Jobless reluctantly leave metro Atlanta

“I am going to look for work up there,” he said, referring to the Kidwells’ destination of Eagan, Minn., just south of St. Paul. “I’ve got some really good leads. Right now, I need a full-time job, something that pays decently.”

For decades, metro Atlanta has drawn newcomers with its powers of job creation. Now, with the region’s unemployment rate in double digits, some are heading in the opposite direction to search for work.

“I grew up in Marietta and I consider Atlanta home,” Kidwell said. “There is nothing for me in Atlanta now, but maybe some other time.”

Because Kidwell’s wife has been dealing with the after-effects of cancer, she cannot work. So the family also needs to save money. They will live with his brother in St. Paul for a while.

In good times and bad, mobility is all-American. Roughly 27 million Americans moved last year, according to the Census Bureau.

Most moves are short — across town into a nicer house or better school district, closer to the grandkids, away from the ex. But millions of people follow the job market — or increasingly — run from it.

“There is a push effect, where there are layoffs, where there are not a lot of jobs being created,” said Doug Krupka, a research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Labor, Employment and the Economy.

Atlanta suffered relatively mild blows in past recessions, but it has been hammered by this one.

The “pull effect” is weak everywhere these days, said Krupka, a former Georgia State University professor. “It’s a bit too early to say whether Atlanta’s growth is finished, but you would expect growth to slow down.”

He noted that recessions generally dampen mobility more than they encourage it. People with jobs are hesitant to gamble on finding something better in a new city. People who own houses are leashed to them in a slow market.

Yet onrushing trouble also shakes some Americans loose of their financial moorings: Lose your job through a layoff, lose your home through foreclosure, and suddenly there isn’t so much to hold you. Metro Atlanta is among the leaders in both foreclosures and layoffs.

That has cooled consumer spending and chilled hiring all through retail and sales.

Kidwell, 56, had worked for about a decade as a sales manager for a company that makes products for big retailers. After being laid off, he searched in vain for something similar. Last year he sold the house and took a job in Toronto, only to have that employer shut down the office as the recession deepened. The Kidwells returned to metro Atlanta and rented.

Now, Kidwell hopes for a turn of luck in St. Paul.

“I’ve already had one networking meeting,” he said Friday.

St. Paul’s unemployment rate of 7.7 percent hardly bespeaks a hiring boom but it is several points lower than Atlanta’s. St. Paul has shed 4 percent of its jobs, compared to Atlanta’s loss of 6.2 percent.

Addison Will, 39, also pulled up stakes in metro Atlanta. He had been a part-time photographer and teacher at Kennesaw State. His wife was a kindergarten teacher. Together, they made less than $40,000, but they got by. Then last spring, their second daughter was born and his wife left work — just when he was between semesters and freelance jobs were scarce.

They were slammed with medical bills, he said. “We had a $4,000 debt and we just never financially recovered.”

Scrambling, they heard of a teaching job where his wife’s parents live. She got the job and they left for Tulsa, Okla.

They moved in with his wife’s parents, and Will found a job at a local health food grocery store. “I miss Atlanta, and I miss my friends a lot, But I don’t see us coming back to Atlanta for awhile.”

It’s hard to say how many stories there are like the Kidwells’ or the Wills’ and it is too soon to know what effect recession has had on metro Atlanta’s population growth.

Between 2000 and 2007, the region led the nation in growth, swelling by 24 percent — more than 1 million people. The Census Bureau hasn’t counted everyone since 2000. The agency estimates the state added people last year, but at only 42 percent of the pace of five years ago.

Another rough indicator is the size of the labor force. Since the recession took hold in late 2007, that count — used to calculate the unemployment rate — has dropped by nearly 100,000 in Atlanta. The official jobless rate would be significantly higher had the labor pool not shrunk.

Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond said outmigration accounts for some of the drop but not all of it. Some people have simply stopped looking for work and others have gone back to school, which takes them out of the labor force count.

Another indicator: U-Haul said last year its rentals were used to move 8 percent more people into Atlanta than out of Atlanta. This year, move-ins are 2 percent ahead.

Kristi Steele became one of the outbound after being downsized out of a job.

She had been a project manager for a large Atlanta consulting company, and despite energetic efforts was unable to find another. “When I had been out of work for three months and it didn’t seem anything was happening for me, I decided not to rule out jobs from another state.”

She found a position with a government agency in metro Washington, D.C., trading cultural comfort for a paycheck.

“This place is considered the South, but there is nothing Southern about it,” she said of her new home in northern Virginia. “There’s no sweet tea. No Krispy Kreme donuts.”

Her self-employed husband took the children north several months after Steele moved. But they still find themselves tied to the metro Atlanta economy, since they haven’t been able to sell their house in Paulding County.

Steele feels the family had little choice but to make the move.

“Yes, I want to stay in Georgia,” she said, “but I’ve got to eat.”