The economy of the San Fernando Valley will grow by 3.4 percent this year – slower than the 4 percent average it has grown in recent years but still faster than the greater Los Angeles-Orange County area, faster than Ventura County and faster than the state as a whole. In fact, it’ll grow faster than about anywhere else. That’s the conclusion of the economists at California Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting. “The San Fernando Valley is a true economic hotspot, whose performance compares favorably to almost any other geography,” said Matthew Fienup, the executive director of the economic research group in Westlake Village. Fienup along with Dan Hamilton, the director of economics at the research group, have produced the Valley Economic Forecast for the Business Journal for four years. Their latest findings were presented at a breakfast event Jan. 15 at the Hilton Woodland Hills hotel, and their reports appear on subsequent pages. Broadly, they see the U.S. economy growing at a much slower clip in 2020 largely because of the ongoing trade war; the “outlook for the nation has eroded dramatically,” Fienup said. California’s economy will slow but less than that of the United States as a whole. The Valley’s economy will slow but less than that of the state. On the jobs front, a sector that economists call “Information and Technology” continues booming in the Valley. The reason: that sector includes motion picture production as well as software engineering and the like. It happens to be the highest paying sector, too, and goes a long way toward explaining why the Valley is an economic star. Not all is rosy in the Valley. It has excruciatingly high housing costs, even compared to its high-priced neighbors, and “the mismatch between housing costs and incomes has significant social costs,” Fienup said. Notably, those costs include a lack of upward economic mobility for many along with an exodus of workers, especially younger and lower- and middle-income workers. In separate reports on the following pages, Hamilton assesses both commercial and residential real estate in the Valley and he examines the Glendale and Burbank economies in a separate report. That’s because those two cities are relatively large and can tip the overall forecast in such a way as to distort the picture the rest of the San Fernando Valley.
