The upheaval shaking Wall Street will hurt privileged enclaves as well as working-class neighborhoods from coast to coast. Find out which will fare the worst

By Prashant Gopal

Read the story on BusinessWeek.com here.

How many former Lehman Brothers bankers or AIG (AIG) executives are likely to be buying a Park Avenue apartment or a home in Darien, Conn., this year? Most likely answer: not many at all.

As anyone who works on Wall Street, invests in the stock market, or just reads the newspapers knows, the past few weeks for the financials sector have been as ugly as Frankenstein’s sister. People have seen their net worth eviscerated, if not obliterated completely.

But Wall Street’s woes are going to have a direct impact on communities around the U.S.—and not just because the proposed $700 billion bailout will result in higher taxes for most Americans. The pain will spread beyond the banks themselves to their back-office and IT operations, accountants, lawyers, and other professional service employees who depend on work from finance companies. It will also reach regional banks across the country. Credit-card companies and firms that deal with auto loans are also vulnerable as the credit market tightens. Even insurance companies, which have remained relatively strong, could be hurt if the economy worsens and workers drop existing policies and decide not to take on new ones. From CEOs to security guards, the financial, insurance, and real estate sectors employ approximately 9.8 million people in the U.S. alone, nearly 7% of the entire American workforce, and their spending potential is even greater.

New York’s Ripple Effect

Moreover, many of these jobs often tend to cluster around certain towns; bankers in one community and tech support in another. And while Manhattan is at the center of the turmoil, the fallout will be nationwide. Already the financial sector alone has lost 10,000 jobs through July, or about 2% of finance jobs.

Moody’s Economy.com projects that New York City and its suburbs will lose 65,000 finance jobs by the middle of 2010, or 11% of the total. Economists are projecting that Manhattan real estate prices will finally sink under the pressure of financial-sector layoffs and shrinking Wall Street bonuses. Wall Street accounts for about 12% of jobs in the city of New York, and a quarter of salaries.

“New York is the stone in the puddle that ripples across the country,” said Scott Simmons, vice-president and founding partner of Crist/Kolder Associates, an executive recruiting firm in Chicago.

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Welcome to our series on helpful tips for PolicyMap. With over 4,000 indicators of data and many features, we hope our weekly tips can help users better utilize PolicyMap. For a complete training, please join a free online session here: Click Here

Did you know you can share your work by emailing a link with the data and points on your map or printing a JPG or PDF to attach to a presentation. All Saved and Printed maps can be accessed by going to My PolicyMap. You must be logged in to be able to save, print, or email any map.

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PolicyMap allows users to consider where people are contributing to their IRA accounts.  By looking at the most recent data issued from the IRS for the 2005 tax year, users can view the percent of all IRS Tax Returns with IRA contributions at a state or zip code level.  Among the states, Vermont leads the country with the highest percent of returns claiming an IRA contribution.

Maine follows at 3.24%, with Montana at a close 3.23%.  The states with the lowest percentage of people contributing to their IRA accounts are Alabama, at 1.71% and Mississippi at 1.57%.  Nationally, 2.63% of income tax filers made an IRA contribution in 2005.

New Jersey leads the country with an average IRA contribution of nearly $4,000 in 2005; up from $3,270 in 2004.

Washington, DC lags behind all the states in the average amount of IRA contributions at $3,041.

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If you are having problems finding an address on PolicyMap, here are some suggestions.
For our example, we will use:

718 Arch Street, Suite 300N, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19106

Here are suggested ways you could enter the address

1. 1. 718 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
   2. 718 Arch Street 19106
   3. 718 Arch St., Philadelphia, PA
   4. 718 Arch St, 19106

Finally, we recommend the following points when searching for an address:

• If you have a zip code for an address; always use it in the search
• Do not include apartment, suite, or floor information
• State names can always be abbreviated
• Streets, avenues, boulevards, etc should also be abbreviated
• If you are searching for a city or county, make sure you add the state and do not abbreviate the city name.
  • e.g. Philadelphia, PA

• Some cities in an address will not match the zip code.  Search with just the address and zip code to find what the city its
  • e.g. Silver Springs, MD 20910 is recognized as Unincorporated Montgomery County, MD
• Search without the city designation
  • e.g. Pueblo City, Co should be Pueblo, CO

If you are having problems finding a census tract on PolicyMap, here are some suggestions on how to search and find a census tract.

• Make sure the correct state is selected from pull-down menu
• County names are not case sensitive but must be spelled correctly; PolicyMap will not auto-correct or show “matching” results
• For best results, census tract should be entered as a six (6) digit number
• Census tracts can be abbreviated but only by truncating trailing zeros

• e.g. 600300 can be entered as 6003
• e.g. 007300 can be entered as 0073, but not 7300 or 73

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In these uncertain economic times, data can play an important role in helping us best prepare for what may follow.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial, “A Regional Crisis“, listed concerns about the “cascading effects of the financial sector’s implosion” – namely the impact on those communities that many of the industry’s employees call home.  Which communities might be hardest hit as financial institutions falter?  Where are high percentages of the population working in the financial sector?  Which local governments, as the Times suggests, may need to start addressing an eroding tax base or increasing services for affected employees of these institutions?

PolicyMap maps the percentage of employed residents working in the F.I.R.E. sector (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate and Leasing) for zip codes throughout the US.  The chart below shows those zips where more than 20% of the people work in this sector are listed in the chart here.  Those both with high populations and high concentrations in the sector are strikingly spread nationwide: many zips in and around New York City; in Bloomington, Illinois; Jacksonville, FL; West Des Moines, Iowa; and San Francisco, CA.  Certainly, we are not suggesting that each of these places has cause for concern, just identifying where there are high percentages of residents employed in this field. Worth exploring.

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Welcome to our series on helpful tips for PolicyMap. With over 4,000 indicators of data and many features, we hope our weekly tips can help users better utilize PolicyMap. For a complete training, please join a free online session here: Click Here

Did you know that with PolicyMap you can see thematic area data and overlay data points?  Add Sites allows you to overlay Federal Housing sites, Hospital locations, Environmental Superfund sites, public and private schools, and any premium subscriber data that is shared with the public – all geocoded to their exact locations on the map.  Just go to Add Sites and choose which set, or sets, of data points to overlay.

Once data points for sites are loaded, you can select an indicator to see more information about that location.

If you wanted to know more about a feature or topic, send your request to info@policymap.com subject “Did you know…”

Sincerely,

The PolicyMap Team

Welcome to our series on helpful tips for PolicyMap. With over 4,000 indicators of data and many features, we hope our weekly tips can help users better utilize PolicyMap. For a complete training, please join a free online session here: Click Here

Did you know if you are seeing panels not fully loading on PolicyMap, this could be caused by a slowed internet connection.  PolicyMap works best through a cable/DSL and up internet connection.  If you are on a slower connection, try closing any additional internet browsers and applications which access the internet.

If you wanted to know more about a feature or topic, send your request to info@policymap.com subject “Did you know…”

Sincerely,
The PolicyMap Team

View an interview with Maggie McCullough, Director of PolicyMap, which recently ran on CNN Headline News.