Forbes ranks Youngstown-Warren area one of the worst areas for recession recovery

According to Forbes.com, the Youngstown-Warren-Boardman area is one of the 10 city areas in the country with the longest road to economic recovery.

To find the 10 cities poised for recovery, and the 10 cities with longest road to recovery, Forbes used data on gross domestic product from Moody’s Economy.com, unemployment and employment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, home prices and affordability from the National Association of Homebuilders, and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Data are for Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Because, in general, healthy cities were not victims of as severe a housing collapse, home prices were not used in ranking the cities poised for recovery.

Reporter Joshua Zumbrun wrote that the area’s GDP, a basic measure of an economy’s economic performance, at the start of the recession was $16.3 billion, and is projected to be $15.4 billion, or a 6 percent drop, at the end of 2010. Unemployment stood at 12.8 percent.

Zumbrun wrote: “The Youngstown region ... has struggled throughout the decade with the decline of manufacturing, a problem that has intensified during the recession. Moody’s estimates that the economy of Youngstown peaked in 2005 and will not recover to that size until early 2013.”

Other cities on the longest road list included, Flint, Mich., Detroit, Stockton, Calif., and Modesto, Calif. Among the cities poised for economic recovery are Huntsville, Ala., Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas, and Seattle-Tacoma, Wash.