Jobless rates rise in US cities for sixth month

WASHINGTON: US cities, first hit by slumping property tax revenues in the housing downturn, are now vexed by surging unemployment with 18 metropolitan areas recording jobless rates of more than 15 percent in June, a Labor Department report said on Wednesday.

It was the sixth consecutive month that all 372 metropolitan areas in a monthly survey registered increases in the rate, said the department.

Eight of the cities with rates higher than 15 percent -- indicating that nearly two in 10 residents are jobless -- were in California, the department said.

A full 144 metropolitan areas reported jobless rates of at least 10 percent in the month, up from 112 in May. A year ago, only six cities had rates that high.

More than three-quarters of Americans live in cities, and the report offers a good picture of how deeply the recession has affected their lives.

Employment problems related to the downturn in the automobile industry also spread beyond Detroit last month into the greater Midwest.

Two Indiana cities, Kokomo and Elkhart-Goshen, had layoffs in transportation equipment that pushed them to the largest jobless rate increases over the year, the department said.

Michigan's city of Monroe saw its rate spike 8.6 percentage points from June 2008, while Muskegon-Norton Shores' rate rose 8.2 percentage points. Both increases were greater than Detroit, where the unemployment rate was 8.1 percentage points higher than a year earlier.

Still, Detroit notched the highest unemployment rate of the 49 cities with populations of 1 million or more at 17.1 percent. It was followed by the Riverside and San Bernardino area, known as California's "Inland Empire," which had a rate of 13.7 percent.

As many as 352 cities said the number of jobs dropped from a year earlier, 16 said the number of jobs rose, while one recorded no change.