The past six years have brought us economic recession and a recovery that has been sluggish at best. Unemployment, by some accounts the defining indicator of the public conscience during this time period, while generally better than the national average, has remained persistently high in Virginia by historic standards. Unemployment figures reached a peak of 7.4 percent in December 2009, slowly dropping to 4.9 pecent in April 2014, then bounced back up to 5.5 percent by August 2014 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014). The highest levels of unemployment tend to be in rural areas as well as inner-city pockets.By other accounts, housing starts might be the key economic indicator. It was, after all, the housing sector that triggered the recession in 2008. Building permits for new housing units in the United States dropped from a high of over two million in 2005 to a low of 550,000 in 2009, and rebounded only partially to 920,000 in 2013.
展开▼
