In 09 the pre recession era was the know as the Celtic Tiger era in Ireland. The things I remember was builders being a very cushy job. They’d be driving in Lamborghinis and horse races would have people helicoptered there. After the recession builders haven’t made near as much a ce back as other sectors. What did you notice after 09?
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The rich got richer.
>The things I remember was builders being a very cushy job. They’d be driving in Lamborghinis and horse races would have people helicoptered there.
Wait so carpenters and masons could afford Lamborghinis?!
The Cash for Gold places shut down
My dad was less angry
Idk I was 17/18 so I was still an ignorant teen.
However a townhome complex sat vacant until the mid 10s and was actually used as a special needs school for a while.
I work in the nonprofit sector, and there was a huge change both in how much money people (in general, as well as foundations and corporations) had available to give away, and what they decided to give money to at that time.
It was so dramatic that I decided to make a career shift in 2009 that involved moving across the country, so it was a life-changing thing for me personally.
There were (and still are) a LOT less large planned neighborhoods being built. Real estate construction companies became a hell of a lot more conservative with their finances, and no longer built large communities, but concentrated on small ones. This, I assume, also applies to higher density areas as well. Why build 250 houses or 1000 units when the risk of people not being able to move in is high? I’m in a newer neighborhood of around 20 houses, they’re building a large 200 unit apartment complex a few miles up the road.
I worked with a group of baby boomers who were all “close to retirement.” And then suddenly, they weren’t.
> The things I remember was builders being a very cushy job. They’d be driving in Lamborghinis and horse races would have people helicoptered there.
How do you define “builders”? The owners/executives of construction companies or something else?
Anyway I noticed more companies having less employees and squeezing the existing ones harder and harder. That’s what my employer and all of our competitors did. They found they could still get almost the same productivity if they cut 20-40% of the workforce, so they did, and never rehired when the economy improved and the executives and owners reaped the profits.
Development reverted to a smaller scale, particularly in housing.
In the area I grew up in we were all fairly poor, after the recessions we were still mostly poor lol. My family actually came out of the recession better than we went into it, idk how that happened but it did. We have a small family business and we were doing much better in the early 2010s than we were in, say, 2007.
My ex was a recruiter in the hospitality industry. He hired chefs and restaurant managers mainly. There were NO new restaurants being opened and his business died a slow, painful death. He’s now a property manager for an apartment complex.
Getting a mortgage, even a large one, before was like being a prize winner on Oprah. Getting a mortgage after is like being confirmed to the Supreme Court
New home construction almost completely stopped. Tracts that had been cleared of trees and had roads put in sat empty, and became overgrown with weeds. My daily commute was a breeze because of so many being out of work. I also got a bargain on a great apartment. I was working and had good credit, so my situation was solid.
More difficult to get a loan for a home. It’s still not particularly difficult, but the bar was incredibly low pre-Great Recession. I had a family member who sold their house and moved to a new area with no job and no plans to get one for a year. Still managed to get a home loan.
No more circuit city 😔
I was only a kid at the time, so the biggest impact I saw was that my local CiCi’s pizza and Krispy Kreme donuts closed down.
Anyone who owns a Ferrari is tacky and insecure.
I was seven years old and my family was financially stable, so… I guess the new penny design was pretty noteworthy
The cars from the Big 3 got really, really shitty for a couple of years, then they righted the ship and started making things that didn’t suck.
I had just graduated college .. yeah I couldn’t get a permanent job. I went to grad school.
Thinking about my town, it put a stop to extremely fast population growth.
My hometown of Oswego was growing like crazy in the 90s and early to mid 2000s. Like it went from 3.8k in 1990 to 13.3k to 2000 to 30k in 2010. Understandably, the village had to constantly expand local services and buildings to keep up.
When the bubble burst… well, people didn’t stop moving in, but it slowed down a lot. Suddenly, you had a bunch of buildings half full because they had planned for that growth to continue.
The giant wealth transfer to the upper classes that took place.
I’m too young to remember the Recession but according to older family members it was essentially the same as before except the job market was awful, especially for people trying to get their first job.
Fewer business trips. Expensive and rarely necessary, especially with the advancing Internet.
Remember the Tea Party? Lots of people suddenly decided they were libertarians and forgot about it within a few years.
People held onto the car as they had longer instead of getting new ones.
My family owned an auto shop for 20 years. I think from like 2008 to 2012 with saw a lot more repeat business because people weren’t trading in as much. That being said, people were still hesitant to spend big money on major repairs, so it wasn’t exactly easy for us either. But I remember seeing some people more often because they were trading in.
Single family homes owned by giant investment firms. A significant number in my town are owned by them and entire developments are being built that are single family home rentals.
By far the biggest change I saw was American culture transitioning from a culture of hope to a culture of hopelessness. Before the recession, some people were doing well and some people were doing badly, but the people who were doing badly pretty broadly believed that there was a chance for things to turn around if they made the right moves and caught the right breaks. Was this true? Maybe, maybe not, but it was what people believed. After the recession the attitude became that it was never going to happen and it was pointless to try, and we’re still in that place today.
Well I was just starting high school. The street my bus stop was on (not my street) had every house (about 20 houses) with a ‘foreclosed’ sign out front. To this date, I have not seen that many houses for sale or foreclosed on. Maybe one or two but not an entire street.
More homeless people in SF and SFBA.
Absolutely nothing changed as far as I could tell. But then, I never noticed the 09 recession. It was just something we saw on the news but this town didn’t seem affected by it.
I was about 12 so the biggest change I noticed was at home; my parents were really struggling financially, and I think they were probably close to divorce. I’ve learned more about it as I got older but at the time I just knew things were bad.