On the Jobless Front in NYC: Now You Can See How Poorly Your Own Neighborhood is Doing

By Elizabeth Dwoskin Wed., Dec. 23 2009 at 2:20 PM

Categories: Featured

One Depression-era approach to dealing with the unemployed.

Those of you who insist on leavening your holiday happiness with doses of grim reality can now check out a new neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown of unemployment in New York City, courtesy of the Fiscal Policy Institute.

The FPI claims that its New York City in the Great Recession is the first report "to provide relatively current unemployment rates at a neighborhood level for New York City, as well as the first to provide such estimates on the basis of race/ethnicity and gender."

You won't be surprised by the disparities — unemployment rates of 5 percent on the Upper East Side and 15.7 percent in the South Bronx — but some figures are really grim. For instance: In a stretch of west Brooklyn from Red Hook to Park Slope, unemployment among white men was 3 percent, while, in the same section, 46 percent of black men were jobless.

"We're not saying the recession has changed the disparity," FPI Chief Economist James Parrott tells the Voice. "There was always a disparity, and that's not surprising. What we're saying is that in this recession, where unemployment rates have doubled, unemployment has gotten to be extremely high in some neighborhoods in Brooklyn. We didn't have the data to show that before."

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