Evacuee aid extended to '09, but they must chip in
4/27/2007
Apr. 27--Thousands of families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita will receive housing assistance for 18 additional months but must begin contributing to their rent next year, federal officials said Thursday.

Apr. 27--Thousands of families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita will receive housing assistance for 18 additional months but must begin contributing to their rent next year, federal officials said Thursday.

Evacuees, their advocates and local officials welcomed the news as a realistic acknowledgment that many families still need help but must prepare to assume more responsibility for their own lives.

"I want the city of Houston to know that the majority of the people of New Orleans are trying as hard as they can," said evacuee Samuel Pollen, 63, who is taking classes for certification to work as a teacher. "They gave up on us too soon because of the bad ones."

Housing assistance for more than 120,000 displaced families, which was scheduled to end Aug. 31, will continue through March 1, 2009. Starting March 1, 2008, recipients will be required to make monthly payments starting at $50 and increasing to $600 by the time the assistance ends.

On Sept. 1, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will take over the program from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has helped families with rent, utility payments, mobile homes and travel trailers since the two hurricanes struck the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Surprise reprieve

The announcement came as a surprise to local officials, who warned evacuees at a resource fair this week that they didn't expect any further extensions.

Mayor Bill White, members of the Houston congressional delegation and leaders of groups that work with evacuees said the additional help is appropriate and welcome.

"This is really what we've needed all along," said Ruquyya Gibson, a caseworker helping evacuees. Previous FEMA extensions, Gibson said, have not been long enough to give displaced families a reprieve from the anxiety posed by the looming threat of eviction.

"They've been worried about their utilities being cut off and their children being in the dark," leaving little time or energy to find jobs or get training for better ones, Gibson said.

HUD and FEMA officials said elderly and disabled people would be exempt from the monthly payments "to the extent allowable by law."

Evacuee Charles Adams, 49, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in the Heights, greeted the news with relief.

"It gives me hope," Adams, an artist, said. "It lets me know that someone still cares. A lot of people talk trash about FEMA, but I've been able to stay in my apartment."

Many Houstonians clearly believe the evacuees have had enough help, an attitude fueled in part by reports that a few have committed violent crimes here. More than 20 comments were posted by Thursday afternoon to a story on the Houston Chronicle's Web site about the extension, and all said it is time for the hurricane victims to take care of themselves.

But John Henneberger, co-director of the Austin-based Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service, said many evacuees who require federal assistance have limited educations and job skills and simply can't afford decent housing available in the private market, even if they are working.

Prior to Katrina, "the inner-city housing and employment situation in New Orleans was deplorable," Henneberger said. "We shouldn't simply re-establish that pattern of poverty and destitution in a new place. That's not fair to Houston."

Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, welcomed the announcement.

"This is a good approach," Brady said. "A lot of these families don't have any hope of going home any time soon so this gives them more certainty about their housing for the next two years and gives New Orleans a chance to make some housing decisions."

Brady said the plan steers a midcourse between Democrats who wanted essentially permanent housing aid for the evacuees and Republicans who had concerns about moving them to HUD's Section 8 program and potentially endless assistance.

Vouchers at issue

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson said Section 8 vouchers, which require recipients to pay 30 percent of their income for rent and utilities, would not be the vehicle for continued housing assistance. The mechanism for providing the rental payments is still being developed, a HUD spokesman said.

Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, is pushing legislation that would provide Section 8 vouchers to qualified evacuees after their other assistance ends. Henneberger said such vouchers are the best way to provide long-term help because they require payments indexed to income, rather than a flat amount.

But Pollen, the Houston evacuee, said he has no problem with the required payments.

"I don't think anyone will complain about that," Pollen said. "That (extension) is better than I hoped for."

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Florida tech jobs booming
4/24/2007
Apr. 24--Florida's high-tech workforce is growing at the second-fastest pace in the nation, a new study said today.

Apr. 24--Florida's high-tech workforce is growing at the second-fastest pace in the nation, a new study said today.

And the state ranks fourth -- behind California, Texas and New York -- in the number of high-tech jobs overall.

"We're seeing growth in all the population centers, whether it's South Florida or the I-4 corridor," said Matt Doster, executive director of ITFlorida, a technology trade group in Tallahassee. "I have not heard of a beehive of growth in any particular place. It's spread out all over." The Cyberstates report to be released today by the American Electronics Association, the national trade association for the technology industry, shows Florida's high-tech job growth stormed ahead by 10,900 jobs in 2005, the latest year available.

Only California added more high-tech jobs, with 14,400.

Florida had close to 276,400 high-tech jobs such as software engineers, Web developers and information-technology administrators in 2005. It doesn't include biotechnology jobs.

The state's workforce grew by only 4 percent from the previous year, the report said.

That's not runaway growth, but it's better than shrinking, which is exactly what Florida's nearest neighbor and biggest rival, Georgia, did.

Its high-tech workforce shrank by 900 jobs from 2004 to 2005, the study showed.

With that many jobs, it's not surprising that Florida's high-tech payroll reached $16.9 billion, putting it at sixth among states.

But Florida's high-tech landscape is made up of 21,000 companies. A handful, such as technology giant IBM in Boca Raton and billion-dollar software maker Citrix Systems in Fort Lauderdale, are huge concerns with more than 1,200 and 3,000 employees, respectively.

Most Florida firms are tiny by comparison.

"The average tech company has 13 employees. The average in California is 23. We're much smaller," said Maryann Fiala, the electronics association's executive director in Florida.

When the number of high-tech workers is weighed against the state's overall workforce, only 41 of every 1,000 workers are in the high-tech industry.

By comparison, Southeastern rival Virginia has 89 high-tech employees for every 1,000 workers. In the category of high-tech job strength against other industries, Florida's ranking plummets to 30th; Virginia's is first.

"That says our concentration of high-tech jobs is low," Fiala said. "What it means is that we still don't have a diverse workforce. It's still heavily weighted to tourism and agriculture." Job concentration isn't the only category where the Sunshine State dips to the lower half of the class among states.

In the electronics association's high-tech wage scorecard, comparing high-tech wages versus average private-sector wages, Florida is ranked 31st overall with high-tech pay at $61,100 a year, a nearly 70 percent premium over $36,100 for the typical job. Even so, in North Carolina, known for its Research Triangle Park, high-tech pay is at a 95 percent premium, at $69,700.

"IBM and Citrix are probably above the average. But it's a very broad reach as to what's included as high-tech wages," said Michael Corbit, executive director of ICoast, a group that promotes technology development in South Florida. "Manufacturing and distribution are part of it, and those are lower-paying." Still, the climate for high-tech jobs in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast is healthy.

The four fastest-growing occupations in the area are high-tech jobs.

The top two are systems software engineers and software programmers. Each is expected to grow by more than 7 percent this year.

They carry wages of $39.63 an hour and $32.76 an hour, respectively, according to the Workforce Alliance, a jobs agency in Palm Beach County.

"We've got a lot of technical jobs; they're growing. Before we were just seeing systems IT maintenance and management jobs," said Steve Craig, the alliance's vice president. "Those are lower-level.

"Now we're seeing more mid-level tech jobs and more companies are realizing they're going to have to pay more to get the caliber of people they want."

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America's productivity growth has slowed. Does that matter?

THE good news about America's economy is that jobs are plentiful despite slower growth and the housing blues. Some 180,000 new jobs were created in March and the unemployment rate fell to 4.4%, three-tenths of a percentage point lower than a year ago. With employment and wage growth strong, consumers are unlikely to stop spending and throw the economy into recession.

That is not all cause for celebration, however. The drop in the jobless rate at the same time as the economy is slowing implies that the growth in productivity--the amount workers produce in an hour--is waning. If this proves to be a permanent shift, slower productivity growth bodes ill for inflation and living standards.

Few associate America with limping productivity. Central to its success over the past decade has been its "productivity miracle", the sudden acceleration in workers' efficiency in 1995. After advancing at a measly 1.5% per year for more than two decades, productivity growth soared to an average of 2.5% a year in the late 1990s and over 3% a year between 2002 and 2004.

This spurt set America apart from other rich countries. But between mid-2004 and the end of 2006, the growth in business output per hour outside agriculture, the most common gauge of worker efficiency, slowed to an annual rate of just 1.5%, on average. Judging by the recent jobs figures, its growth in the first few months of 2007 may be lower still.

Deciding how worrying this is depends on what lies behind the sluggishness. Productivity growth has two components: a long-term trend (set by the quality of the workforce, the pace of capital investment and the speed of innovation) and more volatile short-term fluctuations driven by the business cycle. Early in an expansion, for instance, productivity takes off temporarily as firms squeeze their existing staff harder before hiring new workers. As an economy slows, it tails off, because firms are loth to sack workers immediately.

This time, temporary factors are almost certainly playing the biggest role. Not only has the business cycle reached the point at which productivity growth usually slows, it also has several characteristics that may have exacerbated temporary productivity swings. One is the housing bust. Much of the recent weakness in output growth is thanks to the fall in building activity. Yet employment in construction and other housing-related industries has barely budged. It is hard to isolate workers' productivity in residential housing, but Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs estimates that it was 13% lower at the end of 2006 than a year earlier, whereas in the rest of the economy (outside farming) productivity rose by a healthy 2.8%. His analysis spells trouble for the economy's short-term health: once builders stop hoarding workers, the unemployment rate will rise. But there would be scant need to worry about a broad slip in productivity.

Unusually savage company cost-cutting early in this cycle is another reason why recent productivity swings have been so extreme. Robert Gordon of Northwestern University has long argued that much of the improvement in productivity after 2001 was a one-off event as firms tightened their belts after the bursting of the stockmarket bubble. In a new paper* Stephen Oliner, Daniel Sichel and Kevin Stiroh, all of the Federal Reserve, provide more evidence of this. They show that industries which saw the sharpest drop in profits between the late 1990s and 2001 also saw the largest gains in worker productivity after 2001, probably because they were the most reluctant to hire workers. Today's productivity dip may be the mirror image of that, as job growth catches up with output.

An odd business cycle makes it hard to gauge what has happened to America's underlying rate of productivity growth. So too do shifts in the sources of productivity growth. In the late 1990s workers' efficiency rose thanks both to rapid investment, particularly in information technology (IT), and to innovation, again mainly in IT. Hence the conventional view that America's productivity miracle was based on its ability to harness the power of computers.

Time to upgrade the PC

After 2001, however, productivity gains had less to do with investment or information technology directly. Messrs Oliner, Sichel and Stiroh show that productivity growth was spread more broadly across industries and was partly the result of the reallocation of resources between firms.

Is this good or bad news? Optimists reckon the dispersion makes sense. Just as the efficiency-enhancing effect of steam power or electricity took years to seep through the broader economy, so the IT revolution is now changing business processes, and boosting productivity, throughout the economy. But worrywarts fret that the ingredients of the 1990s productivity boom are missing. Capital spending has been sluggish and is now falling. By some measures the pace of innovation in IT has slowed. John Fernald of the San Francisco Fed points out that the rate at which computer and software prices are falling relative to other overall prices--a crude gauge of IT innovation--has slowed from 8.75% a year in the late 1990s to 6%.

For the moment, the consensus among academic experts seems to be that America's trend rate of productivity growth is below the blistering pace of 2002-04, perhaps slightly lower than in the late 1990s, but well above the 1.5% average of the previous two decades. Messrs Oliner, Sichel and Stiroh, for instance, reckon trend productivity growth is around 2.25%. But no one is very sure. And if unemployment continues to fall while the economy remains weak, the more nervous the productivity gurus will become.

SOURCE: The Economist