Those events happened against a backdrop of flat job growth in the county, a departure from historical growth of roughly 1.5% to 2% a year, says Delores Conway, director of the University of Southern California Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast. "We haven't seen the worst yet," she said. "It's going to be a challenging year, but the market's not going to fall off a cliff, either." Conway predicts that a resilient and diverse economic base aided by an unemployment rate of about 4% -- an increase of about 80 basis points vs. a year ago but still below the nation's 5% unemployment rate -- should begin to lead the county out of the slump in 2009.
