Myrtle Beach has made another unpleasant top twenty five list. 24/7 Wall Street identified the top 28 cities in America that still have not recovered from the Great Recession. Myrtle Beach comes in at number 25. This despite over a half billion in total tax monies spent by the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce promoting the area over that same time period. The city also gave the Myrtle Beach Downtown Redevelopment Corporation over $19 million during that same decade.
Do tax payer funded promotions and government fee funded redevelopment programs really work?
As USA Today reports,
From the end of 2007 through mid-2009, the United States went through one of the worst recessions in its history. During the recession and in the months that followed, the U.S. labor market shed millions of jobs, and the unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent.
The nation is nearing the 10-year anniversary of the official end of the recession and the beginning of the recovery. Today, after 95 months of uninterrupted job growth and unemployment falling below even pre-recession levels, it appears that the nation has more than fully recovered from the economic crisis.
However, in many major U.S. cities, the recovery has either fully stalled or has not been strong enough to offset the jobs lost during the recession.
In several dozen U.S. cities, job levels remain well below the levels before to the recession, even as total U.S. employment has increased by 5 percent since 2007. In these cities, unemployment remains high — even after thousands have given up looking for work and no longer count among the officially unemployed.
The report can be read here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2018/10/12/cities-never-recovered-great-recession/38094325/
