Courtesy NY Times
The overall unemployment rate in NYC was 10.1 percent in the third quarter of 2009, but the jobless numbers vary greatly from neighborhood to neighborhood, according to a distressing, if unsurprising, new study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group. For example, overall unemployment was 5.1% on Manhattan's Upper East and West Sides, compared to 15.7% in Central Bronx and 19.2% in East New York. FPI also broke down the data by race, finding that blacks rank #1 in the jobless category in almost every part of NYC (except areas of Staten Island and Whitestone, Queens, where info on blacks was "not applicable.")
Both The Wall Street Journal and City Room have great interactive maps of the damage; by scrolling over City Room's map, you can see how individual racial and ethnic groups fared in different parts of town. "Wall Street might be recovering, but the recession rages on in New York City's Main Street neighborhoods," said FPI's Chief Economist James Parrott in a statement. "In some cases, great disparities exist within neighborhoods. For example, in the West Brooklyn neighborhood stretching from Brooklyn Heights to Red Hook and Park Slope, white male unemployment was 3 percent, while in the same neighborhood, 46 percent of black men were jobless."
Of course, it's important and depressing to bear in mind that these numbers don't account for those unemployed souls who've given up and stopped seeking employment. Though the city's unemployment rate in November fell to 10.0 percent (seasonally adjusted) from 10.3 percent in October, FPI does not believe this signals an improvement in the local job market. Instead, the report attributes the decline entirely to people leaving the labor force, rather than an increase in the number of jobs. Here's a pdf of the full report; enjoy it with a warm bath and a nice bottle of pills.
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