Southeast Tennessee showed the fastest growth in construction jobs in Tennessee over the past year, rising more than twice the pace for builders nationwide and four times faster than the economy as a whole.
But even after seven years of year-over-year growth in construction, the number of Chattanooga area jobs in construction is still below the pre-recession peak reached more than a decade ago.
Building more jobs
The top metropolitan areas in Tennessee for construction job growth in the past 12 months were in East Tennessee:1. Cleveland, up 13 percent2. Knoxville, up 10 percent3. Chattanooga, up 6 percent4. Johnson City, up 5 percent5. Jackson, up 4 percentSource: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics job growth in construction, mining and logging from March 2017 to March 2018
Ken Simonson“This area has shown strong growth in employment in the past year, better than in most of the state and far better than the economy as a whole,” Ken Simonson, chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America, told the local AGC chapter here Wednesday. “We expect to continue to see growth this year in construction spending and employment, anywhere from 1 to 5 percent, but we’re still not back to the peaks we saw before the recession.”
Simonson is a spokesman for the National Association of Business Economists and the top economic forecaster for the The Associated General Contractors, which represents more than 27,000 members across the country, including more than 200 member companies in the AGC of East Tennessee – one of 89 AGC chapters in the country.