By MICHAEL POWELL and MOTOKO RICH

The United States is mired in a grim New Normal that could last for years. Call it recession or recovery, for tens of millions of Americans, there’s little difference. Born of a record financial collapse, this recession has been more severe than any since the Great Depression and has left an enormous oversupply of houses and office buildings and crippling debt.

The national economy has fallen so far that it could take years to climb back. “No wonder Americans are pessimistic and unhappy,” said Allen L. Sinai, chief global economist at the consulting firm Decision Economics. This dreary picture should not suggest a nation without strengths.

Unemployment rates have come down from their peaks. Port traffic has increased, and employers have created an average of 68,111 jobs a month this year. But new shocks could push the nation into another recession or deflation.

So troubles ripple outward, as lost jobs, unsold houses and empty offices weigh down the economy and upend lives. Struggles in Arizona, New Jersey and Georgia echo broadly. Florence, Arizona In 2005, Arizona ranked, as usual, second nationally in job growth behind Nevada. Construction boomed and land stretched endless and cheap.

Then it stopped. This year, Arizona ranks 42nd in job growth. It has lost 287,000 jobs since the recession began, and the fall has been calamitous. Arizona’s poverty rate has jumped to 19.6 percent, the nation’s second-highest after Mississippi.

The Association of Arizona Food Banks says demand has nearly doubled . Elliott D. Pollack, one of Arizona’s foremost economic forecasters, said: “You had an implosion of every sector needed to survive. That’s not going to get better fast.” Everywhere, subdivisions sit in the desert, some half-built.

Signs offer discounts. But discounts do not help if your income is cut in half. In the town of Coolidge, demand has tripled at Tom Hunt’s food pantry. Some days he runs out. Henry Alejandrez, 60, is a roofer who migrated from Texas looking for work. “I’m a citizen, and you’re lucky if you get minimum wage,” he said. Mary Sepeda, his sister, nods. She used to clean newly instructed homes before they were sold.

That job has evaporated. “It’s getting crazy,” she says. “How does this end?” You put that question to Mr. Pollack, the forecaster. “I’m forecasting recovery by 2013 to 2015,” he says. Cherry Hill, New Jersey A malaise has settled over this suburb just across the border from Philadelphia.

Home prices have fallen by 16 percent since 2006 . James and Patricia Furrow bought their four-bedroom colonial near the top of the market in 2005 for $289,900. Mr. Furrow, 48, retired in July after 26 years as a corrections officer and supplements his pension with work as a handyman. But his income is spotty, and his wife, who works in a school cafeteria, does not earn enough to cover the mortgage on the house where they live with their three children.

They have already missed a payment; they want to sell the house in hopes their lender will forgive the shortfall between their loan balance and the lower sale price. They are asking $279,900. “When we did buy, the market was still moving pretty good,” said Mr. Furrow. “Then it got to the point where people said it is not going to last. And of course it didn’t last.”

Some of the homes being offered at distressed prices are dragging down prices for less troubled homeowners who hope to sell. “Even someone who is trying to sell a normal, well-maintained house is at the mercy of these low prices,” said Walter Bud Crane, an agent with Re/Max of Cherry Hill. So the houses sit. Here in Camden County, unemployment is near 10 percent. Several large employers have closed or conducted huge layoffs; others have pruned hours.

A tlanta, Georgia Long fast-growing, Atlanta has burned to the ground before, figuratively and in reality during the American Civil War, and each time was a phoenix rising. But this recession has left Atlanta’s commercial and high-end condo real estate in an economic coma.

Industry leaders say it could take 12 years for Atlanta to absorb excess commercial space. “That one ? see it?” Alan Wexler, a real estate data analyst, points to a gleaming blue tower as he drives. “A Chicago bank took it over six months ago. Sold at a 40 percent discount.

“And over there ? That was going to be a condo. They just shut it down and walked away.” Approaching downtown, Mr. Wexler points to a white marble building. “See that one? It’s the Fed Reserve. That’s where they sit, look, sweat and wonder: How did we get into this mess?”