bust, and the second when unemployment followed suit. The critical factor that joined up the two for Kearns was that real estate construction is a leading regional employer – when construction came to an abrupt halt, contractors drifted away leaving unemployment behind them.

Apparent disinterest on the part of local banks to allow short sales and facilitate loan modifications is proving to be a major hurdle for economic recovery too. Board Member of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys John Colwell thinks that “they need to change the bankruptcy law to allow for forced modification of these loans. HAMP is not addressing the massive volume of the problem that exists …”

Information from www.foreclosuredatabank.com.

Subscribe via RSS or Email:

Follow us:

Written by Alex Rolim.