North County was hit harder by the recession, but has rebounded faster than the rest of San Diego and is poised to add more well-paying jobs than neighboring areas, an economist said Tuesday.
“This is where the job are,” said Josh Williams, co-founder and president of BW Research in Carlsbad. “Not only have the number of jobs in North County grown, the quality of those jobs has improved.”
He said North County is in transition from primarily bedroom communities to an export-oriented economy led by clusters of biotechnology, environmental technology and active-lifestyle industries.
Williams spoke at the San Diego North Economic Development Council‘s second annual economic summit. The morning event at the Sheraton Carlsbad Resort & Spa drew a crowd of 450, including four of the five mayors of North County cities and many other public officials.
“If you look at North County on its own, it would be the 43rd largest state in the country,” he said, citing it’s population of 1.2 million.
One challenge for the region, he said, is that many skilled professionals continue to commute to other parts of San Diego County or Orange County. “The brains tend to live here, but a lot of them are going south,” he said.
Earlier in the event another economist presented an optimistic forecast for coastal California metro areas. Mark Vitner, senior economist and managing director of Wells Fargo, forecast growth in the U.S. economy to rise from 2.4 percent in 2014 to 2.8 percent this year, but said coastal California will do even better.
“The Bay Area and Southern California are some of the fastest growing areas in the country,” he said.
Vitner said the overall San Diego area benefits from the shift in economic growth from traditional manufacturing to communications and information technology.
“It’s much more centered around intellectual capital than physical capital. It’s been the technology behind the equipment that’s driving it,” he noted.
