Oakland County to add 42,000 jobs by 2020, U-M experts say

In a detailed report on Oakland County’s bustling economy, two University of Michigan experts said Michigan’s most affluent county is steaming ahead as the state’s top job generator.

Yet, as good as Oakland’s job market already is, it’ll just keep getting better, the experts said.

“We expect growth of 1.7% in 2018, 1.9% in 2019, and 2.1% in 2020” for a total of more than 42,000 new jobs in the next three years — many in the “higher-wage industries” that pay $75,000 or more, said U-M economist Gabriel Ehrlich, director of U-M’s Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics. Ehrlich also provides economic forecasting to the Michigan Legislature.

The batch of upbeat numbers and charts were presented Thursday in Troy at the 33rd annual Economic Outlook Luncheon attended by 700 corporate, civic and political leaders, organizers said.

Earlier in the day, the U-M experts gave the news media a preview of the report. The U-M economists are contracted each year by Oakland County to produce the report, county officials said.

The data gurus from Ann Arbor said they were amazed that Oakland’s juggernaut of job growth kept chugging right on through 2016 and 2017, “even with slight declines in Detroit Three vehicle sales in each of those years,” Ehrlich said.

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Such relentless job growth shows three key ways that Oakland’s job market seems to be healthier than the rest of Michigan — “an economy that continues to diversify, a highly educated labor force, and policy initiatives that focus on future growth sectors,” he said.

Sitting next to Ehrlich and beaming at the sanguine news was L. Brooks Patterson, now in his 26th year as elected boss of Oakland County government, who has been praised — and imitated — for prescient moves to make Oakland less dependent on automotive jobs, through county-orchestrated pushes to bring in computer-tech, medical-tech and robotics employers.

Now that times are good, the public has forgotten how bad they were not many years ago, Patterson said. In the Great Recession of 2008-2010, “We lost about 160,000 jobs, and it’s taken us this long to get them all back,” he said.

It’s satisfying to see Oakland County beat both the rest of the state and the entire nation in adding jobs since the Great Recession’s downturn, Patterson added.

Oakland County added more than 119,000 new jobs since 2010, and its average growth pace of 2.6% a year “well outpaced both the nation’s and the state’s average rates” over the same period, the U-M report said.

Adding to Oakland’s luster, the experts compared its economic clout to 37 other U.S. counties of similar size – those with populations from 900,000 to 1.6 million last year. The comparison found that Patterson’s fiefdom of about 1.25 million Michiganders — ranked by averaging five levels of income and education – scored an overall 9th in the nation. The overall rank includes an impressive 7th highest in the nation for median family income (after adjusting for Michigan’s lower-than-average cost of living); and 6th highest for having numerous “Managerial/Professional” jobs.

Falling outside the study's parameters were Macomb County, which has a population just under the 900,000 minimum; and also leaves out Wayne County, whose population is about 100,000 over the study’s upper limit of 1.6 million. The U-M experts said that including metro Detroit’s two other counties would’ve required considerably more number crunching.

But is Oakland County’s success shared by those who live in counties bordering Oakland? It surely is, said U-M economist and labor markets expert Donald Grimes.

“This is a region-wide phenomenon. For example, Wayne County has been growing faster in the last five years than before 1969,” Grimes said, drawing nods from Patterson.

“”We bring in about 300,000 employees a day from other counties, so we’re sharing our wealth,” Patterson said. After subtracting those Oakland residents who commute to jobs outside their home county, “the net” of Oakland jobs provided to outsiders each day is about 110,000 — still a substantial figure, Grimes said.

And a red-hot job market north of 8 Mile Road and west of Dequindre is an asset to anyone working in the tri-county area, the experts said. On the one hand, it means there’s a great choice of jobs in Oakland County, but it also suggests that employers in Wayne and Macomb counties face stiff competition from Oakland for job candidates, which likely leads to wage and salary increases across the region.

The experts’ only worry? That Oakland County could run into a labor shortage in the next few years. That drew a flip comment from Patterson, who acknowledges that some of the region’s best job generators now can be found in downtown Detroit.

“We’ll go down to Quicken Loans and get some of our workers back,” he quipped.



Contact blaitner@freepress.com