FOR MANY, THE RUIN IS STILL REAL
Pain of lost homes, livelihoods lingers long after the recovery
Sue Cesare remembers how brutal the Great Recession was — how it took nearly everything she had.
She was an independent facilitator and trainer in the automotive industry making an average of $80,000 a year but working about six months. That left her time to travel, time to paint.
In August 2007, it all came to a jarring halt.
Cesare, 64, of Fort Myers, Fla., is among the millions nationwide who lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. The Great Recession threw about 11 million people out of work and gobbled up $13 trillion in wealth as the stock market crashed and home prices fell into the basement. Whole neighborhoods changed as once-manicured lawns and well-maintained homes turned into derelicts with greenish-black pools, torn screens and hip-high weeds.
“The work just dried up, just like that,” she said. “And I was calling, and everyone was just saying, ‘Sorry, you know the first thing that gets cut when budgets are tight is training.’ I didn’t know what to do.”
She worked a hodgepodge of jobs to try to make up for the income she lost. It wasn’t enough. She sold possessions, fought for and lost her home on Pine Island in southwest Florida and filed for bankruptcy.
For a while, Lee County, which includes Fort Myers and Pine Island, became the foreclosure capital of the nation. The county led other metro areas in the so-called sand states of Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona.
“The world had convinced itself that you could just borrow money in perpetude,” said North Fort Myers real estate expert Jeff Tumbarello. “It was a mania. … It was a lot of hot air and just collapsed on itself.”
In three years, the unemployment rate in Lee County zoomed from 3.3% to 13.1% — nearly a 300% increase. People who held down stable jobs for years found themselves in breadlines.
The Great Recession officially started in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. In reality, the pain lasted far longer and still lingers.
Ten years after the start of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, many are still clawing their way back. Some people held on to homes that are still underwater, meaning they owe more on their homes than the homes are worth. Some are working but at jobs that pay less. College graduates who tried to join the workforce during the downturn have had their earnings and career prospects stunted. Older workers gave up and retired early.
Some of those effects are masked by the long recovery, which has gained speed in the past few years: The stock market is soaring, consumer confidence is up, jobless rates are low, and the economy is growing.
A federal report in 2015 noted that after eight years of recovery, “it is easy to forget how close the U.S. economy came to an outright depression.”
When economic disaster struck, Cesare didn’t go down without a fight. She worked four jobs. She worked with lenders to get a remodified home loan and lower payments. She hired a lawyer to fight the foreclosure.
Early in the downturn, she got a job as an on-call postal worker on Pine Island. It wasn’t many hours at first, but it had the potential to grow into a fulltime job. She worked as a landscaper, a house cleaner and a real estate agent.
Then she finally lost her home. She bounced around apartments and a trailer, trying to find a decent and affordable place to live.
She landed a full-time job at the post office with benefits in May 2014. She retired a year later. She knows people may question that decision. Her back had been killing her for years. She had surgery in 2017.
“I physically couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “And I turned 62.”
She’s on Social Security and, with the help of family, owns a small condo in Fort Myers. “In retirement, people need a large nest egg or a decent guaranteed monthly income,” she said. “I have neither.”
Then there’s the mental strain. “I think I’ve turned a corner, but I’d say it was a good 10 years of feeling beat up. I was depressed. ... But you can either keep going down that road and keep being unhappy, or you can choose to say, ‘ Well, this is what happened, and I’ve got to accept it and move on.’ ”