Six years ago, the Orlando Sentinel took a deep dive into this community’s wage numbers, and what we found wasn’t pretty.
Among the 50 largest metro areas in American states, Central Florida ranked dead last.
The median annual wage was less than $30,000.
A quarter of all jobs in the region paid less than $20,000 — simply not enough to live on, much less save for retirement or college.
The numbers exposed a dark truth ignored by Orlando’s sunny marketing campaigns — that many of the workers who make tourists’ dreams come true can’t even make ends meet for themselves.
And we all pay — through welfare, housing subsidies and overburdened local charities. So local leaders vowed to do better.
Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ new numbers are out, and not much has changed.
Metro Orlando is still 50th in wages. Still dead last.
The median wage is $15.94 an hour. That’s $33,150 a year. One in every four jobs pays less than $23,050.
Wages in our region, which is 23rd in population, trail cities that are smaller and cities with lower costs of living.
In Grand Rapids, Michigan — a community half our size with a lower cost of living — jobs pay nearly 10 percent more.
In Columbus, Ohio and Richmond, Virginia, the median wage is closer to $40,000 — and living costs are lower.
Thriving cities like Austin. Struggling ones like Detroit. They all have better-paying jobs.
Now, we may have more job opportunities than some of these places. But we’re dismally short on paychecks that allow workers to make ends meet. Especially as the cost of living has risen to around average.
Hence headlines like: “Orlando area now worst in nation for shortage of extremely low-income housing.” You need a lot of low-income housing when you have a lot of low-income jobs.
Florida cities are generally low. But Orlando is the lowest.
The United Way’s recent cost-of-living study found that Orlando-area families need $58,000 a year just to make ends meet (forget savings). Well, when a quarter of the jobs here pay $23,050 or less, you see how many two-income families can’t clear that bar.
Now, I know some people are perfectly fine with a low-wage economy … as long as they’ve got theirs. But I also know some local leaders have made a concerted effort to recruit better jobs.
So what happened? Simple math.
See, while this region added many high-wage jobs, it added many, many, many more low-wage ones.
Again, let’s look at the numbers that Sentinel data-miner Adelaide Chen helped me crunch.
Over the last six years, the region added about 6,000 software-development jobs that pay around $100,000 a year. That’s great.
But over the same time, we also added 31,000 food-service jobs that pay around $21,000 a year.
So 6,000 steps forward; 31,000 steps back.
To put that in perspective, 31,000 is approximately the population of the entire city of Winter Park … though few of the people in these fast food, table-waiting and short-order cook jobs could afford to live in that city.
So why do we keep adding these low-wage jobs? Partly because this region’s tourism community does a boffo job growing. And partly because this community keeps subsidizing these low-wage jobs at massive levels.
Every year, Orange County alone collects more than $280 million in hotel taxes — almost all of which it uses to encourage more tourism.
Last year, I chatted with a candidate for Orange County mayor who vowed that, if elected, he’d aggressively court high-wage jobs and set up a hearty recruitment fund for precisely that purpose.
I told him I appreciated his passion, but that he was mathematically outnumbered.
I said: Let’s say you get $10 million a year to recruit high-wage jobs. (And by the way, you won’t get that much. But let’s say you do.) Your 10 million would be dwarfed by the 280 million we keep spending to subsidize low-wage jobs.
Dale Brill, a former head of the state’s Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development, once summed it up this way: “It’s mathematically impossible to recruit our way to either wage prosperity or a diversified economy. Service jobs are growing at such a rate that recruiting high-wage jobs can’t make a dent in either the average wage or the diversity index of the state.”
Brill, who now works for the Orlando Economic Partnership, said this week he stands by the statement, but that he sees slow progress. “It’s a long-term game,” he said. “We didn’t become a tourism-dominated economy overnight either. The question is: How do we change the structure of the economy without killing the golden goose?”
Fair question. I’ve never advocated killing the goose. I have, however, suggested we stop using taxpayer money to fatten it, foie gras-style.
If we keep using a quarter-billion dollars a year to subsidize low-wage jobs, we’ll keep getting more low-wage jobs. It’s not that complicated.
There are better things to focus on: education, medicine, manufacturing, transportation, technology — the priorities addressed by so many of the communities that rank higher on the list. (Which, once again, was all of them.)
Brill says he believes leaders are ready to confront this region’s economic reality. I’ve seen some evidence he’s right.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer now touts better wages as an aspirational goal. And just last week, the Orlando Partnership put out a report on the local economy that didn’t try to spit-shine reality, saying: “Overall, the number of people living below the poverty line in the region could fill Camping World Stadium 10 times, almost one-third of them children.”
That’s quite a visual — a good way to think about numbers that keep showing the same thing, year after year after year.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
