John Schoen / msnbc.com

 

John Ravenscroft, manager of Mad Anthony's restaurant in Elkhart, Ind., says business is picking up.

ELKHART, Ind. -- As economists sift through the tea leaves looking for signs of recovery, they might want to stop by for a beer at Mad Anthony's on Main Street.

When times get tough, eating out is one of the first things people trim from their budgets. So when this Fort Wayne-based brewery decided to open a fourth restaurant here about a year ago -- with the economy still in free fall -- it was something of a leap of faith.

Now, as the economy here shows early signs of pulling out of a steep slide, the leap appears likely to pay off, according to John Ravenscroft, the restaurant's general manager.

"I think we're getting closer (to recovery)," he says. "We've had our ups and downs. But right now we're getting to where business is consistent."

After getting his degree in hospitality management at Purdue University, Ravenscroft decided to come home to Elkhart, where he landed a job as a server when Mad Anthony's first opened. A year later, he's running the place.

At opening, with Elkhart in the depths of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, some skeptics doubted the restaurant could make a go of it.

"They said, 'You've got to be out of your mind to start a restaurant'," he says.

Unemployment in Elkhart had logged the sharpest increase in the nation in 2008 -- jumping from 4.7 percent in January to 15.3 percent when Mad Anthony's opened in December, and continuing to climb through the spring.

When the restaurant began taking job applications, "people were lined up around the block," said Ravenscroft.

After a honeymoon period when local patrons checked out the new place in town, Mad Anthony's settled into a slower pace. These days, business may pick up one week only to fall off the next. Ravenscroft figures it's because patrons with biweekly paychecks are still limiting their dining out.

On a recent Wednesday evening, a lively group of regulars fills up the bar; the restaurant, which seats about 200, is less than half full. Still, traffic has picked up enough to keep the restaurant consistently in the black, said Ravenscroft. And the banquet room calendar is booked with holiday parties through the rest of the year.

Several other restaurants have opened nearby in the past year, which helps create something of a destination for local diners.

 

John Schoen / msnbc.com

Mad Anthony's, located in a refurbished cinema building on Main Street, is part of a broader push to spruce up downtown Elkhart.

"For the longest time people would take their money and go to Mishawaka or South Bend," said Ravenscroft. "Now they know they don't have to go that far."

Ravenscroft says his next goal is to try to attract customers to Elkhart from those other towns.

Restoration of the historic ELCO Theater -- scheduled to reopen in about a year -- is also expected to help bring more diners to the area. Steve Gruber, president of Downtown Elkhart, says the project is on track with plans to open its new season a year from now with a performance of The Nutcracker Suite in time for Thanksgiving.

Gruber says he's also seeing a pickup in interest from investors who have begun buying up buildings downtown at bargain prices.

"We're definitely hearing about a return to residential rehab -- taking second floor space that was dormant and turning them into apartments," he said.

ELKHART, Ind. -- Returning to his hometown, Chris Burkhead hopes he's seeing signs of change in the devastated local economy.
When first profiled in July in "Faces of Elkhart," the third-generation member of two highly successful family businesses was living in Davenport Iowa, telecommuting as chief estimator for the larger concern, Indiana Plastics, while his wife, Angela Lucterhand, studied to be a chiropractor.

John Makely / msnbc.com

Chris Burkhead, project estimator with Indiana Plastics, Inc in Elkhart, Ind.

Though he was involved in the company business throughout, and traveling frequently back to Elkhart, Burkhead has watched his town suffer much of the recessionary storm from a distance.
With Lucterhand nearing the completion of her studies, the couple recently returned to Elkhart with their two dogs, Snoop and Bootsie, and visions of making their life here. They're renting for now, but will look to buy their own place -- "just a good starter house" -- once Lucterhand has finished an internship and started to practice.
In the meantime, Burkhead, 26, said his family's enterprises, which include Kruis Mold and Engineering and are run by his aunt, uncle and stepdad, are feeling a decline in sales but "still doing fine," as they were when he described the family's rather simple formula for success in the July article: Make quality products, keep customers happy, constantly improve efficiency and avoid debt.
And he sees positive signs elsewhere in Elkhart, starting with a number of new and reinstated jobs in the RV industry. Friends recently opened an upscale restaurant, McCarthy's on the Riverwalk, which was booming with lunch business on a Monday earlier this month.
"Things seem to be OK," Burkhead said. At Indiana Plastics, "We've gained a couple new customers this year and that will really kick off next year. We're pretty primed for a good 2010."

ELKHART, Ind. - In hard-hit Elkhart, Ind., there are glimmers of economic hope as some recreational vehicle makers and other companies have begun hiring again after a long downturn.

But with the county jobless rate still well above the national average at 15 percent, state, county and local officials are pulling out all the stops to bring in more jobs, aggressively offering tax incentives to bring in new business or get existing businesses to expand.

And they are leveraging Elkhart’s national reputation for joblessness as a great reason for businesses to move here.

"When the president of the United States comes to your county twice in a short period of time, you are right up at the top,” economist Morton Marcus said recently at an Elkhart-area business luncheon. “You couldn’t have gone out and bought advertising like that ... We have seen this county really highlighted in the country, and as a result, people say, ‘Well, maybe that’s the place I want to go.’ Take advantage of that.”

Local officials are trying to do just that, stressing the area’s assets: highly skilled workers, seven million square feet of available factory space and a basically union-free environment where the average hourly rate for most factory jobs is under $20 an hour.

And they have been aggressive in the use of tax abatements or phase-ins — essentially giving job-creating businesses a reduced tax assessment on upgraded property and equipment for up to 10 years. A typical arrangement in a five-year abatement is no tax the first year, followed by 20 percent of the normal tax the second year, and so on.

The idea is that the projected tax revenue from the new jobs will quickly offset the reduced business tax revenue.

“Under better times I would not be there at all,” says Elkhart Mayor Dick Moore. “But with 20 percent unemployment in the city we thought we had to make an exception. We needed to do something if we could without breaking the bank.”

Such incentives are used across the country by communities in similar straits — a strategy that some experts warn could backfire if not crafted and monitored properly.

“Jurisdictions in Indiana and throughout the U.S. have been burned by companies unable to live up to their promises,” notes Kurt Zorn, an economist and professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University.

In those cases, communities have doled out tens of thousands of dollars without seeing the projected jobs or tax revenue. Detroit, for example, has “spent a lot of money to support a dying industry” by focusing on abatements to existing companies in the auto sector, says Laura Reese, director of the Global Urban Studies Program at Michigan State University.

Elkhart-area officials say they initially approached tax abatements with trepidation and are very careful about what they dole out — including “clawback” provisions that require companies to return some tax savings if their job projections fall short.

Mike Yoder, one of three Elkhart County commissioners, recalls when the county started looking at the tax tool three years ago. “Philosophically we didn’t like it,” he says. “Industry is supposed to spring up on its own.”

Back then the idea was to explore abatements for companies in advanced technology, the goal being to help Elkhart, the so-called RV capital of the world, diversify its economy.

That goal changed quickly as Elkhart was hit hard by the recession. The area's unemployment rate grew to become the nation's worst, topping out at nearly 19 percent in March, compared with 9 percent in August 2008. “The County Council said, ‘We just need jobs,’ so the advanced technology requirement went away,” says Yoder.

The county has approved four abatements so far this year, and the once-skeptical Yoder now is a key backer, saying news of new investment also brings the area a much-needed boost in confidence. “The companies coming in are not in recession, so they bring optimism and growth,” he says.

Izzy chairs — a case in point
One of the recent abatement beneficiaries is Izzy Plus, a Michigan-based company that makes high-end office furniture.

Izzy already had a chair assembly plant in Middlebury, in the northeast corner of Elkhart County when, early this year, it went looking to relocate an assembly line from a plant it was closing in Belton, Texas.

Its options included moving the line to Izzy facilities in Alabama or Michigan.

CEO Chuck Saylor recalls how aggressive Indiana officials were in recruiting Izzy, including Gov. Mitch Daniels, who gave him his direct phone number and said state agencies would look into buying Izzy’s chairs.

It also didn’t hurt Elkhart’s chances that almost all the resources needed for the chair assembly line were within a 75-mile radius of the area.

Indiana offered nearly $1 million in tax grants and up to $100,000 in training grants if Izzy added 85 jobs in Elkhart within three years. Izzy projected those jobs would add $3.8 million to its payroll, which had been at $5.8 million for 140 workers.

Elkhart County sweetened the pot by offering a tax abatement worth $23,000 over five years if it met the jobs projection.

Saylor and his board did eventually decide to move the line from Texas to Elkhart County.

“While there were some good incentives, it wasn’t so much about that, to be honest," Saylor says. "It was about the people and a governor who was walking the talk. I was just incredibly impressed.”

So far, Izzy has hired some 30 workers for the new line of business at the Indiana plant, which went through a major overhaul.

“It was moving a factory into a factory,” plant manager Les Stoller says while showing off the facility, which assembles up to 4,000 chairs a week.

Win-win, or win-lose?
The experience with Izzy raises two questions that are asked across the country when abatements are used.

First, would a company that gets abatements have invested anyway?

That is almost impossible to know because companies have no interest in divulging that ahead of time, says Laura Reese, director of the Global Urban Studies Program at Michigan State University.

By keeping its motives hidden, a company can more effectively play communities off one  another, says Reese, who has researched and written about abatements.

“It’s a negotiating tactic,” acknowledges Yoder.

Reese worries that if a community ends up “offering more than it can afford, more than it might get back … then you’re just wasting local resources. Very likely the company didn’t need that much of an incentive to begin with.”

“If you, a community, don’t know what the company needs, but you know that all your neighbors are offering incentives, too, then it drives a particular locality to offer extra,” she adds.

Zorn, the Indiana University professor,  says that kind of competition can be cutthroat. “I just hope policymakers are asking, ‘Is it worth what we're offering?’" says Zorn,  who himself is on the economic development council that helps Bloomington, Ind., attract investors. "Sometimes I scratch my head and think they offered too much.”

The second question is broader: Is this really economic growth on a national level when one community — in this case Belton, Texas — loses at the expense of another?

“Elkhart County is a winner,” notes Zorn. “And that’s the game of economic development. Whether you think it’s successful or not, you can’t be a reputable state or locality without playing the game.”

But he acknowledges that in a case like this, there is no net gain for the national economy.

"You’re just transferring jobs from one area to another," he says. "In fact, you could argue that there’s a loss in terms of taxpayer money.”

In Belton, Izzy had employed 140 people and had even received financial help in recent years from the local economic development council.

Belton Mayor Jim Covington says the city offered Izzy some incentives to stay, but wouldn’t specify what. “We did everything we could to keep them,” he says.

“We were sad to see Izzy go,” he says, although he added that he can understand the business decision. “Many companies are downsizing and controlling expenses by consolidating operations,” he notes. “There are no hard feelings.”

Drawing the line
So where do you draw the line on what to offer? Elkhart County and the city governments within it use a scoring system that calculates the “tax savings” offered to a potential investor and compares it to how much the projected new jobs will provide in new local government tax revenue.

In Izzy’s case, officials calculated the county would get $57,000 in new tax revenue annually from those new jobs — compared with the $23,000 in abatements. The state, for its part, expects $129,000 more in income tax revenue.

Yoder and Moore, Elkhart’s mayor, say some companies have asked for too much and have been turned away. “Everybody needs to pay property tax,” Yoder says. “Frankly, it’s pretty easy to draw the line.”

Yoder notes that sometimes companies are turned away for other reasons as well.

“We’ve had companies offer $9 to $10 hourly wages, and we tell them, ‘It’s not going to work,'” he says. “We’d like to get $15 to $16 an hour, and we tell companies that.”

Yoder also says officials try to be vigilant and avoid "cutthroat competition" with other communities.

Moore has a similar view.

“There is no doubt that we are in competition with the world and even our neighbors sometimes,” he says. “We are willing to compete with anybody within our means. But we’re not going to bankrupt the city to bring in new businesses and jobs."

As Elkhart’s local governments work the tax angle, the privately operated Elkhart Economic Development Council also is trying to recruit businesses to move to the area.

Dorinda Heiden-Guss, director of the council, said interest in Elkhart “is the highest … ever experienced.” She said businesses have promised to invest $105 million in the area this year, which would lead to 2,600 new jobs.

Unemployment in the county dipped to 15 percent last month, but the fact is that most of those new jobs have yet to materialize and are predicated on the economy rebounding and those businesses, many of them new, succeeding in the market.

Yoder, for one, expects most of those jobs will show up next spring. But he adds: “I’m concerned the new jobs won’t hit this economy soon enough.”

Grant Black, an economist at Indiana University in South Bend, echoes that view. “It’s going to take a while to get people plugged back in,” he says, citing federal data on households showing that Elkhart County had 79,500 people employed in September — 18,000 fewer than in September 2007.

Other officials have that same concern as winter, and freezing weather, approaches.

“The challenge for us is to keep our food pantries full, to provide energy relief and clothing,” says Larry Thompson, mayor of Nappanee, a town of 7,000 in south Elkhart County where RV layoffs left some 3,000 people without jobs. “Those needs haven’t gone away.”

Elkhart community leaders on Wednesday brainstormed ways to pull out of the recession, starting with the premise -- now self-evident -- that the county can no longer expect the RV industry to hold up the community. In it's effort to re-envision the future, The Elkhart Truth reported, the county called in people who know their way around the challenge -- leaders from the Rust Belt.

The gathering, called Horizon 2.0, is a reincarnation of a push that started in 2002 to create a sustainable, attractive, well-planned economy. But it does so in dramatically changed circumstances, and with a greater sense of urgency.

"Growth stopped in 2008, and it may never be the same," said Bill Johnson, chair of the Horizon Project, at least in the industries the county has relied on in the past.

Speaking to the need to beef up education, and retain educated people -- now one of the forum's top priorities -- were two men who have grappled with that juggernaut -- former Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson and Bob Jorth, who runs an education fund in Kalamazoo, Mich.

And in a nod to Elkhart's new economic reality, they brought John Fetterman, mayor of Braddock, Pa. Since his election in 2005, Fetterman has been trying to rebuild the town as a creative urban village from the ground up. The town was devastated by the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and '80s and the wave of illegal drugs and violent crime that followed.

In 2002, Elkhart government and business leaders issued an SOS: The Elkhart economy--though booming--was heading for trouble if it didn't start changing its ways. They launched the Horizon Project and drafted an extensive plan to build a more sustainable economy in the face of growing global competition. Among other concerns, as reported by The Elkhart Truth, the Horizon Project analysis warned of Elkhart County's dependence on a few industries. It advocated offering incentives to encourage new industries, beefing up work force training, and an overhaul of land-use rules. The plan got under way -- but not in time to blunt the impact of the current recession.

Now, with the RV industry operating at a fraction of its earlier strength, and grinding unemployment levels here, the need to complete the economic makeover is just that much more urgent, say organizers. Enter Horizon Project 2.0, an attempt to jump-start the project, beginning Wednesday.
"We are in desperate straits," William Johnson, chairman of the Horizon Project from 2002 to 2006, told The Elkhart Truth. "We've got to figure out some ways to change the way we approach community development."
One of the organizers of this renewed push, County Commissioner Mike Yoder, is quick to point out that Elkhart made noteworthy progress on Horizon plan's original goals.
Groundbreaking for a new extension of Ivy Tech Community College in Elkhart in July marked one concrete step toward the 2002 goal of raising the educational level of local workers. He says an overhaul of land-use and zoning laws represents real progress toward the goal of better planned development. A coordinated economic development office combined the resources of local and state offices in one place, to accommodate incoming businesses, he says. Breaking with tradition, the county put in place a tax abatement to attract high-tech companies.
"We were just getting to the point where we were beginning to implement this stuff when the recession hit," says Yoder. "We'd actually had only done one or two tax abatements for high-tech companies before the recession."
Progress was sometimes slow, says Yoder, in part because times were so good prior to the recession.
"One reason it was so tough was that nobody saw the needs for these changes."
Now, Yoder says, Elkhart needs to get to its unfinished business: to vastly improve its educational system for long-term development. And it needs to formulate a robust set of policies -- including tax abatements and other incentives -- to retain and fuel some of the nascent business clusters in the area, and attract new companies.
There is a sense of urgency among leaders trying to breathe new life into the Horizon project this week.
"We are slowly sliding -- in some cases not so slowly -- sliding behind other regions of the country," said Dan Boecher, a loan officer with First State Bank and incoming chair of Horizon 2.0, speaking to The Elkhart Truth. "The slide will continue if not addressed."

ELKHART, Ind. - Coroner John White is presiding over a sad tally in this northern Indiana county, tracking rising numbers of suicides he believes are linked to the lingering recession.

Rumors of an economic recovery may be whispered elsewhere, but here, where the downturn remains entrenched, 22 people have killed themselves this year, and two more cases were likely suicides, outpacing the county's annual average of 16 self-inflicted deaths.

In more than a quarter of the cases, White said, distress caused by job loss or financial failure was cited as the last straw.

“We have a real problem,” said White. “They left notes specifically stating that the reason they did this was because of the economy.”

Debra K. Gibbs, a 54-year-old homemaker in Goshen, in Elkhart County, didn’t leave a note. Instead, she simply sent her worried daughter out for soda pop on a summer morning — and then shot herself in the head.

Despondent over a pending home foreclosure and mounting bills, Gibbs took her life on June 23, the day after crews came to repossess her 2007 Chevy Malibu, the last purchase she’d made together with her late husband, Sam.

“She was doing everything she could to hold onto what was hers,” said Gibbs’ daughter, Rebecca Filley, 30, of Cassopolis, Mich. “This was a vivacious, very strong woman, and she was taken to her knees because of money.”

Spikes in Elkhart and elsewhere
The rise in suicides is alarming not only in Elkhart, which has been in recession since December 2006, but also in other regions of the country that also entered the downturn early, making this county of less than 200,000 a potential harbinger of similar deadly increases.

Federal figures on suicides during the current recession won’t be available for at least two years because of a lag in the way the deaths are collected and reported.

And, historically, only a slump of the magnitude of the Great Depression has had any overall effect on the nation’s suicide rates, which hovered in 2006 at 11.1 deaths per 100,000 people, totaling about 33,300 people a year, according to the American Association of Suicidology.

But in some U.S. communities that went into recession as early as 2005 or 2006, the ongoing crisis has been accompanied by a worrisome rise in suicide deaths. These spikes in suicides are especially notable because in most of the places hardest-hit by the recession, populations either held steady or dropped, census figures show.

“Everyone needs to be more aware with the stresses of 17 percent to 18 percent unemployment,” noted White, the Elkhart coroner. “Everyone really needs to be aware of what’s going on.”

Suicide experts say the reasons for taking one’s own life are complicated, and can’t be attributed to a single factor.

While there hasn't been a link between suicide rates and recent national recessions, which are declared based on many factors, there is a link with circumstances that come along with a recession, such as unemployment and home foreclosure, said John L. McIntosh, a professor of psychology at Indiana University at South Bend who researches suicide trends. Individually, people who’ve lost jobs commit suicide at rates two times to four times as high as those who are employed, the suicide association notes.

Medical and law enforcement officials who’ve watched the rise of suicides in their own communities say they can’t help but see a link with the downturn. “We’ve had many situations where people lost their jobs and that was the reason for why they do what they do,” said Sheriff Mark A. Hackel of Macomb County, Mich.

In that county of about 830,000, 81 people on average committed suicide each year between 1979 and 2006, records from the federal Centers for Disease Control show. But the figure jumped to 104 in 2008 and to 178 in the first seven months of 2009, a rise that has left Hackel’s deputies scrambling to respond to near-daily calls about suicide attempts.

In a county where unemployment still tops 18 percent, nearly twice the national rate, Hackel said he expects the trend to continue.

“I try to be hopeful, but I have a feeling we’re going to be dealing with this for a long time,” Hackel said.

Data on every U.S. county
You can see the suicide rate for U.S. counties for 1979-2006 in these PDF files:

Foreclosure notice triggers tragedy
In Columbiana County, Ohio, a rural community of about 108,000, the number of suicides has averaged 12 a year since 1979, according to the CDC. Suicides jumped to 14 in 2007 and to 21 in 2008. By June, there already had been 11 suicides in 2009, a spokesman for the coroner’s office said.

That tally included Betty J. Lipply, 72, of East Palestine, Ohio, who died Jan. 24, within days of receiving a foreclosure notice on the house her husband had built himself for their retirement. A family lawyer said she used an electrical cord to hang herself from a support beam in the garage.

“She just had to have been so depressed that no one knew just how severe it was,” said Lipply’s daughter, Sherrie Blum, 52, of nearby Darlington, Pa. “This was not my mom. Her family was her life.”

Robert B. Holman, the lawyer, said Lipply and her husband, Robert Lipply, also 72, were victims of a predatory lending scheme that used an inflated appraisal to authorize a home loan that the Lipplys could not repay. Holman filed a lawsuit on the couple’s behalf, but said the action is languishing in county court.

Blum blames the finance officials who approved the loan for her parents’ financial situation — and for her mother’s death.

“It’s been very hard on me. I’ve lost my best friend,” she said. “It upsets me, the fact that people do this to the elderly and then just take total advantage of them.”

Another Michigan community, Kent County, with a population of about 605,000, went into recession in September 2006. The county posts an average of about 47 suicides per year. But in 2008, there were 66 suicides, and in the first seven months of 2009 alone, there already had been 41 suicides, records showed.

Since then, it’s continued to go higher, reported Dr. Stephen D. Cohle, a forensic pathologist and the county’s chief medical examiner, rising to 57 suicides by the end of September, when the jobless rate was nearly 12 percent. In at least seven of the cases, there was some indication that the deaths were related to unemployment or financial trouble.

“It’s going up, and it does certainly correlate with the bad economy,” Cohle said.

They included an unemployed 52-year-old Sparta, Mich., man who hanged himself on New Year’s Day because he was “despondent over financial stress,” according to a case report. A 45-year-old Grand Rapids man shot himself in June after telling family members he was overwhelmed with credit card debt. And a 31-year-old Kentwood, Mich., man hanged himself in August in the wake of a home foreclosure and looming bills.

Economy only one factor
In many of those cases, however, the people who died by suicide suffered from depression and other emotional ills in addition to having financial problems, Cohle noted.

That’s an important point emphasized by suicide experts, who say it’s too easy to blame a slumping economy for the rise in deaths. McIntosh, the psychology professor at Indiana University at South Bend, says economic pressures simply increase the pool of people vulnerable to suicide.

“There are more of them that are closer to the edge,” he said.

Typically, a combination of conditions and events — depression combined with difficult personal relationships combined with a job loss, for instance — is what drives people to take their own lives.

“It’s an accumulative effect,” said Cathy Blum, a counselor in Elkhart who often works with people at risk for suicide and with the families of victims. “It’s like you have a glass of water and you’re dripping drops of water into and then it spills over. Perhaps unemployment is the final drop.”

While the impact of economy-related suicide on victims and their families is profound, detecting the effects on the larger society is difficult. An msnbc.com analysis of suicide data and economic data in U.S. metropolitan areas between 1994 and 2005, the period for which records were available for both economic factors and suicides, found no correlation between recent economic downturns and self-inflicted death.

That’s a conclusion shared by experts, including the American Association of Suicidology. Suicide rates did increase during the Great Depression, rising to a rate of 17.4 suicides per 100,000 people, but subsequent recessions have shown no clear association.

Could this recession be different?
But this recession could change that, McIntosh said. The depth and the breadth of the current downturn might be strong enough to nudge the national figures above the 2006 figure of 11.1 deaths per 100,000 people, he suggested.

“My guess is that it will be 12 or 13 by the time we’re done,” he said. “If it went up 1 per 100,000 or even 2, that would be a significant change.”

Worries about a national rise in suicide are shared by government officials who’ve been tracking suicidal tendencies — and trying to prevent deaths. A sharp rise in calls to suicide hotlines this year — from about 39,000 calls in January to 57,000 calls in July — prompted an infusion of more than $1 million in additional money to fund up to 20 crisis centers facing the biggest upticks.

About 30 percent of the increased calls were related to economic problems, noted Richard McKeon, the lead adviser for suicide prevention for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which helps pay for prevention.

“Our best assessment is that there is a relationship between economic distress and suicide, but it’s a complex relationship, not one that we would over-simplify,” McKeon said.

Preventing economy-related suicides requires the same skills and services as other suicide interventions, including 24-hour crisis lines, access to mental health counselors and to treatment programs to help with the drug and alcohol problems that often lead to suicide attempts.

‘What else can we be doing?’
But in an economic crisis, cities, counties and state programs that provided such help are cutting back, McIntosh said.

“I worry that people are trying to find places to cut their budgets,” he said. “There’s a great concern that we’re lowering our resources at the time we really need it.”

That’s a worry in Elkhart County, where the most recent suicide on Oct. 3 brought the likely tally to 24, which ties the region’s record for suicide deaths in a single year. The record year was 2007, after Elkhart first dipped into recession.

Crisis calls in the county are routed to a statewide hotline, because there isn’t enough money to staff a local line, noted Jim Smith, who coordinates a local suicide prevention coalition. People who’ve lost their jobs have usually lost health insurance, too, including coverage for mental health care.

Smith retains a list of counselors who’ll see suicidal people quickly and, sometimes, without charge. Members of his group speak out in public, hoping to reduce the stigma of suicide and to increase awareness of the warning signs. But he acknowledges it’s an uphill battle.

“We sit around and constantly ask: ‘What else can we be doing?’”

No bailout for suicide victims
People who’ve lost family members to suicides say what would have been most welcome is some last-ditch compassion from financial lenders.

Rebecca Filley says her Elkhart County family is still reeling after the loss of her mother, Debra Gibbs. She acknowledged that her mother hid her financial problems in an effort not to burden family members and then failed to address the desperate situation until it was far too late.

But in a country where big-name financial firms received government bailouts when they were in trouble, Filley said she can’t understand why there wasn’t more help for her mom.

“You’re talking about people who don’t have anything left and they’re taking away what little they have,” she said.

For Sherrie Blum, who is dreading her first Thanksgiving without her mother, the loss is particularly difficult when she hears people talking about economic recovery.

“I feel better as far as the people that have survived this and are able to go on,” she said. “But it don’t change for all the people that this has happened to. It’s not over for us.”

In the darkest hours of recession in Elkhart, optimists clung to this thread of hope: That in the past, this RV manufacturing economy always led the way into a downturn, but it also led the way out.
The mood at the annual Biz-ness Expo this week, as reported by The Elkhart Truth on Friday suggests that old adage just may be proving true once again.

The number of companies taking part in the the Chamber of Commerce event at the Recreational Vehicle/Manufactured Housing Hall of Fame was up 18 percent from a year ago.
And most of those interviewed--from purveyors of trout to insurance sales representatives--saw business looking up as 2010 approaches. It may not be the boom of 2007, but certainly, they said, it looks better than 2008 and early 2009, when so many businesses shut down that unemployment soared to nearly 20 percent from around 4 percent.
Helping fuel a modest rebound for this economy is an increase in demand for RVs. Manufacturer Jayco is hiring back 200 workers as it boosts production, The Elkhart Truth also reported this week.
Now the number of jobless is drifting down, hovering around 15 percent, and business is picking up for those businesses that survived.
As business one interviewee put it: "A lot of companies are starting to crawl out from under the desk."

ELKHART, Ind. - Finding a job in this challenging economic climate is a pitched battle, not the sort of adrenaline-fueled forays that members of the Elkhart-based Indiana National Guard’s 1538th Transportation Company grew accustomed to during 10 months in Iraq.

That lesson is being driven home daily for many of the 46 members of the 182-strong unit who had no jobs waiting for them when they returned home more than three months ago. 

“I just like to work, so… it kills me just sitting at home,” said Spec. Jerry Vanest, 36, one of five members of the 1538th that msnbc.com is following as they attempt to regain their financial footing.

As msnbc.com reported in July (“When Johnny comes marching home – to no job”), some of the unit’s unemployed citizen-soldiers saw their jobs vanish while they were deployed in Iraq, something that many of them thought couldn’t happen.

“I thought you were like guaranteed your job when you got home,” said Pfc. Christine McAllister, 22, of Bristol. “I didn’t know they could actually lay you off while you were gone. So that was a little shocking. I know it upset a lot of people.”

Members of the National Guard and Reserves are protected by the Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act when they are called to active duty. But that law doesn’t protect them when businesses are shuttered or forced to make deep cuts in their work forces.

And that was a common occurrence in Elkhart County last year, when the recession hit the backbone recreational vehicle industry full force as the 1538th was running convoys through the desert sands.

“Before we left … people said the economy’s getting bad and people were getting laid off, but it never really affected me or anybody that I knew,” said Pfc. Jonathan Maher, 21. “So when I came back home, it was like, ‘Wow, all these places are closing down, factories, you don’t see all these cars in front of them.’ … It was a big shock. … It blew my mind actually.”

Despite recent signs that the recession may be loosening its grip on Elkhart County, jobs remain in short supply. Several of the soldiers interviewed by msnbc.com said they had fruitlessly submitted dozens of applications since their return and often encountered “no work available” signs before they could even get in the door.

Sgt. Russell See, a 41-year-old welder who lost his job at Valmont Industries, said the only thing he’s been able to find is part-time work with his brother, chopping and selling firewood.

One job falls through, but another appears
Maher is one of the lucky members of the 1538th, even though the welding job he thought he had lined up on his return fell through. After working odd jobs for a time, he secured a mechanic’s job at the National Guard Armory in Elkhart, a one-year posting that he hopes will become permanent.

“But if this doesn’t work out then, the way I look at it, there’s always going to be trucks on the road,” he said. “You know, you can’t get anything everywhere from a boat, a plane or a train. You’ve got to have semis.”

Also working is 37-year-old Spec. Joseph Dilts, who lives in neighboring Fulton County with his wife and two children. Though his job as a plastics handler with Plastics Solutions Inc. in South Bend was eliminated while he was in Iraq, the company offered him a position as a press operator upon his return. The only hitch: He had to take a pay cut.

“It’s disappointing because it just makes it a little harder to get by,” he said. “I mean I’m grateful to have a job, but it’s too bad I have to take the pay cut.”

Jerry Vanest, 36, has seen his paycheck dwindle to nearly nothing as his hours as a part-time cook at Applebee’s have dried up. He’s preparing to go to Ivy Tech in January to pursue an associate degree in criminal justice, but in the meantime he’s chafing at the forced inactivity as his wife works full-time as a nurse at a local hospital.

‘I feel so guilty’
“I feel so guilty for that every day,” he said in the living room of their home in Mishawaka, where he occupies himself with household chores and home-improvement projects. “I wake up thinking, … she’s going off working real hard every day and she’s tired when she gets home, so I try to do as much as I can around the house to help her and run errands and get groceries and things like that. ‘Cause I do, I feel bad.”

Christine McAllister also is preparing for classes at Ivy Tech. In January, she will use her military education benefits to embark on a two-year program to become a licensed practical nurse. Then she plans to pursue her degree as a registered nurse, which will take another two years.

Just as Maher sees a bright future in the underside of a truck, McAllister said she is confident in her job prospects once she is trained and licensed.

“There’s always jobs in the medical field, so I’m not worried about that,” she said. “Once I get my degree, I’m good.”

(A sixth National Guard soldier interviewed in July, Spec. Heather Smiechowski, 25, declined to discuss her current employment situation.)

The scorecard for the five Guardsmen that msnbc.com is following – two working (albeit one at a lower wage), two heading back to school and one working part time – actually isn’t too bad given the current economic conditions in Elkhart County, said Scott Mitten, a former Army Ranger who now runs a job assistance program for the Indiana National Guard.

He expects there will be more success stories in the coming months, as more soldiers throw themselves into serious job hunts.

“The 1538th is still on their reset time,” he said. “We talked to a handful in the first couple weeks, but most of them wanted to depressurize a little bit and figure out where they are. They said, ‘Give us some time to settle down and we’ll come see you.’

“They understand the Indiana National Guard is here for them, and when they need a little help, they realize that there are programs to help them.”

COVENTRY, U.K. - Photographs of President Barack Obama run on a constant loop in the foyer of a factory here, roughly 100 miles northwest of London.

Shots from the photo-op show the president standing in front of trucks with “Navistar” emblazoned on the front and side, a publicity coup for the major American commercial truck and bus manufacturer.

But why are these photos being shown in Coventry, Britain’s down-at-heel equivalent of Detroit?

The answer lies in the flat-fronted truck looming behind the president: It wasn’t made in Illinois, site of Navistar’s headquarters, or Indiana, where the photos were taken; the vehicle was made at a factory in Coventry by Modec, a small British producer of battery-powered trucks.

“It was hard to believe that the most powerful man in the world was in front of a Modec,” said Darren Dewis, one of about 85 people employed at the company’s airy, glass-ceilinged factory. “It was brilliant, we were over the moon,” the 29-year-old cab assembly worker said of the first time he and his fellow workers saw the pictures.

Dewis has reason to be pleased with Obama: Under a nearly-finalized joint venture with Navistar — an arrangement backed by U.S. stimulus funds — Dewis and his Modec colleagues will get to produce more of the kind of truck seen with the American president.

The deal shows how some of America’s $787 billion stimulus package is trickling beyond its shores, and also how some U.S. companies are having to reach out abroad for the cutting-edge technologies that the president hopes will help spark a broad recovery and foster “green” manufacturing jobs.

‘Right here in America’
On Aug. 5, Obama unveiled plans that would allow Navistar to receive $39 million in federal money to build electric battery-powered commercial trucks with Modec. The funds were part of a larger pool of money being made available to American manufacturers.

“I’m here today … to announce $2.4 billion in highly competitive grants to develop the next generation of fuel-efficient cars and trucks powered by the next generation of battery technologies, all made right here in the U.S. of A. Right here in America. Made in America,” Obama said inside Navistar’s Wakarusa, Ind., facility to a round of applause from local officials and factory workers.

But while Navistar and Modec eventually plan to establish manufacturing facilities in the United States, the first batch of their battery-powered vehicles will come off the shop floor in England, not America.

Before the joint venture, Modec produced up to 15 trucks a week at its Coventry factory, and counted UPS, FedEx and Tesco, Britain’s largest retailer, among its customers. But the Navistar joint venture is the five-year-old firm’s biggest success by far.

Under the joint venture, the companies plan to build 400 battery-powered vehicles by 2010, and several thousand vehicles per year after that, Navistar said. The deal will eventually create up to 700 jobs in the U.S., the company said.

The first handful of trucks are scheduled to arrive in the United States on Dec. 25.

“A Christmas present for Navistar,” said Chris Wolfe, operations director for Modec.

An ‘ironic’ announcement?
The president unveiled his automotive grants just a few months after iconic automotive firms Chrysler and General Motors staggered toward bankruptcy and were bailed out with billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. His promise that the grants would support products “made in America” came in Elkhart County, Ind., a community devastated by the shrinking recreational vehicle industry.

But the fact that much of the new technology would initially come from outside the country was not lost on Modec’s workers.

“If he wants to call it American and produce millions of them, let him get on with it,” quipped Stephen O’Neal, 43, who works as a team leader on Modec’s assembly line. “As long as he keeps selling them and Americans keep buying them, we’ll produce as many as you want.”

Some in the United States also noticed that the president was hyping a U.K.-made vehicle during his Wakarusa announcement.

"We did find it quite ironic that the president of the United States stood at the Navistar plant proclaiming his passion to build fuel-efficient cars and trucks in the United States … standing in front of a Modec vehicle,” said John Waters, the chief executive of Anderson, Ind.,-based Bright Automotive, which has developed a prototype hybrid-electric delivery van.

Bright is also vying for some of the billions of dollars that the administration has decided to spend to promote electric and battery technology.

Waters was part of the team that developed General Motors’ EV1 in the 1990s, an electric car that quickly gained a small, devoted following but was eventually scrapped by the company.

“(Obama) is giving money to U.S. companies importing vehicles and not exporting them,” Waters said. “There is a contradiction there in terms of image and messaging.”

Perhaps sensitive to the perception their collaboration is creating, Modec and Navistar are circumspect about where exactly the U.S. government money is going and whether some of the $39 million will go directly into Modec’s coffers.

Navistar’s spokesman Roy Wiley also declined to say when exactly the vehicles would start being produced in the United States.

“I won’t respond to timeline questions,” he said. “We’ll start production when we start production.”

‘Investing in the future’
Matt Rogers, the Department of Energy’s senior adviser in implementing the Recovery Act program, said the Modec-Navistar deal makes good sense for Americans.

Roughly a third of the Recovery Act was meant to halt the economy’s downward spiral, said Rogers, who was a senior partner at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. before joining the Department of Energy. Another third was aimed at helping states suddenly caught short of essential cash.

The remaining third was earmarked to foster investment in technology that will have a long-term impact, both in terms of jobs and new technologies, he said.

“(The Navistar-MODEC joint venture) is going into a former recreational vehicle factory and restarting production in that factory with advanced technology,” he said. “We need to attract new technologies and accelerate the adoption of new technologies in the automotive sector,” he added.

U.S. companies certainly are getting serious government incentives to spur innovation.

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, $112 billion will be invested in so-called "green" technologies, and $2 billion will be earmarked for renewable energy research. Obama has also proposed adding $15 billion a year to renewable energy research.

One of the reasons that so many billions need to be spent to get U.S. manufacturers up-to-speed is that for the last two decades or so the country’s leading automotive companies have lagged their foreign counterparts in developing innovative and fuel-efficient vehicles.

Buoyed by decades of a lax regulations and low fuel prices, giants like General Motors, Chrysler and Ford focused on building bigger vehicles full of creature comforts, with little regard for how much fuel they used.

“Where’s the innovation been in the last 20 years? In NAV systems, putting VCRs in cars – that’s not innovation, that’s getting my decorator in to redo my living room,” said Maryanne Keller, who wrote “Rude Awakening: The Rise, Fall and Struggle for Recovery of General Motors,” and “Collision: GM, Toyota, Volkswagen and The Race to Own the 21st Century.”

“Obama has basically said, ‘You will reach 30-plus miles per gallon,’ so everyone has gotten on the bandwagon, saying, ‘We’re not going to be able to BS our way out of this like we have for the last 25 years,” Keller said.

So after having fumbled with and even stifled cleaner and more fuel-efficient technology, according to industry insiders, America’s automotive industry is looking for partners to help it come up with that same technology – and fast.

Hence President Obama’s photo-op display in an English Midlands factory.

In the case of the Modec-Navistar deal, the American company looked for a partner that had a particular product ready to go instead of having to develop one from scratch, Keller said, adding that the deal makes “perfect sense.”

‘You can’t just take’
Back in the Coventry factory, the type of collaboration Keller describes is top of mind.

“We’ve all got individual skill sets and we will all struggle individually,” said Wolfe, the operations director. “But if we can get together … we can take this technology onto the next step.”

Dewis, the factory worker, who like many of his colleagues lost his job at Peugeot and struggled to find work before coming to Modec, sees the Navistar deal in a bigger context that has little to do with salary, profits and national borders. 

For him, the electric-vehicle technology he works with could well change the world for the better.

“You’ve got to think about future generations and the way the planet is at the minute,” said Dewis, who has a 2-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old stepson. “You have got to give something back; you just can’t just take.”

Kari Huus / msnbc.com

Antinio Long, 34, awaits a ride to a new job outside a work release facility where he is serving time because of missed child support payments.

In better times, even those behind bars were better off.

When the local RV industry was booming, low-level criminal offenders in the Elkhart County Jail were routinely cycled through the work release program. Eligible inmates would sign out for work then return to the minimum security detention facility in Goshen after their shifts. With good behavior, they could earn greater freedoms and, eventually, be released to home detention, opening up beds in the facility for other inmates.

But with 15 percent unemployment in the county, movement through the facility has slowed to a crawl. Only about 50 percent of the inmates in the 327-bed detention facility are working, compared to 85 percent in normal times, according to Elkhart County Sheriff Mike Books. At the recession's peak, the number of employed in the facility was even lower -- only 38 percent had jobs.

"It's frustrating," said Books, who is also chairman of the Community Corrections Advisory Board. "It slows the flow back into society."

Frustrating is too kind a word for it if you ask Antinio Long, 34. Like many of the offenders here, Long was arrested on charges related to back child support in April, and transferred to the work release program from the jail shortly thereafter.

Only in mid-October -- after more than five months of job hunting during his allotted half day per week -- did Long finally land a full-time position working at McDowell Enterprises, which makes copper and brass fittings. Unfortunately, the $9 an hour is less than he was earning at a local sanitation company before his arrest, he said.

Eventually, Long will be able to generate money to pay back child support for his three girls and a boy -- ages 4 to 11.

But first, he must pay the county what he owes for supervision at the work release facility -- a privilege for which inmates like Long are charged $84 a week. Long said he has an outstanding bill of $1,009, and he will continue to pay what he called "rent" as long as he remains here.

"This program is really just a way for (the county) to make money," Long complained as he waited for his ride to work in the detention center parking lot. "It's legalized extortion."

Still, he's able to start digging himself out, which is more than others interviewed outside the facility were able to say.

Marcus Conner said he too had been looking for work "everywhere from fast food restaurants to factories" every week for five months -- with no results. Conner, also in on child support charges, rushed off to repeat the exercise when his ride arrived in the facility parking lot.

Kathy Pinkerton of Elkhart, waiting in her car for her husband, said she has been driving him around to look for work every week since his transfer here six months ago after serving two years in Indiana's Westville Prison.

"It's impossible," she said as the man she was waiting for climbed into the car for another round of job hunting.

Before driving away though, the man, who declined to give his name, said he has had several verifiable job offers in recent months, but has been told by corrections officers that he can't take those jobs because they don't provide adequate supervision.

"It's a joke," he growled. "There was more work in prison."

Even as new data suggests that the economy in Elkhart County has emerged from recession (click here to read last week's Adversity Index report), out comes a new measure of the meltdown's impact on this community: a list of 3,200 county properties with delinquent taxes -- roughly triple the usual figure.

Among the properties on the list are homes, businesses and churches, the Elkhart Truth reports.

Click here to read the newspaper's coverage of the delinquent properties, which can be sold at auction starting Nov. 30 if the tax bill has not been paid.

NBC Nightly News correspondent Kevin Tibbles reports from Elkhart County on signals that the local economy is improving. Click on the video above to watch his report.

Or click here to read a profile of RV worker Marlin Hostetler, featured in the Nightly News story.

Elkhart County's unemployment rate dipped to 15 percent in September, registering its sixth straight monthy decline, according to figures released Wednesday by the Indiana Department of Workforce Development.

The county's unemployment rate has been steadily declining since it hit a high of 18.9 percent in March. It declined 0.7 percent in September from August's rate of 15.7 percent, according to the state.

Click here to read the Elkhart Truth's coverage of the new data. Or you can click here to read about the latest national unemployment data.

The report on Elkhart County is consistent with The Adversity Index, an economic forecasting tool developed by Moody's Economy.com for msnbc.com, which last week showed that the city of Elkhart entered "recovery" in August after 32 consecutive months of economic contraction.

Click here to read the national Adversity Index report, or click here to read a blog post about the situation in Elkhart.