Quote:
Originally Posted by uaarkson
How is Lansing doing these days, economically?
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I had started a thread tracking unemployment by county and metro, but I'm not sure how far down it's sunk. See if you can find it before I do. It has some useful information in it.
It really depends on the factors used. On one hand, the employment base has fallen like every Michigan city, and unemployment has increased just like everywhere else. Despite this, Metro Lansing's GDP growth (2005-2008) was only second to Battle Creek, and tied with Kalamazoo.
I guess you could say that we've been able to hang onto what we had better than most, but state government and GM employment are down significantly from the beginning of the decades, and that's made the area significantly poorer than it once was. But, to go back to the good, the areas been able to keep crime under control despite this economic and socially upheaval. It's really a mixed bag, but definitely not the death spiral some other communities in the state have felt over the last few decades. The central city didn't really begin to fall off in population until the 1990's, when most began to lose their's percipitously in the 50's or 60's.