With Arizona’s October unemployment rate at 8%, up from a low of 4.5% in pre-pandemic February, many sectors of the economy are clearly still suffering from the effects of COVID-19.
But some sectors are bouncing back, including construction, which is just shy of its pre-pandemic level of employment.
Jeremy Dye, assistant director of Yavapai County Development Services, said that the flow of construction permits in the county has been “non-stop.”
“We have been extremely busy,” Dye said. “COVID has not slowed down development in the county at all.”
Dye said that the county set a new record for the number of single-family residence permits issued in one month in July, with 56. The monthly average for the past year has been 35 new single-family permits. Dye’s office handles permits for unincorporated parts of the county; cities and towns process additional permits.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Arizona’s construction industry experienced a small dip in employment in April, but construction jobs statewide started recovering in August, and by October were at 98.7% of February’s industry total of 174,700 jobs.
That’s a stronger recovery than the overall jobs numbers in Arizona, which are still down 4.2% from where they were in February.
If the volume of building permits in Yavapai County is any indication, the local building industry may be doing at least as well as the rest of the state. The average number of permits processed by Yavapai County Development Services has trended upward since the beginning of the year.
Dye said he’s seen other clues that the construction market is hot right now, namely that construction projects are seeing delays and projects are being scheduled further out into the future.
“Contractors can be backed up for months,” Dye said. “It seems like the engineers are delayed. We’re just seeing so much growth.”
The growth in construction is probably good for workers in that industry, but other sectors are not faring so well in the pandemic.
The Sedona Chamber of Commerce and Tourism reported recently that hotel occupancy in the city has largely bounced back after its fall in the spring, but leisure and hospitality remains one of the hardest hit sectors of the economy statewide.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ seasonally adjusted numbers for Arizona show that October’s leisure and hospitality jobs are only 83.8% of February’s numbers. Roughly half the leisure and hospitality jobs lost in Arizona during April’s unemployment cliff were still gone in October.
