RECOVERY SLOW FOR MASS. 3RD DISTRICT
Minorities still lagging in employment, earnings
Close to a decade after the peak of a worldwide economic recession, local real estate agent Michelle Rivera still sees the effects lingering.
Rivera’s business is doing well, but she has doubts about the optimism hinted by the steadily declining unemployment rate. Several of her clients are selling homes in distress, and a few are now working two jobs.
A group of 10 renters she knows
will soon be displaced because they cannot find a suitable price. Homes that could be acquired two years ago for $200,000, she said, could not be purchased now for $225,000.
“Unemployment rates appear to be improving. However, when it comes to local towns like Lawrence and Lowell where we are dominated by minorities … I don’t see a direct impact on them yet,” Rivera said. “There’s a huge gap, and it will continue to get worse if people don’t start speaking up.”
Although raw job numbers themselves have trended positive for about eight years in all 37 of the 3rd Congressional District’s cities and towns, progress has been uneven. Roughly half of the district’s communities, including many that were already affluent, have seen substantial income growth.
In more urban, diverse areas, middle- and working-class families, particularly nonwhite ones, have felt a lag, driven by underemployment, slow wage growth and burdensome housing costs.
“Working-class and poorer areas have been kind of left behind in the recovery,” said Tom Whalen, a social sciences professor at Boston University. “Now you’re seeing the lower middle class that’s eroding, but the upper class is doing quite well.”
Local unemployment rates peaked in 2009 and 2010. The statewide rate topped out about 9 percent, while about half of the 3rd District communities exceeded 10 percent. Since then, though, unemployment rates have fallen below 5 percent in almost every town and city in the area. Lawrence had the region’s highest non-seasonally adjusted rate in March at 7.3 percent, although that, too, has fallen from the 15.6 percent it reached in March 2011.
Earnings data reveal a different trend. Between 2010 and 2016, the median household income in Massachusetts grew $6,445. More than half of the communities between Haverhill and Fitchburg saw increases less than that amount, and in five of them — Harvard, Groton, Shirley, Lowell and Gardner — median household income actually decreased in recent years.
Many of the local communities that have seen the least income growth in recent years are urban areas or have significant minority populations. Some of the district’s most affluent areas, however, have continued to boom.
Ayer, Andover, Bolton, Acton and Stow saw median household incomes increase more than $20,000, and of those, all except Ayer already featured median incomes greater than $100,000 before the recent growth.
“The wealth is growing on one end, but the other end, moderate to low-income families, it’s challenging,” said University of Massachusetts Lowell economist and research professor Dave Turcotte. “The average wage-earner income really hasn’t been increasing for many years.”
Although Massachusetts has the highest average weekly wage of any state in the country, it also has the largest gap in the country — close to $40,000 — between median white household income and median Latino household income, according to census data compiled earlier this year by 24/7 Wall Street.