‘Everything rolls downhill’
Energy sector’s downsizing making area’s growth grind to a halt
Sue Burnett is like a weather vane: Whichever way the economic winds blow, she turns with them.
For four decades, her staffing agency has been a leading indicator of impending recession and the inevitable recovery, as employers lay off workers — sending a flood of résumés through her doors — and then start building back with temporary employees. In Houston, that usually starts when the price of oil bounces back up again.
That’s not happening during this extended energy downturn.
“The difference with this one is it’s two years — we’ve never had a twoyear price decline,” says Burnett. “Our temp usage has not picked back up as sometimes it does, because I’m not sure that people are convinced that we’re coming out of it. There’s nobody saying ‘Yay, it’s over,’ or that it will be over in a few months.”
As the oil bust drags on — and perhaps even longer as the impact of Britain’s exit from the European Union plays out — it’s starting to hold back sectors that appeared to have been chugging along. Some, such as law firms, bars and restaurants, and educational services, have already reversed direction, stalling job growth in the Houston area in May. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and local workforce agencies expect job growth to end up in negative territory by the end of the year.
This downturn was supposed to be different, of course. There’s now more than oil supporting Houston’s economy, political and business leaders insist: fast-growing hospitals, schools, shopping centers, eateries and arts institutions. And it’s true that the region has moved into other industries since the 1980s.
But as the unemployment rate here climbs above the national average, it shows the region’s vaunted diversity is more dependent on oil and gas
than everyone had hoped.
Bill Gilmer, the University of Houston economist who’s become the region’s oracle, has a useful way of breaking down Houston’s job market.
The way he figures it, the region has about 550,000 “base” jobs, which include sectors like oil and manufacturing that sell goods out of state, bring new money into the Houston area, and generate the momentum that drives the economy forward. And it has about 2.5 million “non-base” jobs, largely composed of services like real estate and retail, that essentially recirculate money already in the local economy.
Base jobs have disappeared rapidly, with oil and gas losing 1 in 5 jobs and manufacturing 1 in 8 over the past 18 months. Non-base jobs are still growing — but more and more slowly.
In the last three months of 2015, they grew by 2.5 percent on an annual basis. In the first three months of 2016, they grew by 1.8 percent, and in the last two months, by just 1 percent. Essentially, Gilmer said, the economy is running on fumes.
“Employment growth, we know, is behind us,” Gilmer said. “The momentum disappears and exposes the slow growth.”
That’s showing up in all kinds of numbers. Average wages started declining in mid-2015 after climbing steadily since 2012. Retail sales have fallen more than 10 percent over the past year. New car sales were down 33 percent in April from a year earlier, and the dip was most pronounced in economy car models.
That follows a familiar pattern: As higher-income earners lose jobs, they cut back. Eventually, that squeezes people whose jobs depend on their spending, from banquet attendants to landscapers.
“First it’s the high-paid employees in oil and gas that have felt all the pain,” Gilmer said. “And now, this far into the downturn, we see the trickle down into these secondary industries.” The pinch in services
A lot of sectors don’t show up as oil or manufacturing in employment numbers, but they might as well. Take business and professional services, which encompasses law, architectural, engineering, and consulting firms. Many of those have a long list of oil clients — and the business services sector has shed more than 13,000 jobs in Houston over the past year, a decline of nearly 3 percent.
A lot of small businesses in that segment are struggling if they depend on oil and gas. Huggins and Associates, which administers training and tests for safety certifications that workers need to go into the oilfields or onto offshore rigs, is now having a hard time filling classes and has had to cut from 14 employees and contractors to nine.
“When the oil and gas industry’s down, all the services industry goes down with it,” says Charles Huggins, the company’s founder. He’s trying to keep busy by focusing on clients in the construction and petrochemical industries — but they’re also slowing down.
“None of them are doing OK. But when you put it all together, we can get by,” Huggins says.
But he doesn’t rule out the possibility of closing up shop.
“Unless things change, you never know what’s going to happen,” he said. Manufacturing hurting
Manufacturers here have long piggybacked on oil and gas, making heavy equipment, circuit
“First it’s the high-paid employees in oil and gas that have felt all the pain. And now, this far into the downturn, we see the trickle down into these secondary industries.” Bill Gilmer, economist, University of Houston
boards, instruments and other products that energy companies need to find, exploit, and manage oil and gas fields. Some manufacturers, however, have tried to put distance between themselves and the boom-and-bust energy industry, pivoting from oil and gas after the epic crash of the 1980s.
Higginbotham’s B&M Machine Works, a metal fabrication shop near Hobby Airport, was one of them.
Nearly 30 years ago, the small manufacturer, which employs about 25 people, decided to focus on making parts for the medical and electrical industries instead.
“What we do isn’t as lucrative as the oil guys. Those guys will pay $1,000 for a nut. They don’t care; they’re making money,” says Scott Higginbotham, the business’s third-generation owner. “But they’re a roller coaster.”
Word gets around the constellation of small machine shops in Houston, which often share work when business is good. Higginbotham has heard of guys who borrowed money just like their oil industry clients, leaving them far in debt when orders dried up. B&M’s work is more steady, and Higginbotham hasn’t laid anyone off. But he’s not expanding, either.
“The thing about oil field in Houston is that eventually everything rolls downhill,” Higginbotham says. “Doesn’t matter what industry you’re in.” Construction down
Here’s what Higginbotham is talking about: The construction industry, which kicked into high gear to accommodate a surge in demand for offices and apartments and the facilities needed for refining crude oil or making chemicals, is about to hit a wall.
The hotel industry, for example, built more than 7,000 rooms since the beginning of 2011, or 10 percent of the existing inventory. But with the exception of the area around the Medical Center, they’ve been whacked by the dropoff in energyrelated business travel; attendance at the annual Offshore Technology Conference, for example, plunged nearly 30 percent this year. Revenue per available room is down 13.6 percent from its peak in early 2014.
Christian Abbate, a director at CBRE Hotels focused on the Houston market, believes the construction boom is over.
“Projects that are planned that have their financing in place, developers will go ahead and build them,” he says. “Typically, those that don’t have their financing at this point will stall and go back.”
The crunch might not have affected contractors quite yet. The public school system is still building its way through a $1.89 billion bond measure, and hospital construction shows no sign of slowing down.
But the city now has a glut of residential and commercial real estate: Houston’s office vacancy rate rose by 2.2 percent in the first quarter over a year before, and apartment vacancy rates have reached 20 percent for Class A apartments, with developers offering incentives from Apple watches to flat-screen TVs (plus two months free rent) to entice tenants.
Accordingly, the pipeline of new projects is start- ing to empty out. City of Houston building permits were down about 16 percent and total building contracts fell nearly 20 percent in the first four months of 2016, compared to the same period the previous year. Gilmer estimates that $22.7 billion worth of industrial projects are expected to be completed next year, but only $5 billion in 2018.
“As these projects ramp down, we’re going to stop employing thousands and thousands of construction workers,” says Jesse Pound, an economist with the Dallas Federal Reserve. “Many of them are going to move away.”
The growth in construction employment has already slowed, rising just over 1 percent in the last year compared to nearly 6 percent in the previous year. The sector has shed nearly 5,000 jobs since the end of last year, in part because some contractors are already doing preliminary layoffs in case building continues to slow.
“It is giving them an opportunity to trim down, cut the fat, and prepare,” says Candace Hernandez, a principal in the construction consulting firm Kiley Advisors. “Because they see the storm coming, so batten down the hatches and get ready.” Leisure a little shaky
If an oil downturn has been underway for the past two years, the Houston food scene doesn’t seem to have noticed it. Food blogs are replete with news of new openings, and the New York Times published not one but three paeans to Houston cuisine in the first half of 2016.
According to the numbers, however, hiring has started to slow down.
Bars and restaurants dropped 200 jobs in May, after climbing to an alltime high of 258,200 jobs in April. Greater Houston Restaurant Association president Jonathan Horowitz, who runs the Antone’s Famous Po’ boys chain of sandwich shops, says he’s heard of a little softness in the corporate banquet business, especially out in the energy corridor on the way to Katy.
Other than that, though, he says restaurants are still scrambling for to find good workers.
“In the grand scheme of things, we haven’t seen a slowdown at all,” Horowitz says. “People moving to the area, they all need to eat.”
That was indisputably true in the beginning of last year; Houston gained 159,000 people between July 1, 2014 and July 1, 2015. But the numbers likely won’t be as impressive this year, as job growth tapers off. Already, growth in leisure and hospitality jobs so far in 2016 is 25 percent below what it was last year. Repositioning jobless
The downturn has kept one kind of enterprise operating in overdrive: The 27 career centers run by Gulf Coast Workforce Solutions, which receives state and federal funding to provide help with interview skills, job searching and grants for higher education.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, the location near the Astrodome was packed with people working on computers, uploading résumés and scanning through job listings. Some waited for appointments with a counselor; others looked for someone to help them get started.
This office specializes in “middle-skilled jobs” — hospitality, information technology and construction. All of the sectors that had been doing well and are now softening.
“You see more layoffs lately,” says Jacqueline Felix, the office manager. “We have been very, very busy.”
Workforce Solutions is helping about 115,000 people — 15 percent more than it was at this time last year. At the same time, according to the organization’s director, Mike Temple, job postings from prospective employers are down 8 percent in the first six months of 2016 from the same period last year.
“It puts a strain on our services,” Temple says. “In our busiest offices, when there is an increase in the number of people looking for work, there can be an increase in wait times.”
Chalita Purnell, 43, is one of those who went to the career center to retool. She lost her job at Sam’s Club four years ago and has since struggled to find full-time work. She decided to move into the burgeoning medical field with a 15-week course at Houston Community College to become an EKG technician.
Now, armed with a certificate, she’s ready to tap into part of the Houston economy that’s still growing.
“There are so many outlets in nursing. It is unreal,” Purnell says. “I’ll just be happy to work.”