Surprise job gains in Phila., Delco -- and losses in burbs, NJ

Philadelphia, with its growing core of recent college graduates settling downtown, where a few employers have followed them, has 19,000 more fulltime-equivalent jobs than it did before the 2008 recession -- while the rest of the region is still down 4,000 jobs, as I noted in my Sunday Inquirer column,

Here's more surprising job data: aging Delaware County, where the population had been in decline, is the only part of the region that attracted jobs faster than Philadephia in 2007-14. Everywhere else in the suburbs, employment remained below 2007-2008 peak levels; some counties, including the wealthy outer suburbs, are years behind their former job totals.

Combining its worn older suburbs and slow-to-recover Delaware River industrial districts, its wealthy-but-slow-growing Swarthmore-to-Main Line belt up north, and its last few developing townships between Newtown Square and Chadds Ford, Delco has boosted payrolls by +2.8% since 2007 (vs. +1.4% in Philadelphia and a decline in the nine other counties), according to Bureau of Labor Statics data compiled by Lauren Gilchrist, research director at property broker JLL's Philadelphia office.

That's a big reversal: The city once again accounts for a quarter of the metro region's 2.7 million jobs (that's counting South Jersey from Princeton to Salem, plus the Wilmington, Del. area and neighboring Cecil County, Md., but not the Shore), up from around 23 percent before the recession.

Philadelphia's relative success follows steady growth in its medical and major-college employers, plus Comcast and smaller suburban tech companies like Fiberlink (now part of IBM) and iPipeline that have expanded in Center City to attract young engineers.

Delco, which BLS still groups with Philadelphia as two older industrial areas that had been losing jobs for decades, turned around and added positions despite losing an additional 3,200 manufacturing jobs and suffering declines in construction, wholesale, warehouse, retail, information and transport services during those seven years.

The losses were more than offset by a jump in hotel/restaurant jobs and healthcare jobs (about 2,000 each) -- plus more than 4,200 new Delaware County position in the category including accountants, financial administrators and corporate headquarters positions.

While Philadelphia has had a tough time luring financial employers or corporate headquarters after tens of thousands of bank jobs vanished in the mergers of the 1980s and 1990s, suburban developers have opened their doors to bean counters and securities-picking specialists at sites including Brandywine Realty Trust's Radnor Financial Center (which lured companies from the City Line area and Conshohocken, Montgomery County), Equus' Ellis Preserve (where Sunoco moved after pulling its bosses out of Philadelphia), and the Glen Mills/Chadds Ford area (where DuPont spinoff Axalta moved its financial offices after leaving Wilmington), for example.

By contrast, employment in Chester County (Pennsylvania's richest) at year's end was still slightly below 2007 and 2008 levels; New Castle County (Wilmington and vicinity, which lost two auto plants and a bank headquarters) was down nearly -2 percent from pre-recession highs; the former growth counties of Burlington and Montgomery were off more than -3 percent each vs. 2007; Gloucester and Bucks, around -5 percent; Camden, more than -6 percent (even as Gov. Christie was giving out big tax breaks to bring jobs to Camden City); and Salem County (down around Penns Grove, the DuPont Chambers Works, and the western edge of Jersey farm country) was off more than -9 percent.

Salem-area jobs continued to vanish in 2013, at least two years after every other county in the region had begun to recover. Like neighboring Cumberland County and nearby Cape May, Salem residents and local businesses have been hurt by the disappearance of tens of thousands of Atlantic City casino-dependent jobs (things are worse at the Shore, but Atlantic County is outside the Philadelphia census region.)