Detroit-Area Recession Means More than Unemployment

Michael Rocha, Detroit-area born and bred, subscribes to the adage that when the national economy catches a cold, automotive towns catch the flu.

Circumstances for the 43-year-old Rocha show that the severe economic recession, in the Detroit area and elsewhere, creates problems that go beyond people losing jobs. Extended families end up living under one roof, health care is not available and life overall simply isn't as good as life once was.

"It's like everything wrong that could happen, it just came down in one fell swoop," Rocha says.

He's currently unemployed, but that's not all. His 80-year-old father, a retired barber in a depressed state, has moved into the family home. So have his 20-year-old daughter-in-law, her unemployed boyfriend and their 18-month-old twins.

In a different economy, this might have been the happiest time of his life. He married his second wife in January, after what he describes as a long and loving courtship. Their union remains solid, he says, in spite of all the troubles and pressures that 2009 has wrought.

Rocha is a print journalist, educated at Detroit's Wayne State University. In May, he lost his 12-year reporting position at The Saginaw News, based in a town 90 miles north of Detroit along the hard-hit Interstate 75 automotive corridor. Ironically, Saginaw often is called "Little Detroit" because of the similarities -- rampant unemployment, high crime, rundown abandoned neighborhoods and struggling schools.

Rocha's employer slashed staff in a cutback to three-days-per-week print newspaper production. His new wife, whom he met in the newsroom, kept her job but with a 40 percent pay cut. He applied to his hometown Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, but the quest was fruitless because those newspapers also are cutting back. He even applied for an $11-an-hour reporting and photography position at a rural mid-Michigan weekly. He was turned down.

"These days, newspapers only want 22-year-olds straight out of college," he says.

He has searched for other types of work, with no luck except for a one-night gig helping a friend steam-clean a small office building. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, official September unemployment rates up the I-75 corridor were 27.9 percent in Detroit, 35.2 percent in Pontiac, 26.3 percent in Flint and 19.7 percent in Saginaw. Michigan's 15.3 percent overall unemployment rate is the highest in the nation, where the count stands at 10.2 percent.

That's not all. Rocha says his father constantly complains and possibly has become afflicted with dementia, but no funds are available even for assisted living. He has his own health care challenges, stemming from a chronically bad back and from a knee ripped apart while playing high school football. But his limited health insurance will expire in December, along with his newspaper severance pay. Meanwhile, his daughter-in-law and her boyfriend frequently are inattentive parents, and so he is filling what he calls a "Mr. Grandmom" role.

"Sometimes, it's like I don't even have time to look for work," Rocha says.

When will it all end? Rocha says he has no idea. With the Christmas holidays approaching, a newspaper reporter who once covered poverty issues may end up joining the Detroit area's long and winding unemployment lines.