As his plane approached Jacksonville International Airport the other day, Mark Vitner noticed something he hadn’t seen in a while in the neighborhoods surrounding the airport.
“I think I saw three or four houses under construction,” he said.
On previous visits, he noticed utility work with no signs of home construction, so he took that small amount of building activity as a hopeful sign.
“The housing market is coming back in Jacksonville,” Vitner said Wednesday at an Economic Roundtable of Jacksonville luncheon at Jacksonville University.
Vitner is a managing director and senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities in Charlotte, N.C., but he knows the Jacksonville market well. Before joining Wells Fargo predecessor First Union in 1993, he spent nine years as an economist at Barnett Banks Inc. in Jacksonville.
He said Jacksonville is growing faster than the national economy, but that’s partly due to the fact that Jacksonville lost so much ground in the recession and has a lot to make up. However, the trends are looking up.
“The recovery seems to be back on track in Jacksonville,” Vitner said after the meeting.
During his luncheon talk, Vitner painted a somewhat optimistic picture for the national economy.
“Growth has gained momentum over the past year,” he said.
He projects the nation’s gross domestic product to end 2014 with growth of 2.4 percent, up from its recent trend of 2.1 percent.
“It still isn’t all that great, but it’s better than it’s been,” he said.
He projects the growth rate to reach 3 percent by 2016, which still isn’t great but “it should be the best run of growth we’ve seen since the middle of the last decade.”
Vitner said there are some structural issues still impacting the global economy. However, “economic conditions don’t have to be perfect for the economy to grow.”
He said geopolitical risks don’t seem to be having a big impact on the U.S. economy. For example, recent turmoil in the Middle East has not hurt the economy because of increased U.S. oil production.
Vitner said the economic improvement has been broad-based, with even the financial sector seeing better times after getting hit hard in the last recession. “It has begun to pick up a little bit over the past year,” he said.
However, the mortgage sector is still hurting, he said, and the “broken” mortgage finance business is holding back the housing market somewhat as it has become more difficult for first-time homebuyers to get a loan.
“There’s almost no question that the labor market has improved,” Vitner said. The U.S. economy added 230,000 jobs a month through July of this year, and he is unconcerned that the latest report showed a dip in growth in August.
“The fact that we had 142,000 in August doesn’t mean anything,” he said, because there tends to always be a “rogue month” every year that goes outside the trend.
Jobs are growing in Florida, but the state is still 3.2 percent below its pre-recession employment level, Vitner sid.
“We still have a way to go to recover all the jobs we lost in the recession,” he said. “It will be 2016 before we get there.”
(904) 356-2466