Chicago Adds More New Jobs Than Every Metro Area but 1 During the Past Year

As anyone who has seen all the cranes dotting Chicago’s skyline these days knows, it is great to see so many construction workers busy throughout this amazing city. The sad fact is that it has been too long since we've seen a lot of folks working in hard hats in these parts.

Indeed, the past few years have been very difficult for the construction industry. Total spending on construction activity remains more than 20 percent below the March 2006 spending peak, even without taking inflation into account. Over 2 million construction workers lost their jobs, and barely a quarter as many have been hired since the market bottomed out in early 2011. The Chicago area and much of Illinois have not been immune from the nationwide construction downturn. The August peak for construction employment in Chicago was back in 2006. Since then, the metro area has lost 49,500 construction jobs—more than one quarter—even after three years of increases. Statewide, 72,900 of Illinois’s construction jobs have disappeared since 2006.

Yet largely thanks to a flurry of new, mostly private-sector projects, the Chicago metropolitan division added more construction jobs than all but one other metro area in the United States between August 2013 and August 2014. During the past 12 months, Chicago added 9,900 construction jobs, an 8 percent increase. While last year 129,700 people worked in construction in the area, today 139,600 construction workers are employed. There are more people working in construction in this area today than at any point since 2009. This is good news for the region’s economy because construction jobs pay better than the average job.

It has been far too long since we've had news like this to report here in Chicago.  Even better, the area was not alone.  All told, 220 out of 339 metro areas added construction jobs during the past year, including the Springfield, Rockford and Decatur areas.