Florida’s Double Trouble: Foreclosures and Unemployment

Signs of Florida’s troubles: New but empty condo high-rises, court-ordered foreclosure mediations and county websites auctioning distressed properties to thousands of buyers from around the world.

Florida – particularly South Florida – has become a hotbed of foreclosure-related activity, and one more dubious sign of the housing crisis hit hard today. The unemployment rate for the Sunshine State increased to 11.8 percent in December, the highest since May 1975, according to the state Agency for Workforce Innovation.

Florida’s jobless rate is about two percent higher than the national average. The largest number of jobs lost were in the construction, trade and professional areas. The only growth sector was health care.

At the height of the housing boom, Florida had a disproportionate number of construction workers, real estate brokers and mortgage bankers soaking in the soaring business. By 2005, construction and real estate accounted for nearly a third of all jobs.

And now, it might be until 2014 “before payroll employment levels return to their pre-recession peak,” according to an analysis by the Institute for Economic Competitiveness at the University of Central Florida.

Legislative economist Amy Baker predicted this week that Florida will lag behind the rest of the nation in recovering from the recession – primarily because of the state’s housing surplus.

Florida has the 7th-highest unemployment rate in the nation. Ahead of it are other states hit hard by the foreclosure crisis: Nevada (2nd with a 13 percent rate); California (5th with a 12.4 percent rate), according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Miami-Dade County, the state’s most populous county, launched foreclosure auctions online last week. Already more than 25,000 visitors from 83 countries have been to the site, and close to 6,000 have registered.

Florida has the third-highest mortgage delinquency rate in the nation – after California and Nevada. RealtyTrac reported 516,711 foreclosure filings in Florida for 2009 – a rate of 1 in every 17 housing units. It ranked behind Nevada (1 in every 10) and Arizona (1 in every 16).

So clogged is Florida’s courts with half a million pending foreclosures that its Supreme Court has issued an order requiring managed mediation programs to speed up the stalled cases.