Sorry for the scarcity of recent posts; I’ve been busy with a couple of charitable projects that should be finishing up later in May. Until then, I’ll try to excerpt the best of the real estate and financial press coverage of the accelerating decline in housing and mortgages.

Following is from Scott Goldstein, NJBIZ, April 28, 2008. Not a pretty picture…and the 1929 comparisons/analogies don’t help:

When it comes to creating private-sector jobs, New Jersey was a laggard in 2007 as compared with neighboring states and the rest of the country, according to a Rutgers University report released last week. Authors of the report say the state’s job growth will not improve this year while the nation enters a “deep recession” and a financial crisis that will be “arguably the worst since the Great Depression.”
New Jersey gained just 3,700 private-sector jobs last year, an increase of only 0.1 percent over 2006. That was significantly lower than the increases in New York and Pennsylvania, which saw private-sector employment gains of 1.2 percent and 0.6 percent respectively, according to the study.

“In terms of job growth, New Jersey fell significantly behind its economic peer states in 2007. The state has lost its role as regional economic dynamo,” says the report, which was titled “Reversal of Economic Fortune” and co-authored by James W. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Public Policy at Rutgers, and economist Joseph J. Seneca.

Overall, New Jersey ranked 41st among the states in percentage of private-sector job growth last year, according to the Rutgers report. That was unchanged from 2006. New York ranked 17th, up from 28th in 2006, while Pennsylvania ranked 29th, up from 34th.

The Garden State may have suffered recession-related layoffs earlier than its neighbors because Wall Street job cuts hit back offices in North Jersey first, Hughes said in an interview. He says the state lost 7,900 financial sector jobs in 2007, mostly in the second half of the year.

The entire Northeast will likely falter in 2008, the study says. New Jersey lost 10,500 private-sector jobs in the first quarter of 2008, according to the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development. “That’s a reflection of the national downturn,” says Hughes.

He says the pharmaceutical and biotech sector accounts for about 41,000 jobs in New Jersey, while financial businesses ranging from banks to Wall Street brokerages account for 269,000 jobs in the Garden State. The importance of these sectors to New Jersey puts the state at particularly high risk of layoffs, says Hughes. “We are going to get hit hard,” he says.

Behind the national recession are factors including the bursting housing bubble, the subprime mortgage crisis, growing turmoil in the credit markets and soaring energy and commodity costs, according to the report.

Hughes says New Jersey and the Northeast are feeling a backlash from the lending boom that lasted from 2001 through 2006—a period when “we had cheap global credit, lending standards disappeared, there were record Wall Street profits and great job growth.”

There’s little that Gov. Jon S. Corzine and the rest of state government can do to ease the pain of the recession, adds Hughes. “They are prisoners of forces that may have built up over a 10-year period,” he says.