Workers in a lift are surrounded by the frame of the new fieldhouse under construction in Shoshone Park on Aug. 19, 2024.
The Buffalo Niagara region has plenty of company when it comes to a lackluster jobs recovery following the Covid-19 lockdown.
The Buffalo Niagara region still is down about 4,800 jobs from pre-pandemic levels, according to seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a shortfall of a little less than 1%.
And other parts of upstate New York have had an even slower rebound. Places like Utica, Ithaca and Elmira all have shortfalls that exceed 2.6%.
But other major upstate metro areas are doing better than Buffalo Niagara. Albany and Syracuse have posted small job gains since the pandemic, while Rochester is very close to recovering all of its Covid-related job losses.
Of course, none of that terribly impressive when you consider that the nation recovered from the Covid lockdowns more than two years ago and now has more than 4% more jobs than it did before the outbreak.
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“New York’s recovery has been notably unbalanced on a regional basis,” said E.J. McMahon, senior fellow at the Empire Center, an Albany think tank. “Most regions of New York have yet to recover the private-sector jobs lost in the wake of pandemic lockdowns – and the Empire State trails far behind the rest of the U.S.”
