Since Santa Clara County’s Shelter In Place Order in March, OED has had played several key roles in the City's response.

The first role was to provide vital, accurate information and help to our impacted businesses, identifying sources of funds, linking businesses to community-based support organizations, and creating multi-lingual web-based guidance and education. The second role has been to access and analyze data for insights on how the pandemic is impacting all aspects of the local economy, to help guide the City's efforts through the recovery process

This fall, Deputy Director for Economic Development Chris Burton presented a summary of the analysis and an update on our department’s recovery activities to department heads and to the Community & Economic Development Committee of the City Council.

The pandemic-induced recession caused steep GDP declines and greater job losses than the Great Depression. Any rebounds have been driven by federal stimulus actions, but it’s not clear that small and service-based businesses can survive if conditions continue or reverse. Overall, advertising, ecommerce and communications continue to drive technology industries, which in turn buoy the stock market. Technology companies have been quick to adapt by increasing their digital offerings.

OED began by examining how businesses are faring, not by sector, but by levels of vulnerability, and found three different economic realities:

• Stabilized: businesses which can transition to remote work with little loss of productivity
• Holding on: businesses that rely on interpersonal contact, for instance, retail, hospitality
• In crisis: business required to shut down for long periods, not able to transition, with resulting displaced workers and remaining workers stressed with family care.

In the video of the November presentation to the Community and Economic Development Committee, you will learn more of the sector-by-sector breakdowns of recovery patterns, analysis of the relationship between consumers staying at home and total consumer spending, and the serious impact on small businesses – almost 40% of those who shut down in March are still closed at the end of October.