City on a Hill Press » Recession

Santa Cruz’s Self Improvement Regimen

City on a Hill Press — Thu, 17 May 2012 23:00:57 +0000

Illustration by Christine Hipp

Roads without potholes, running water, safe parks and sidewalks, streetlights that turn on and toilets that flush — they’re all things that some residents of Santa Cruz might take for granted. They require constant attention and money to keep them all working properly, and much of that responsibility falls upon the city of Santa Cruz’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP).

The CIP is a yearly budget that includes projects and expenditures that fall outside of the city’s day-to-day operations, such as paying out salaries, and generally consists of repairs and improvements to the city of Santa Cruz, as well as large-scale infrastructure projects.

“Every once in a while, we need to build a new facility, repair a road, or maybe they need four new garbage trucks because their old ones are wearing down, so when anything big like that happens, those are capital projects,” Santa Cruz finance director Marc Pimentel said. “The vast majority of our projects are something that the public is looking for and either expects or wants.”

The report detailing the proposed CIP expenditures for fiscal year (FY) 2013–14 and possible projects for FY 2014–2015 were presented to the City Council on April 24, and they will have the chance to make changes to it until July 10, when the plan is approved and work will begin on the many projects contained within it.

“A lot of them aren’t very sexy projects, but they’re important,” Santa Cruz city manager Martín Bernal said. “It’s ultimately our attempt to maintain and improve our infrastructure.”

Currently, the CIP budget for next year is $20.1 million, about 12 percent of Santa Cruz’s overall annual budget of $160 million. While much of the money comes from the Santa Cruz general fund, it is also supplemented by state and federal grants.

Pimentel said that although the most pressing items on the agenda will be taken care of by next year’s CIP, many of the projects that people would like to see will have to wait until the city’s finances have recovered from the recent recession. According to the CIP report, “The City faces an ongoing challenge to meet its capital needs with limited resources.”

“When you’re looking at a project list, you look at what can be put off a year and what do we have to do now,” Pimentel said. “So coming out of recession, most of the projects are the bare minimum of what needs to be done. It’s not what we should do — it’s what we have to do.”

Pimentel said the recession has meant that many “community space” projects, such as new parks or public art installations, have had to be postponed until the city’s revenues return to pre-recession levels. Chris Schneiter, an engineer with the Public Works Office, said that the city’s streets have been hit especially hard in recent years due to the lack of funds.

Still, in addition to the bare-minimum repairs that Santa Cruz needs to continue functioning smoothly, the 2013–15 CIP does contain a few new projects that have the potential for long-lasting impacts on residents.

One that has sparked community interest is the proposed creation of an estimated $115 million desalination plant in Santa Cruz, which some locals have strongly opposed due to the project’s potential environmental impact. Next year’s CIP budget includes funds that will go toward preliminary studies of the project, which when completed will allow the city council to reach a final decision on whether or not to go forward with the plant.

Also on the agenda for next year is the construction of the Arana Gulch Master Plan, which will create a paved bike path connecting the end of Broadway at Frederick Street with the beginning of Brommer, and would also include several unpaved trails as well as grazing areas for cattle. The paved portion of the path would consist of an eight-foot wide porous concrete walkway and would also include a 300-foot stressed-ribbon bridge spanning the Hagemann Gulch.

Other projects covered in next year’s budget include the continuation of the city’s efforts to replace all street and stoplights with LED lights, which use less energy and also last much longer than the incandescent bulbs currently in place. The CIP also contains plans to install several solar panels behind City Hall.

“It’s great for saving energy and meeting our climate goals,” Schneiter said of these projects.

Despite these new developments, the vast majority of the projects contained in the CIP will consist of much-needed repairs and upgrades to existing infrastructure, ensuring that the services residents depend on continue to function smoothly. Pimentel said this is the way Santa Cruz has kept itself going since it first became a city.

“I think we’re approaching 150 years soon,” Pimentel said. “There’s always been a capital component. It may not have been so formal 146 years ago, but definitely that was the case in some way, shape or form.”

Federal Student Loan Debt Reaches New Milestone

City on a Hill Press — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:54:42 +0000

Illustration by Louise Leong

At more than $1 trillion, total student loan debt in the United States recently surpassed total credit card debt, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Combined with credit debt and local, state and federal government debt, Americans today face a seemingly insurmountable task in obtaining an education at a reasonable cost.

In this time of uncertainty and recession, it is time to reevaluate our public education system and the financial options available to students. The impact of the student loan debt crisis does not only hinder college graduates — it damages the economy as a whole.

In California, we once had a policy called the Master Plan that kept the cost of attending UC affordable. Far from keeping to the plan, fees have risen astronomically in recent years.

To pursue students who have defaulted on $67 billion’s worth in college loans, the Department of Education has hired 23 private collection agencies. Many graduates cannot afford to make large payments every month and ultimately stop paying altogether.

The federal government offers three lending programs:

1.    Stafford loans, subsidized and unsubsidized rates
2.      Parent loans for undergraduates, PLUS loans for graduate students
3.      Need-based Perkins, set to expire this year

These loans provide advantages over private loans and credit cards because they offer fixed interest rates and deferments on repayment, among other consumer protections. However, students do not have the option to declare bankruptcy on federal loans. Payment plans are generally inflexible once one is out of school and unemployment is still a large problem.

By launching its “Know Before You Owe” student loan project on April 11, the CFPB has made strides toward educating families about college costs. A new government website allows prospective college students to compare costs of various undergraduate and community colleges.

However, more drastic changes must be considered to alleviate the burden many graduates must shoulder. The editorial board of UC Riverside’s student newspaper, The Highlander, released a proposal in January 2012, the UC Student Investment Proposal. Also referred to as Fix UC, the proposal allows students to attend a UC at no upfront cost and requires them to pay the university 5 percent of their annual income for 20 years after graduation.

This type of radical change in the way students pay for a public education could mean a more stable way of generating revenue for the UC and an accessible payment plan for California public college students. A similar proposal has been made to address CSU budget problems.

On July 1, 2009, the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 was enacted. Its income-based repayment plan allowed graduate debt for the class of 2012 and beyond to be forgiven after 25 years of payments capped at 10 percent of one’s annual income.

President Obama proposed a change in his 2010 State of the Union address — which Congress quickly passed — that lowered the length of payments to 20 years and reduced payments to 10 percent. This type of alternative policy is a step in the right direction.

Australian universities use a system similar to the Fix UC proposal. In Finland, there are no tuition fees for university students.

The student debt crisis is out of control, and a return to the essence of the UC’s tuition policy laid out in the Master Plan is key to a viable solution.
More info about Fix UC program:

Fix UC website: www.fixuc.org
Petition for Fix UC: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/fixuc/

A Shaky House of Cards

City on a Hill Press — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:35:27 +0000

Background image by Patrick Yeung. View Full Size >>

When the real estate bubble burst, the Wynn Hotel halted construction. The lot now finds itself in real estate limbo, waiting for visitors to simply start spending again. Photo by Rod Bastanmehr.

Vegas was engulfed by the same rampant optimism that fueled New York during the early stages of the early 1900s. Now the strip features the Big Apple’s own cityscape. Photo by Rod Bastanmehr.

Mediterranean Materialism: The Venetian hotel houses a hotel-wide gondola that travels through a channel of high-end stores. Photo by Rod Bastanmehr.

The faux-Eiffel Tower looks down over the strip. Photo by Rod Bastanmehr.

The Sistine Chapel is peeling off.

The artificial gold that frames the Venetian hotel’s ceiling-top mural is beginning to chip, with the fragments floating down onto the cigarette-burnt carpet. The dome’s blue sky is melting away, looking as if it has been years since anyone’s paid attention to it, and Adam’s finger, reaching out, reeks more of desperation than of the divine. Either no one sees it, or no one cares, but this is Las Vegas.

Beyond the painting’s decay, the city itself is similarly crumbling, and the lights of the strip are dimming. After two decades as the fastest-growing metropolis in the United States, Las Vegas’ population growth has flattened. It has the highest foreclosure rate of any major metro area, and the unemployment rate jumped from 3.8 percent to 12.3 percent in the last three years alone.

In the 1970s, when free love and a booming counterculture were en vogue, the birth of Las Vegas represented the seedier side of the revolution for freedom. But once the ice-cold reality of the ’80s hit, and the ‘rebuild, remodel’ cynicism of the ’90s set in, Vegas followed suit, demolishing its hotels and with them the history of its first cultural wave.

The city that once represented the pinnacle of optimistic grandeur is now headlining the recession. Over 13,000 people have been declared homeless in the past three years, an increase of over 17 percent since 2007. Hotel rates have plummeted by over 50 percent their cost a mere two years ago. And outside of the strip, there’s hardly a block without more than half of the houses foreclosed on. The dream is dead.

This is why I’m back here again, for the third time this school year.

Because Las Vegas is for sale. Because what made it so interesting from the beginning was that it was our city. We built this city, we defined it. It was the 20th century’s anti-Ellis Island, a sanctuary from the outside lands of reality. But moreover, we destroyed it, rebuilt it, defined it, and redefined it. We have complete ownership over this city. It is our single greatest creation.

“This place is a shit-hole.”

Amir Kahaleh is the kind of cab driver who knows the hustle of the strip well enough to have default conversations that will always loop back to a tip. Tonight, he is wearing a blue collared shirt, with just enough of his chest poking out to tell you he’s serious about the medallion he claims to never take off. He tells me it was one of the first things he bought for himself after receiving his first paycheck as a Vegas cabbie.

“I think this place is kind of magical,” I tell him. “Not in a direct way, but the allure of this street is kind of fascinating.”

“No, no, my friend … this place isn’t alluring. It’s rotten. It sucks you in with its rottenness, and, suddenly, you find yourself [with] no money or anything. It sucks you in. Horrible, horrible. Why are you here?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m here to figure out — why it is that I keep coming back to Las Vegas?”

He laughs, shaking his head and rolling down his window, throwing his fist out and uncoiling each finger one at a time, as if his palm holds the answer. “This,” he tells me, as he points to our destination, “is the real Vegas. This is all there is. Nothing more. When [you are] here, you accept it.”

He’s pointing to a fenced-off crater, filled with nothing but iron beams, rubble, cement blocks, and a couple of curiously clean cranes. This is The Echelon, the enormous multi-billion-dollar project that might one day be made up of four hotels. But today, it’s just settled for three buildings, nine floors each, made up of nothing more than concrete and steel beams sitting idly on some of the most expensive real estate in the nation, and waiting patiently for the people who broke ground on nothing more than promises to make good.

Kahaleh calls it a cemetery. I call it an artifact.

The Hotels

In 1931, construction on Hoover Dam began, bringing an influx of workers into Vegas, giving the city its first population boom and its economy, in the grips of the Great Depression, a much-needed boost. In March of that same year, Nevada legalized gambling in the hopes of giving those temporary residents a needed outlet for their sinful desires, and giving the city a few bucks of profit in the process.

“So, from the beginning, this town has been exploiting the very people that helped build it — in this case, literally, the construction workers.” I commented.

“Pretty much,” Dino tells me, his voice thick with that kind of cinematic Italian accent that makes you think he could order some pasta and a mob hit in the same breath. He is a daunting tower of a man of about 6’2’,’ reeking of scotch and stories, and all too eager to share both.

Dino — who apparently with no last name, like Cher or Madonna — has been a Vegas resident for going on 30 years, though the number fluctuates depending on the story’s requirements. If he’s playing innocent, he’s only been around for 15 to 20 years. If he’s preaching his mastery of the strip, the number can hit 40.

More importantly, Dino was here for ‘Vegas 2.0,’ a post-millennium moment, in which the strip was hit with a hard dose of reality. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, Vegas has seen gambling revenues fall only once since the 1970s. Even after 9/11, the town saw nothing more than a 1 percent drop in profits. However, in only the last year, gambling revenues have fallen 4 percent, with the number of conventions the city has held dropping 10.4 percent.

“On a lucky day,” Dino tells me, “you can book the type of room that was $500 a year ago for $110. High-end restaurants at the MGM [Grand Hotel] have gotten rid of most of their $400 bottles of wine and replaced them with $100 ones … the city is downgrading. It’s insane, you can see it everywhere.”

A limo driver whose job depends on the common guests’ desire for luxury, Dino has seen steadier days. Nearly 7 percent fewer cars have been crossing the Nevada-California border along Interstate 15, reflecting in part the fact that high gasoline prices are still prohibiting drive-in visitors from trekking across neighboring states. Making matters worse, three airlines with substantial service to Las Vegas — Aloha, ATA and Champion — have gone out of business.

“I don’t know if there are facts to support what I’m actually searching for,” I tell him.

“What’s that? The American dream?”

“No, just the Vegas one. I want to find the real Las Vegas, and see what happened to it over the last few years.”

“Oh, then you’ve got to leave the strip. Not even by much, but it’s the houses, pal. The houses.”

The Houses

Any hope for camaraderie with Dino is dashed the second I hear how much it’s going to cost me to be driven past the strip line and into the suburban neighborhoods he has warned me about. But, for the sake of the story (a phrase journalists throw around when they’re trying to justify stupid actions), I tell him to take me.

Here, Dino takes me to a woman named Lyn Houbish, a real estate agent. Houbish described people who attempt to make a couple bucks from the housing bubble’s bust. She spoke about a process in which realtors find homeowners who owe more on their houses than the house itself is worth. These realtors then sell them a brand new house at half the price of their old one, telling their clients to stop paying the banks the mortgage they owe on their old house, all in the hopes that the banks would rather sell the house than participate in a messy court case. In Vegas, even the realtors gamble, and always bet on a bluff.

“You don’t even understand how things were [in the Vegas suburbs],” Houbish said. “These houses were destroyed from people going crazy after being foreclosed on. Things were a mess. They’ve been a mess for a long time.”

The burst of the housing bubble hit harder than anyone could have predicted. When affluence came to America, the town with nothing to lose bet it all. In the early parts of the new millennium, construction began on larger and grander pieces of real estate. And people were buying — suddenly, apartment prices skyrocketed. Bigger hotels bought planning permits.

And the city that had seemingly grown overnight kept trying to get bigger.

Then in 2006, reality flooded the desert. The bottom fell out from under the housing market, and it turned out that realtors were selling what ordinary people feeling the crunch of hard times couldn’t buy.

“Overnight, homes plummeted nearly $200,000 in value,” Houbish said.

Right now, over 10 percent of the homes on a given Vegas street have been left uninhabited. Half of the houses that are left in standing condition have “For Sale” signs in front of their doors. Here, in Western Vegas — a portion of the city hit hardest — you would be hard-pressed to find a single house with a car in the drive way.

“You have to understand — this isn’t a city built on money. This is a city built on the promise of money … everyone in this town works with their fingers crossed. Everything is a gamble.”

Back to the Fantasy

Back on the strip, memories of a suburban graveyard seem too distant to pay any attention to. Here, the strip maintains exuberant neutrality in regards to all the happenings beyond the hotel lights. Whether they don’t know or choose to forget is up for interpretation. I am bathing in the fantasy of the strip — the one that allows Vegas to maintain its grandiose nature — which is a puzzling experience in light of the reality that exists just west of the boulevard. That reality amidst all the fantasy is the ghost I’m searching for.

There are ghosts everywhere on the strip. Just beyond the MGM Grand are three more unfinished sites — the 63 empty iron floors of the Fontainebleau, the forgotten shell that was once going to be Caesar’s Palace’s Octavius Tower, and two cranes hovering on a structure that was supposed to be a condominium building. Just past those is the New Frontier, a resort modeled after New York City’s Plaza Hotel.

“Isn’t that heap of trash the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen?” Alan Freedman asks me. “A friend told me that it was deemed so ugly that the Wynn [Hotel] had to plant a row of trees along it, just so guests wouldn’t stare at it from their windows.”

Freedman is the man who deals with the myths of the strip. He’s the MGM and Mirage Hotel’s spokesman, and the kind of ‘high-up’ individual who doesn’t mind sitting with a student journalist. But he’s also the person whose job it is to lie about how the strip is really doing, so trust — as with everything else in this city — is hard to come by.

“We made a structural change in our company to become more efficient and provide the same level of service,” he explained, defending the hotel in a town where scaling down and shutting down are one in the same. “We did have to advance that effort, because we are undoubtedly seeing a softening in the marketplace … It’s not an easy time, but we’ve seen worse.”

This is the first major recession that Las Vegas has had to deal with since becoming a hybrid of both a city and a tourist attraction. In 1991 and 1992, the last somewhat comparable fiscal freeze, non-gaming activities in Vegas provided just 42 percent of the town’s overall revenue. Now, that number is roughly 60 percent. Nevada has no income tax, and greatly relies on taxing casino owners and their respective establishments. Now that no one is willing to lead a life of luxury, the state is scrounging.

Jessica Smith,* a hotel manager who requested anonymity, sees the casino’s failures as being too intricate to Vegas as a whole to ignore. When I tell her of Feldman’s claims of affluence, she is quick to correct.

“The stock price of MGM, Bellagio, Mirage, and eight other Strip resorts, has halved. In recent weeks, the company eliminated 440 middle management jobs to save $75 million annually. Nothing, I repeat, nothing, is okay.”

Take, for example, Sheldon Adelson, who has lost more money during the rigors of the economic collapse than anyone else. He is the 76-year-old chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns the Venetian hotel, the Convention Center, and a plethora of other lavish landmarks. In 2007 and 2008, he was the third richest person in the world, with a net worth of $40 billion. By February of 2009, he’d lost $36.5 billion — more than the GDP of half of the countries in the world. That’s his crane parked between The Venetian and The Palazzo.

“It’s horrid here, but we’ll bounce back,” Smith said. “It’s like everywhere else. Everything here is just an exaggeration.”

And there it is. This is what I have been looking for — an explanation as to not just what happened in Las Vegas, but why it matters. And that’s because Las Vegas is not a real city, but something else entirely. It is, as Smith explained, an exaggeration. It personifies every aspect of American culture, from its moments of affluent excess to the pitfalls of a culture that bet too big.

In the wake of our country’s newest motto, ‘big businesses, big problems,’ the world’s biggest convention city is now finding its streets curiously empty — I guess that’s what happens when you’re a city known for extravagance during a time when extravagance is the problem.

Checking out of the Venetian, the reality of Vegas became a heavy weight to carry. Knowing that in the cheap gold furniture hides the fundamental failures of a city whose money depended on the type of folks who are usually hit first and hit hardest, I couldn’t help but almost pity the town that was built on nothing more than big dreams and lousy intentions.

But as I was leaving, the air was different. Things weren’t falling from the sky, and Smith’s words suddenly felt a little more substantial. Looking up, I saw the source — two men balancing on a scaffold, repainting the Sistine Chapel a better shade of blue. Things on the strip might not change anytime soon, but the town is always making sure it looks its best.

~~~~~~

*Name has been changed

Slow Summer for Santa Cruz

City on a Hill Press — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:57:11 +0000

After a busy summer, the Boardwalk’s roller coasters and rides are now empty. Local business owners prepare for Santa Cruz’s off-season. Photo by Isaac Miller.

Every year after Labor Day, the neighborhood surrounding the Boardwalk transforms from a bustling pool of congestion to a near ghost town.

But even this year’s summer season — which traditionally brings with it lots of Boardwalk area bustle — was significantly more quiet than in previous years according to Praff and Sunni Patel, who own and manage the Super 8 Motel at 334 River Street, located just a few blocks from the Boardwalk.

“It was definitely slow,” Praff said. “It was harder to fill the rooms compared to previous years. Obviously, when the economy’s strong, people have the money to travel. This year, for sure, it was much harder. But you know, we’ll have to survive.”

According to the Santa Cruz Conference and Visitors’ Council (CVC), hotel occupancy in Santa Cruz County declined 7 percent this year from the previous summer, and the average daily rate was down 10 percent.

The CVC also reported that between 75 and 80 percent of summer visitors to Santa Cruz County came from Northern California and the Central Valley.

Tom Cole, manager of the Babbling Brook Inn, a 13-room bed and breakfast located about a mile from the Boardwalk and near UC Santa Cruz and Mission Street, said that the city tends to be a destination for people who live within a few hours a way.

“We always used the expression that, ‘If you can get there and back on a half-tank of gas, then let’s go.’ We’ve got quite a few communities within a half-tank of gas of us that are very [interested in Santa Cruz].”

While many of the visitors to Santa Cruz this summer live within a half-tank radius, local business owners, hoteliers and restauraunt employees noticed that fewer of them stayed overnight, creating a loss in total summer revenue.

“We do have a very strong market in terms of day-trippers,” said Christina Glynn, communications director for the CVC. “The challenge is encouraging them to stay overnight. Those reductions have a trickle-down effect and they will also [lead to] reductions in spending in the community.”

This year’s summertime decrease in business was detrimental enough to cause shops like Central Coast Running and Super Silver, formerly housed further from tourist thoroughfares, to reevaluate their locations.

“I needed to move somewhere downtown or I was going to cease to exist,” said Adam Boothe, owner of Central Coast Running. “With the drop-off in the economy, I needed to be somewhere more visible.”

Many businesses experimented this summer with different hours, lower prices and special offers to get visitors in their doors.

Surfrider Café, which opened in February, was one of many businesses that offered its patrons coupons for the Boardwalk this summer. Kris Reyes, community relations director for the Santa Cruz Seaside Company, which owns the Boardwalk, said that such coupons have proven to be a great success for the both parties involved.

“One of the things we saw this year was a growth in our discount offers because people were so value-conscious, probably more so than in years past,” Reyes said.

Unfortunately, although business at the Boardwalk was steady this past season, value-conscious visitors failed to produce a sizable amount of revenue at nearby hotels like the Patel’s Super 8.

“The challenge is going to be the slow season,” Patel said of the upcoming fall and winter months. “[The question] will be: ‘How slow does it get?’ If it gets really slow then it’s a cause for worry. But if we’re down like summer — 20 or 30 percent — I think we’ll survive. We’re just hoping that it’s going to pick up next year.”

According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Santa Cruz County saw its GDP decline for the second year in a row in 2008, making a pick-up in business a major question for 2010. But the Patels — and many other business owners — remain optimistic.

“You can’t take the ocean away, so more people [will always] like to come here,” Sunni said. “We are very lucky. It’s a great paradise we live in.”

Unemployment Hits Santa Cruz County

City on a Hill Press — Thu, 07 May 2009 10:55:31 +0000

Illustration by Justin Martinez.

A phrase frequently uttered across the country has shown its claws in the Santa Cruz job market recently, as firms make cuts and businesses endure the economic burn.

“These are tough times,” said professor Daniel Friedman, director of the UC Santa Cruz undergraduate economics program.

Santa Cruz, which has been hit particularly hard by the economic recession that has plagued the nation, has seen widespread unemployment since the economy’s initial demise last December.

According to a monthly data release from the Employment and Development Department of the California government, the Santa Cruz unemployment rate was 13.6 percent for the month of March 2009. This figure is 2 percent higher than the statewide average and 4.6 percent higher than the national average. The number has increased over the last few months and is higher than last year’s estimate for the period, at 8.3 percent.

As a result, over 20,000 citizens are unemployed in Santa Cruz County. Throngs of job-seekers have subsequently entered into a shaky job market that does not have enough positions to accommodate the influx.

“When we do open for public recruitment, we are getting a higher response than normal,” said Lisa Sullivan, president of the city’s human resources department.

“First of all, the city is not hiring as much as we normally do because of our own budget and economic issues,” Sullivan said. “One of our strategies is we are limiting the application period to the first hundred applications received. It gives us an opportunity to screen.”

Cuts are being made across the board, but a few industries have been spared from the financial downturn.

“Food products tend not to go down as much in a recession,” said Bill Tysseling, director of the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce. “Agriculture is doing pretty well right now compared to everything else. There is always a continuing need for people to eat.”

The hardest hit right now is retail, Tysseling said, as people do not spend as much in leisure industries when money is tight. Retail employment is down 20 percent compared to last year, and the arts, entertainment and recreation industry is down 16.7 percent since last March, according to the monthly labor force data report for Santa Cruz County.

There is not much hope from officials in Santa Cruz for improvement in the coming months — at least not yet.

Tysseling does not expect the economy to begin improving during the current year.

“Truth is, it’s going to be a hard time for the next 18 months,” he said.

People struggling have found support through numerous community organizations. The Second Harvest Food Bank, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army are just a few organizations that have been responsive to the needy, Tysseling said.

UCSC economics professor Friedman said, in response to nongovernmental organizations’ role in lending support, “A lot of things people are doing are right.”

In spite of the hardship, there is a silver lining for some companies.

“If you’re in a business not hurt as badly, this is a good opportunity to get great talent,” Friedman said. “You should be hiring.”