From time to time I have reported how things are going in Silicon Valley. Are things getting better? No they are not.

Our Catholic Church requires weekly collections of about $13,000 a week to meet its budget. For the last year that has been a problem which has worsened. Last week we took in about $8000. September of 2001 our Church helped 200 parish families who were in need. This included food and other means of assistance. The number has climbed to 1700 as of this month.

Unemployment is at about 11% with 160,000 programming jobs lost – gone. Hardware houses have also been hit. Housing vacancy is at 8% - the highest in memory. Mortgage defaults are the highest in 30 years.

On the “positive side”, the value of a house has increased 25% with sales up 7.5% from last year. Something is wrong and I think the worst is not yet here. Vacant office/RD space continues to increase and passed the 16 million square foot mark.

In 1982 Bank of America owned 1 million square feet of Office/RD space that was not leased. That combined with payment defaults caused B of A to go from the worlds largest bank to almost bankrupt. What I see today is much worse than ever before. Perhaps we should go back to being an agricultural community.

I would be interested in hearing how other areas of the country are doing. I do believe that a key indicator of a local area economy is our churches. How well a church does in collecting donations from parishioners and the amount of assistance the church gives to the community may be an indication of economic stability. I began examining this type of information in 1990 during our last recession and it seems to have some degree of validity.

Tom