New housing feeds almost half of area’s growth, as builders create communities for the many new people moving here.
Building, finance fed growth
They chipped in 40 percent of region's economic expansion in 2005
By Dale Kasler - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Thursday, September 27, 2007
It's no secret that the housing boom was a meal ticket for Sacramento and much of California, one of the leading drivers of economic growth. Statistics released Wednesday show just how true that was.
Construction and finance, which includes mortgage lending, accounted for 40 percent of metropolitan Sacramento's economic growth in 2005, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis said. That was the final year of the housing boom and the latest year for which statistics were available.
Several other California cities came to depend on construction and finance to fuel their economic growth, according to the BEA report. While the U.S. average in 2005 was 27 percent, those two sectors of the economy generated 40 percent of the growth in Los Angeles-Orange County, 50 percent in Merced, 35 percent in San Diego, 53 percent in Vallejo-Fairfield and 41 percent in Stockton. The figure was 81 percent in Yuba City that year.
