It’s Always Sunny in Los Angeles: 2014 Anderson Forecast
On April 2, 2014, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti delivered a keynote address at the UCLA Anderson Forecast: Solutions for Our City event to address key challenges facing the city including, but not limited to, the growing poverty rate, a lack of accountability in City Hall, the regulatory tax environment and job growth.
“The focus that we have here today on skills, on creating jobs…to me, they’re more and more unified than they’ve ever been,” said Garcetti. “Los Angeles doesn’t necessarily grow people at the rate they need in order to become productive workers. We have to make sure our skills align with the needs of our economy here – especially for our youth.”
Garcetti said his administration is working hard to create more opportunities for young people. His plan includes the creation of a summer jobs program that will launch this year aims to add 10,000 jobs.
UCLA Anderson Forecast economists then helped paint a picture of the current economic conditions in Los Angeles and across the nation. Forecast Director Ed Leamer pointed to the fact that, while the U.S. has seen a 25-percent job growth since 1990, during the same period, Los Angeles has lost 3.1-percent of its payroll jobs – worse than Detroit and Cleveland.
“We really need to get that job engine growing,” said Leamer. “The city’s development strategy has to move in two distinct directions. We want to be like the Bay Area and attract entrepreneurial types, but at the same time, we have to do something for the rest of Angelenos who don’t have the same prospects.”
Forecast Senior Economist Jerry Nickelsburg predicted that the state’s economy will continue to grow, with nonfarm payroll employment only .6-percent below its previous peak and employment .5-percent above its previous peak.
The UCLA Anderson Forecast event also featured two panel discussions that touched on the topics of job availability, job preparedness, the importance of paid summer internships and job training programs, lowering the recidivism rate of former prison inmates, immigration reform, and trucking and environmental regulations, among others.
