High-paying jobs on decline in metro Atlanta

The Atlanta area’s high-paying jobs are declining and its low-paying jobs are increasing.

That’s one of the trends in Regional Snapshot, an Atlanta Regional Commission report that comes out Thursday.

The report also says the 10-county population increase of 70,200 this year is the lowest since 2003, and is 16 percent lower than the annual average for the decade.

The makeup of the region’s population is changing as well. The percentage of residents 20 to 65 years old is shrinking and the percentage of residents older than 65 or younger than 20 is growing.

That shift means the region has to think harder about providing easy access to health care and mass transit, and building more walkable communities, said Chick Krautler, the ARC director.

The most troubling information contained in the report might be the slip in jobs that pay on average $5,700 a month. More than 40,000 such jobs have been lost since 2001.

“That’s been a significant concern since 2000,” Krautler said. The region hasn’t fully recovered from the dot-com bust early in the decade when 60,000 well-paid jobs were lost, he said.

Since then, a lot of low-paying service sector jobs have been created, Krautler said, and “that’s not a good place for the economy to be.”

The downturn has cost metro Atlanta about 21,000 jobs this year. Still, the region has plenty of high-paying work in information, wholesale trade, and professional and business services, according to the report.

The snapshot also points out just how severe the residential construction collapse has been. Building permits from August 2007 to August this year plunged 55 percent. That’s the steepest drop among 15 big cities.

But the region’s economy is diverse, so “there’s nothing that indicates our growth rates won’t get back up to where they have been as the housing market come out of its slump and the economy comes out of its slump,” Krautler said.