To cover the gubernatorial election on behalf of Ohioans, more than 20 Ohio news organizations set out in December of 2021 to gain an understanding of the state’s economy through data and talking to people.

Lauren Lindstrom of the Toledo Blade found Art Goodside of Montpelier, a village of about 4,000 west of her city.

Goodside told the reporter that he was just shy of his 30th anniversary at the nearby Fleetwood travel trailer factory in 2009 when the Great Recession brought the plant to its knees. The company filed for bankruptcy, and hundreds of employees, among them Goodside, lost their jobs.

Goodside, 57, is representative of an Ohio workforce reeling from a recession that began in 2001, never recovered, then plunged over the edge in 2008-09.

The Fleetwood closing contributed to a downward spiral in Williams County, which experienced the largest drop in median household income of any Ohio county since 2000 — 27 percent, or $15,000 — according to an analysis by retired Beacon Journal data reporter David Knox. He was contracted to examine jobs and income in Ohio’s 88 counties for the news organizations.

Devastated job markets were the norm across Ohio, in aging urban manufacturing counties, coal country, lakeside communities and flatlands.

Trumbull County, home of the cities of Warren, Girard and Niles about 40 minutes east of Akron, lost 25,909 jobs in that same time. One of every four jobs that existed in 2000 was gone.

Dayton’s Montgomery County lost 56,335 jobs, or 18 percent. Mansfield’s Richland County lost 11,533, or 18.5 percent — one in every six jobs.

Summit County can take solace that it did better than all other major urban counties — with the exception of Franklin — by losing only 1 percent of its jobs since 2000, or 2,963, according to Knox’s research.

But hidden in Summit’s 1 percent is where the Ohio slide can be found.

The heart of it all

Ohio is always a battleground in presidential elections. This year, candidates will swoop into the Buckeye State with regularity in the run-up to the March 15 primary and the Republican convention in Cleveland in July, and they’ll be back in the fall.

They’ll spend heavily to sway Ohio voters, but will they address the economy?

The the 2001 recession, 9/11 terrorist attacks, deregulation and trade agreements all contributed to Ohio’s swift and stunning fall.

The median household numbers since 2000 look like this:

Ohio down $9,363, or 16.1 percent, to $48,849.

U.S. down $6,205, or 10.4 percent, to $53,482.

Ohio’s plunge was second largest in the nation, falling from 19th-highest median income to 35th; from only 2.5 percent below the national median to 8.7 percent below.

Akron and Summit

Summit County experienced one of the smallest declines in jobs among urban counties since 2000, but that’s putting bad news in a good light.

What counts is money in pockets. Summit ranked 37th among 88 counties for decline in median household income, which means more than half did better.

When adjusted for inflation, the median income is $10,000 less now than it was 15 years ago — a drop of 17 percent — an amount that is palpable for most.

Summit County has been in a steady decline for 15 years. Jobs in the goods-producing sector — the high-paying, often union jobs that produce chemicals, plastics, autos, highways and buildings — plunged nearly 20 percent or about 12,000 just from 2000 to 2003. They continued to erode as the nation edged toward the precipice in 2008.

The long-term implications of those job losses took a few years to surface. But they did, in clear, troubling ways. Summit County’s auto and home sales weakened in 2005. Home values — the most important asset for middle-income families — were dropping to lows not seen for decades.

So, when the country entered the Great Recession, residents of Summit County already were in perilous financial situations, often trapped by depressed home values.

Summit lost another 7,440 goods-producing jobs in the Great Recession, so that since 2000, one in three of those prized jobs was gone. Summit ranks fourth in the state for total losses — 21,276, or 35 percent.

Neighboring Stark County lost 34 percent, and Cuyahoga 38 percent.

The combined total of just those three counties is 94,000 jobs that at one time were the foundation of the Northeast Ohio industrial economy.

The Ohio slide

A November poll of Ohio by the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute of Applied Politics showed the level of disgust with the federal government at an extreme level and helps explain the rise of nontraditional candidates.

Yes, there has been recent job growth in Ohio. Overall, the number of working people has recovered since the year before the great slide. But the types of jobs that remain, and the long-term loss since 2000, continue to plague the state:

•Since 2000, Ohio has lost 442,958 private-sector jobs in 61 of 88 counties.

•Cuyahoga, Montgomery, Hamilton, Franklin, Summit, Trumbull, Stark, Lorain, Lucas and Clark lost about 252,000 goods-producing jobs paying about $15 billion in annual wages today.

•Private-sector growth occurred mostly in the Cincinnati and Columbus areas, in Delaware, Warren, Butler and Franklin counties.

•A majority of Ohio’s new jobs are in the service sector — 144,000 since 2000, with paychecks that are a third less than factory workers. Those jobs include discount stores, low-wage health-care workers and call centers.

•Only 10 Ohio counties saw median household income rise between 2009 and 2014. All were in Appalachia, partly because of the natural gas boom, and also because those counties were at the bottom, with nowhere to go but up.

•Private-sector growth since 2010 masks a significant drop in public-sector jobs throughout the state.

The breathtaking decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs can be seen on multiple levels.

The state’s gross domestic product — its total value of goods and services — slipped from about 4 percent of the national GDP in 2000 to 3.5 percent in 2014, the latest year available.

While a half percent difference doesn’t sound like much, that’s $65 billion less in goods and services produced by Ohio workers than if the state had preserved its share of the nation’s production.

What about the rich?

As a part of the news media project, the Dayton Daily News examined income disparity in Ohio’s major cities and found that the rich generally didn’t get richer. Their incomes declined in most cities, but generally not as much as lower-income households.

The Daily News isolated two income groups: Those with household incomes in the top 5 percent, and those in the bottom 20 percent, and compared 2007 with 2014.

There were two cities that stood out at opposite ends: Akron and Cleveland.

In Akron, the gap narrowed between the highest household incomes and the lowest. No other city did. Moreover, Akron has the second-smallest gap between the two groups. Only Columbus has a smaller gap because its lowest-income group has an income 28 percent higher than Akron’s.

Cleveland is at the opposite end. The rich got richer, by 2 percent, and the poor got poorer, by 18 percent.

However, Cincinnati, even though income fell for the richest, still holds the title for largest gap between rich and poor. The richest 5 percent receive 15.7 times more than the bottom 20 percent.

For other major cities, the richest 5 percent make this much more than the bottom 20 percent:

Cleveland — 11.6 times

Dayton — 10.3 times

Youngstown — 9.5 times

Toledo — 9.2 times

Akron — 8.4 times

Columbus — 8.1 times

The government factor

With the exception of Franklin County, home of the state capital, there was widespread loss of government jobs following the state reduction in aid to local governments and schools after the 2008-09 recession.

While the entire state lost 55,000 government jobs from 2007-2015, Franklin was virtually unchanged.

But Cuyahoga lost 10,245, Hamilton 5,902, Montgomery 3,582 and Summit 3,409.

Contributing to this story were Beacon Journal reporters Doug Livingston and Jim Mackinnon, retired Beacon Journal reporter David Knox, the staff of the Dayton Daily News and Lauren Lindstrom of the Toledo Blade.

Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Jim Mackinnon can be reached at 330-996-3544 or jmackinnon@thebeaconjournal.com.