Kalinda Campbell: Texas beckons after luck in Atlanta runs out
The metro Atlanta job market was better thanTampa’s, so Kalinda Campbell came here. But things changed again and now she’s in Houston.
“I see a lot of people moving away from Atlanta, people who have live there a long time,” she said.
A Tampa native, she had shuttled back and forth between her home town and Atlanta before getting a full-time job here in human resources. “There was more opportunity back then in Atlanta. And I loved Atlanta. I was there 12 years on and off.”
Then she was laid off.
Campbell, now 31, was able to land a series of contract jobs, but her last one ran out in August 2011.
“I left Atlanta because I couldn’t find a job,” she said. “And I got two or three job offers in Houston within two weeks of posting my resume.”
Her experience reflects a statistical flipflop between two Sunbelt regions.
In mid-2003, Houston’s jobless rate was 6.9 percent while Atlanta’s was 4.8 percent. Last month, unemployment in metro Houston was 5.9 percent, vs. 7.6 percent here.
“As much as I loved Atlanta,” she said, “I decided to leave because I got more money and there’s a lower cost of living here.”
