Decided to take a look at labor force data to see where Philly stacks up nationally. Apologies ahead of time, it's a bit of a mess, but I think how the MSAs stack up on the side can be a helpful visual. The labor market seems to be pretty strong nationwide with low unemployment rates, but a lot of that seems to come from changes to the labor force since the pandemic. So for example, some places have a lower unemployment rate but the labor force has shrunk significantly. The latest data is for November '22 so I used November '19 as a base to represent a "normal" pre-COVID economy and to account for seasonal factors (at least for the latest data). Anyway, we see that Philly is pretty middle of the road looking across these somewhat randomly selected MSAs, and just barely below it's pre-COVID labor force size (99.5% of Nov. 2019). It does however do the best in the northeast, outperforming DC, Baltimore, NYC, Boston, Pittsburgh, Hartford, Buffalo, and Providence. So that's good! It seems there's a trend of larger, more expensive markets not doing so well in these metrics. NYC, DC, LA, SF, & Boston all perform poorly here. So this tells me that Philly has closed the gap somewhat on those places in the last three years. In any case, I really like where we're sitting, our labor market is looking pretty resilient. These days we're closer to likes of Seattle, Miami, San Diego, and Las Vegas than the likes of NYC, DC, Boston, Baltimore and Pittsburgh, which is a nice change of pace.
Looking at just the last year we see Philly does above average (for this dataset) in terms of % and absolute growth too. You can see that some other northeast cities like DC, Boston, Baltimore, and Providence actually had a shrinking labor force in the last year - not exactly where you want to be if you're still behind where you were three years ago. But Philly charges ahead with a growing labor force. Again I think this bodes well for us going forward. While our unemployment rate is nominally higher than some other places, it's actually partially being driven by real growth in the labor force. That gives us an additional lever for growth to pull that Boston and DC can't right now. I think we've got a good combo of a solid percentage and absolute growth going for us right now and it's a nice spot to be in. The labor force composition isn't what it was three years ago, so even though we're at about the same nominal total, I don't necessarily think that means we're in a worse spot.
Also, on
unemployment, "In November, 33 metropolitan divisions had over-the-year unemployment rate decreases, 3 had increases, and 2 had no change.
The largest rate decline occurred in Philadelphia, PA (-2.0 percentage points). The largest over-the-year jobless rate increase occurred in Gary, IN (+0.8 percentage point)."