Obama's Vacation Choice, Asheville, Doesn't Reflect North Carolina Job Losses

April 23, 2010 — -- When the Obamas arrive in Asheville, N.C., today for a vacation, the first couple will find a festive tourist destination and a bustling business hub that, though hurt by the recession, has managed to keep its unemployment level below the national average.

If only the rest of the state were so lucky.

Some 30 miles away from Asheville, in Waynesville, N.C., furniture store owner Tom Massie, 70, is recovering from his business's toughest year in decades. For most of 2009, he said, 108-year-old Massie Furniture didn't turn a profit and Massie had to dip into savings to make ends meet.

Massie was able to keep all 12 of his full-time employees, but he watched as businesses around him shed workers and contributed to his home county's 12.3 percent unemployment rate.

"It's by far the worst we've seen since the Depression that my father and grandfather went through," Massie said.

With a few exceptions -- including Asheville and the biotech-heavy "research triangle" of Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh -- most parts of North Carolina struggle with unemployment rates above 10 percent, thanks largely to the downturn in the construction and manufacturing sectors also seen nationwide.

"Because those industries were bigger here (than in) other states, we were hammered," said University of North Carolina-Charlotte economist John Connaughton.

The economy in the western part of state, including Waynesville, has also been hurt by a decrease in the number of retirees who -- thanks to the ills of the national housing market -- are unable to sell their homes in other parts of the country and move to western North Carolina.

When the "in-migration" to the region was higher, those retirees helped stimulate both home building and commerce, as they shopped for everything from groceries to furniture to sustain their new lives, said Tony Plath, an associate professor of finance, also at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

The downturn of the nation's banking sector, meanwhile, took a heavy toll on the economy and employment in Charlotte, which lost one of its biggest banks, Wachovia, after it was purchased by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo. Charlotte, the home of Bank of America, is still considered the banking hub of the Southeast, but the city and its neighboring towns have lost some 10,000 jobs in the finance sector since 2007, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.