This Place Was Hopping In The Late 90's And Early 2000's When Everybody Was Buying SUVs With Credit They Didn't Deserve And Gas Prices Hovering Around $1.50.
It Never Felt Right To Me - Industrial Jobs Were FLEEING Syracuse At This Time, Not Arriving And A Lot Of The People I Knew Who Bought SUVs Really Couldn't Afford Them.
Much Like How I Felt In 2003 When I Worked At A Home Builder Supply Store.
Things Were BOOMING With Pallets Of Nails And Thousands Of Dollars Worth Of Power Tools Flying Out The Door And To The Newly Built Tract Housing Subdivisions Sprouting Up All Over The Area.
This Would Be All Well And Good Were I Living In NYC Or Another Growing Area, But This Was Rochester, A Metro Area With A Decades Long Metro Population Of 1,000,000 And A City At It's Center Whose Population Was About 2/3 It's 1950's Peak Of 300,000.
It Didn't Seem Real To Me That We Were Selling Nails For Homes That No One Was Moving To Rochester To Live In.
I Concluded That This Housing "Boom" Was A Fraud Somehow Supported By A Dearth Of Corporate/Business Credit And That Once The Money Stopped Flowing, The "Demand" For These Projects Would Follow.
My Bosses And My Customers Looked At Me Cross Eyed And Went About Their Dance Of Denial.
I Quit That Job In August Of 2007 - A Few Days Before Countrywide Went Down And The "Correction" Began.
Now, At New Process We See How Quickly Reality Does Its Work - The Jobs At This Plant Were Artificially Created By Lax Lending Standards And Unnaturally Low Gas Prices.
It's Peak Of 4,000 Workers Occurred Just Seven Years Ago But Is Now - On The Other Side Of The 2007-?? "Correction" - Down To A "Final" Tally Of 300 And Will Soon Close Down Entirely.
No comments:
Post a Comment