Pike County copes with high unemployment

BY ERIKA NORTON
MILFORD — Even though the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, the national unemployment rate is only now beginning to return to pre-recession levels.
For Pike County, the recovery has been even slower. The county reported an unemployment rate of 6.8 percent in July — 1.9 percent above the national average.
Michael Sullivan, president of the Pike County Economic Development Authority in Milford, said the culprit is the loss of the county’s second-largest industry: home building.
“My office is located on East Harford Street, and on East Hartford Street, there used to be 10 home builders and now there's only one,” Sullivan said. “So in the Great Recession, we lost our home-building industry and that has not recovered since.”
From about 1995 to 2005, while the nation was growing at a rate of 9 percent, Pike was one of the fastest-growing counties in the Northeast, with a rate of 28 percent, Sullivan said. People were selling their homes for $300,000 in places like Orange County, N.Y., and buying comparable houses in Pike County for $200,000. Besides putting $100,000 in the bank, these new residents also enjoyed lower state taxes.
When the recession hit, people stopped moving to Pike and the home builders left, Sullivan said. It's hard to recover from the loss of such an important industry, he said.

Not enough businesses

Another challenge is the lack of business in the county. According to the County Business Patterns, which uses U.S. Census information, only about 886 businesses exist in Pike County. But in Orange County, right across the Delaware River, there are about 9,300 businesses.
Other surrounding counties, like Lackawanna, Monroe, and Ulster, also have significantly more businesses than Pike. This means many members of Pike’s workforce — about 26,500 people, according to Sullivan — commute elsewhere to work.
“After the Great Recession, many people stopped looking (for work), and they were not counted as part of the workforce,” Sullivan said. “What you have now is people who are coming back into the workforce, and they would like jobs. So as they enter back, the unemployment rate goes up if the number of jobs remains the same.”
When people move to Pike County and join the workforce here, the unemployment rate often goes up — unless new jobs are created at the same time.

How to fix this

The Pike County Economic Development Agency (EDA) has tried a few different strategies to attract employers to the area, Sullivan said.
Almost five years ago, the county lost one of its major employers, the audio electronics company Altec Lansing. The 200,000-square-foot Altec building was left vacant for a long time. But the EDA recruited a company from Sussex, N.J., the packaging company Econo-Pak, which purchased the building, said Sullivan.
Econo-Pak currently has 600 employees on three shifts, a development that greatly pleases the EDA.
The EDA has also recruited manufacturing companies, such as the firearms manufacturer Kahr Arms and a company that plans to grow hydroponic vegetables.
Another EDA initiative is getting the home-building industry back by recruiting people to move to Pike.
“We found a county that has a very high selling price for homes," Sullivan said. "And we have just started a new marketing campaign to talk to people in that county about the virtues of working and living in Pike."
At this location, Sullivan said, houses sell for about $450,000. These homeowners can save more than $150,000 if they move to Pike County. The EDA has the ability to identify households in this area that might be interested in moving to Pike.
“I would like to see some of those custom-built homes people back in business,” Sullivan said.
When you lose a whole industry, the unemployment rate goes up, he noted.
"Now we have made up for it in terms of total jobs, but the fact is that there are more people looking for work now than there were at the end of 2015, and that’s what’s causing our unemployment to be higher," he said. "So we are doing several things at once.”