While I was at the Frost & Sullivan conference last week in Anaheim I met a guy who had worked in Greensboro years ago, moved to DC and then moved on to Michigan.  The conversation was particularly interesting to me because he knew the two housing markets I had dealt with, DC and the Piedmont Triad, and while he agreed that it was a very positive move my family made from DC to NC (sold in a sellers market and bought in a buyers market) his move from DC to Michigan was even stronger.  In fact he said he almost feels guilty because the market in Michigan is so depressed that the deal he got on his house was almost "criminal".

To give me a taste of how bad the economy is in Michigan he told me that the unemployment rate in Michigan is the highest in the country. I just checked and it’s 7.1% which makes Michigan second to last, in front of only Mississippi’s 7.5%.  That makes North Carolina’s  4.9% (36th in the nation) seem not so bad by comparison. 

By the way Virginia is tied with Montana for third lowest unemployment rate in the country at 2.9%.  The job market in Northern Virginia is so strong that they actually worry about finding enough workers and finding a place to house them.  That equates to high salaries that are eaten up by astronomical housing prices, over-crowded schools, world-class traffic congestion and the flight of at least one family to the embrace of the Piedmont Triad.

Worse for Michigan is that things seem to be continuing downhill after Chrysler announced today that they’re eliminating another 13,000 jobs.  Here in NC there aren’t a whole lot of manufacturing jobs left to lose and the service, biotech, tech and financial sectors seem to be gearing up for growth.  In addition NC is becoming a retiree destination, which isn’t something I think you’ll see happen in Michigan until global warming really kicks into gear.

Just goes to show that while the grass often seems greener on the other side of the fence you can be certain that someone in the neighborhood has a lawn with more weeds than yours.