Charting Valley’s Business Climate Can Be a Moving Experience

Economic indicators are not generally measured in tonnage, but that’s how one industry assesses the current economic climate in the San Fernando Valley.

The signs, at least according to this unscientific measure, indicate the Valley is definitely on the move, with the population on the increase but the business picture mixed after years of decline as companies fled for greener pastures.

“With the turn of the aerospace fortunes in 1989-92, there was a heavy migration out of the Valley that was unheard of before,” said Courtland “Corky” Weber, who has studied movement throughout the Valley for 33 years.

“That lasted for a long time, into 1996,” he added. “Then we got a stabilization of new people, one in for every one out. Now, we’re starting to see a little bit of a reverse again. The motor that drives all of this is jobs.”

It’s not unusual for the 55-year-old Weber to talk about the economy in trucking terms. A principal owner of C & M Relocation Services of Van Nuys, Weber is a veteran in the moving and storage business.

Movers--the folks who pack up households or whole companies and transport them from here to there or here again--have their fingers on the pulse of economic conditions, who’s going where and why.

Unlike government statistics, which lag 12 to 18 months behind, movers are in tune with the here and now.

And right now, they say, their industry is booming, possibly in the best shape it has been in at least 10 years.

But the economic signs they see are mixed.

Some are very strong signs: People are moving into bigger, more expensive homes. Former renters are joining the ranks of homeowners. Start-up companies are thriving and expanding.

But some moves have negative connotations for Valley growth: Electronic and manufacturing firms are migrating outward. Skilled jobs are giving way to minimum-wage positions or warehousing. A ripple effect from the decline in aerospace continues, affecting support services and businesses, such as the neighborhood dry cleaners.

“I guess you could say we’re the barometer of the nation’s economic climate,” said George Bennett, a vice president of the American Moving and Storage Assn., which monitors the $7-billion-a-year industry.

Locally and nationally, moving companies say they are scrambling to meet an unseasonal demand. “Traditionally, we are busiest during the summer,” Bennett said. “But for the last few years, it has continued over into the winter and remained busy throughout the year.”

Weber said the current moving climate in the Valley is unprecedented.

“Everybody is trying to accelerate their escrow to get in before the Thanksgiving holiday,” he said. “I don’t know the reason. Normally we slow down this time of year.” (A good possible explanation is the lowest home mortgage rates in more than 30 years, reduced again last week by the Federal Reserve Board.)

Weber and others say they are serving a large migration of homeowners to areas outside the Valley--to Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and, in particular, the Stevenson Ranch area of the Santa Clarita Valley.

Homes in the Valley are being “backfilled,” as Weber puts it, by a growing ethnic population, especially Latinos and Asians, often by families who pool their resources to double up in sprawling, ranch-style homes in now-aging neighborhoods.

“People are upgrading their homes and they are more likely to use a mover when they do that,” said Jill Kroening, the third generation of a family that has operated Andy’s Transfer & Storage in Glendale since 1945.

“In the early ‘90s, people were not using movers,” added Kroening, who is president of the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the California Moving and Storage Assn. She said the downturn forced the family to diversify Andy’s Transfer from primarily serving households to expand into commercial services, which now accounts for about 60% of its business.

From that perspective, Kroening said the businesses moving out of the Valley are those seeking larger facilities at a lower cost and a more stable work force.

Her own company has been unable to find more warehouse space in Glendale and is having trouble finding workers to meet its cyclical needs, Kroening said. “Labor is getting harder and harder to come by. We’re trying to hire, but everybody seems to already have a job.”

Both Kroening’s and Weber’s companies helped relocate from the Valley to Utah a sporting goods manufacturer which cited a more stable work force as the reason for the move--meaning employees who would stay on the job for lower pay. Another technology firm relocated to the Sacramento area in order to escape the rising overhead costs of Southern California, Kroening said.

The movie industry, which dominated the local economy as aerospace waned, is now beginning to curtail its spending, movers said.

But law firms are coming into the Valley from the Westside, and Internet technology and other start-up companies here are expanding.

Weber said he assesses the mood of his commercial clients--the mainstay of his business--by talking with employees. “I always like to ask the girl at the front desk or the guy on the machine, ‘Are you looking for a new job or are you going with them?’

“I really like what I do,” Weber said. “There’s so much going on underneath, it’s incredible. I get in behind the closed doors of people’s life efforts. I get to go into their closets and see what they are up to.”

Movers not only have a local view, but a regional, national and global perspective as well.

Weber predicts that Orange County “is going to be the mortgage capital of the world. Money institutions are flocking there like crazy.”

San Diego’s Golden Triangle, he said, is a magnet for medical supply and biotech firms “that have been growth-impressive, but [that’s] tapering off now.”

California last year led the nation in the total number of moves by professional carriers in and out of the state, but the outbound traffic was still higher than inbound, as it has been throughout the decade, according to the national moving association.

The Los Angeles area was third highest in the nation in outbound moves, but only seventh in inbound traffic.

The most common destinations of traffic from Los Angeles were Texas, Washington and New York. In turn, the greatest number of shipments into Los Angeles originated in New York, Texas and Illinois, according to the national association, which measures 75% of the professional moving market.

The California Department of Finance noted this year that statistics from 1997 indicate a net gain of 21,000 for the year in the state’s domestic population, the first increase since residents began leaving in droves during the recession in the early ‘90s, losing 1.2 million residents in four years.

But that gain has yet to show up in Los Angeles County, where residents continue to move away, some 73,000 more than moved in from elsewhere in the nation during 1997, although the county’s overall population grew by 93,000 due to foreign immigration.