The Mystery of Bed-Stuy’s Missing Jobs (City Limits)
Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood has seen the city’s most dramatic increase in unemployment since the economic crash, leaping from 6.0% to 15.3%. Why has it been so especially hard hit, and what can be done to improve matters?
Three years into the Great Recession, and the dramatic rise in unemployment that began in 2008 shows little sign of abating. While the unemployment rate has eased slightly in recent weeks, much of that is the result of jobless who’ve given up even searching for work. In New York City, meanwhile, the employment news is not promising: The city’s jobless rate of 9.0 percent is unchanged from last year, now ranking higher than the national rate, and more than double what it was at the end of 2006. And the pain is not shared equally among the boroughs: Where relatively few Manhattanites are seeking work, in patches of the outer boroughs unemployment rates are well into the double digits… [read more]