San Francisco’s ever-rising minimum wage—set to hit $15 next year—has restaurant owners asking for the check. “At Least 60 Bay Area Restaurants Have Closed Since September,” read a January headline at the website SFist, which partly blamed “the especially high cost of doing business in SF, with a mandated, rising minimum wage that does not exempt tipped employees.” Another publication, Eater, described the rash of recent closures as a “death march.”
Gross domestic product grew at a 0.7% annual rate in the first quarter from the preceding three months, the Commerce Department said Friday. Economic output has grown an average of roughly 2% during the nearly eight-year expansion.
During the latest expansion, new establishments have accounted for a little more than 11% of all new private-sector jobs created in the U.S. During the 1990s, the figure was 15%, according to Labor Department data released Wednesday.
That may seem a small shift, but those few percentage points add up to nearly 300,000 jobs a quarter. Separate data from the Commerce Department show the trend goes back even further. The share of private firms less than a year old has dropped from more than 12% during much of the 1980s to only about 8% since 2010.
Once known for casinos and brothels, Reno is now attracting corporations drawn by its low costs, lenient permitting rules and relative proximity to Silicon Valley. Other big corporations that have recently built data centers, factories and distribution centers at the industrial park include Apple Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and eBay Inc.
The decline in homeownership rates to near 50-year lows is partly to blame for the U.S. economy’s sluggish recovery from the last recession, new data suggest.
If the home-building industry had returned to the long-term average level of construction, it would have added more than $300 billion to the economy last year, or a 1.8% boost to gross domestic product, according to a study expected to be released Monday by the Rosen Consulting Group, a real-estate consultant.
The possibility of a tax-code overhaul is casting a shadow over the $10 billion affordable-housing industry, which receives tax credits so valuable they often determine whether or not projects get off the ground. . . Developers said investors are valuing the credit 10% to 20% lower since Election Day. In some cases, investors have walked away, opening up funding gaps in projects already in motion. Because developers already walk a financial tightrope to build low-income housing, some projects are simply failing.
In lieu of steep menu price increases, many independent and regional chain restaurants in states including Arizona, California, Colorado and New York are adding surcharges of 3% to 4% to help offset rising labor costs. Industry analysts expect the practice to become widespread as more cities and states increase minimum wages.
The pace of job creation remained robust in February, with payrolls rising by a seasonally adjusted 235,000 new jobs, the Labor Department said.
“Almost sixty years ago, officials at California’s transportation department unveiled a plan to build a six-mile freeway extension in Los Angeles County. They are still working on it.”
Her loan is part of a booming corner of the lending industry called Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE. Such loans, set up by local governments across the U.S., are designed to encourage homeowners to buy energy-efficient solar panels, window insulation and air-conditioning units. . . Creditworthiness matters little to lenders, because loans are based on the value of a homeowner’s property. PACE loans typically require no down payment, and the debt is added to property-tax bills as an assessment. Ms. White’s annual property taxes soared to $6,500 from $1,215.
Over the past year, the levels of quitting and hiring haven’t made any progress. Hiring plunged during the recession, but by the end of 2015 the rate had climbed to a post-recession high of 3.8%. For the past eight months, it has hovered below that rate.
The trade gap for goods and services increased 6.8% from a month earlier to a seasonally adjusted $45.24 billion in November, the Commerce Department said Friday. That took the monthly deficit to its highest level since February.
“Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 156,000 in December from the prior month, a slowdown from November’s more robust gain, the Labor Department said Friday. For all of 2016, the economy added just under 2.2 million jobs, the smallest gain for a calendar year since 2011. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.7% last month, but remains historically low. Wages showed new signs of firming, rising at the best annual rate since 2009, a sign that more than seven years into a slow-growing expansion labor-market conditions are finally tightening enough to reap payoffs for workers.”
Demand for small and midsize passenger cars has collapsed amid a sustained run of cheap fuel, pushing buyers to gravitate toward sport utilities, crossover wagons and pickups. . . Barclays’s Mr. Johnson estimates a “sedan recession” will have companies scrambling to cut about 2 million units of car production annually to make way for more SUVs and crossovers. This trend extends beyond the domestics—last spring, Toyota Motor Corp. retooled a cars-only assembly line at a plant in Princeton, Ind., to be able to build the Highlander SUV, helping notch its best sales month ever.
The collaboration with the U.S. Council on Competitiveness—which describes itself as a nonprofit, bipartisan group of labor, corporate and university leaders—tracks health, education and housing costs and outcomes from 1980 to 2014. It finds combined spending in these three areas has ballooned from 25% to 40% as a share of GDP since 1980, without commensurate improvements in quality.