Geographer Richard A. Walker, in his 2018 book “Portrait of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area,” writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The Great Recession has been calamitous. The official U.S. government designation of a two-year lapse in growth 2008-2010 minimizes the reality….things are worse than that. The Great Recession won’t go away — regardless of the soaring stock market and falling unemployment. By any measure, recovery from the Great Recession was the slowest from any crisis on record, including the Great Depression of the 1930s<\/em> [emphasis mine]. U.S. productivity remains poor overall, aggregate demand is weak because wages have barely budged, and corporations are not investing with any gusto. Loose talk of full employment by mid-decade ignores the fact that so many Americans have dropped out of the labor force entirely.” (pp. 64-65).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two conclusions for congregations: (1) Expect fundraising to be an ongoing challenge, since many households have not recovered from the Great Recession. (2) Expect the need for congregationally-based social services such as food pantries and supporting homeless shelters will continue to be robust. In other words, we will have to continue to do more with fewer resources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Geographer Richard A. Walker, in his 2018 book “Portrait of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area,” writes: “The Great Recession has been calamitous. The official U.S. government designation of a two-year lapse in growth 2008-2010 minimizes the reality….things are worse than that. The Great Recession … Continue reading “The Great Recession”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13],"tags":[330,820],"class_list":["post-7632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bay-area-calif","category-congregational-growth","tag-fundraising","tag-housing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7632"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7634,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7632\/revisions\/7634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}