Coral Gables Watch

Coral Gables Future Economy: Who is Thinking About It?

I have been wondering about what the future of Coral Gables will be like.  Will healthy retail sales return for local, regional and internationally focused business.  Will growth and prosperity return to the city or will the city live through a relatively long period of tepid growth?  Will the city reconstruct its future on the basis of real estate growth, expanding services for important companies located here and will we take advantage of a traditional sectors such as education (UM).

Will the city and the business community in Coral Gables and South Florida attract more dynamic businesses, activities and businesses.  Or will we be stuck in an economic time warp that portends the reactivation of real estate, finance, administrative and technical support services to international trade and large-scale but traditional business with inherently slow grow opportunities.

I wonder who is thinking about new and important sectors that could be the basis for a more rapid and sustained growth of the city?  I trust that the Chamber of Commerce and regional business leaders are indeed thinking about this, but the city of Coral Gables seems too quiet about the future.

Lots of Structural Unemployment, Especially in Coral Gables and South Florida

I was interested in the comments in an interview on CNBC of the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, James Bullard, who talked about structural unemployment in the construction sector.  This is very relevant to Coral Gables and South Florida.  What he says is that there are lot of workers who have been in the construction sector, that this sector will not likely come back, and that these people need to be retrained, to be literally moved to other types of employment.  They will not be able to get back to construction work.

Who in the State of Florida is doing anything about retraining these surplus workers and getting the local economy on another footing with new and more dynamic sectors.

I don’t hear anyone in the City of Coral Gables talking about this problem and how Coral Gables might promote new, dynamic sectors (or what is called today “clusters”–synergistic groupings of complementary businesses).

More from Krugman: Is He Wrong?

I know what some players both at the Fed and in the administration will say: they’ll warn about the risks of doing anything unconventional. But we’ve already seen the consequences of playing it safe, and waiting for recovery to happen all by itself: it’s landed us in what looks increasingly like a permanent state of stagnation and high unemployment. It’s time to admit that what we have now isn’t a recovery, and do whatever we can to change that situation.

via Op-Ed Columnist – This Is Not a Recovery – NYTimes.com.