Take a Hard Look: April Jobs Report Is Not Going To Be Pretty

I feel sorry for the month of April. Stuck inside because of this bastard of a virus, most of us lost track of time and the poor month couldn’t seem to progress fast enough. I hope you have had, at least, some meaningful time with your family, I hope you are not killing each other, and I hope you were able to remain productive at home whether working or cleaning.

And I hope your finances are — okay. We share the angst. When you look at your investment portfolio, remember what the late Henry S. Miller once told Allie Beth Allman: “Everything that goes down comes up.”

(And a lot of investors are eying real estate.)

Job Statistics For DFW Show Pre-COVID-19 Gains

The annual job numbers released from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics are like from another world, telling the story of strong employment gains we in North Texas enjoyed for a whale of a long time before the COVID-19 pandemic and oil price collapse. That’s two double whammies.

Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston led the nation with job gains — yes we did.

Austin saw annual employment gains of 27,200 and San Antonio was ahead by 18,100 jobs in March compared to a year ago: not too shabby at all.

But get the Xanax ready: April and May’s numbers are going to be the worst on record since 2008 … and maybe since the Great Depression.

But don’t despair too much. I’m hearing many businesses in the northeast, the rust belt, and yes, California, are casting eyes on metro areas where there is less employee reliance on public transit — yeah — and more of a car culture. Kind of the opposite of what we have been building towards in Dallas, right?

Pandemics and disasters always force a change, and I’m getting a glimmer that dense urban centers are going to unload out to the less urbanized states. After all, so many of us are working at home, even the head of Barclays in the UK says big offices may be a thing of the past. Here’s what Joel Kotkin said just as April was dawning:

The impact of the coronavirus pandemic may be too early to measure, but it’s clear that the great preponderance of cases, and deaths, are concentrated—at least as of now—in dense urban centers, most particularly Wuhan, Milan, Seattle, Madrid, and New York City. This crisis is the right moment for the world to reconsider the conventional wisdom that denser cities are better cities.

Sadly, many of the attractions that make places like New York so unique and appealing also make them more dangerous. Crowds, mass transit, clubs, and huge cultural venues create a perfect terroir for the spread of pathogens. In contrast, the rate of infection has been far lower in less urbanized states like Iowa or Oklahoma, which health professionals say benefit from less crowding and unwanted human contact.