Unemployment over 12 percent in LA County

Oct. 15, 2009 | By Shirley Jahad | KPCC
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The Dow is up but jobs are still way down. Unemployment in L.A. County is over 12 percent. New numbers are expected Friday. A top local economist talks about the outlook for jobs.

Employment in LA is expected to sink until next year and then just lie low for a while – before inching back up slowly. As bad as it is countywide, certain communities have even higher unemployment.

“You have some areas in the county that are really struggling. Smaller cities with 18, 19, 20 percent unemployment. And that’s very scary," says Jack Kyser with the L.A. Economic Development Authority. "What happens to these cities? How do these people find new jobs? And this is why we are pessimistic about the trend in unemployment."

Kyser says in parts of L.A. Couny nearly one in four adults are out of work. "There’s an area called Florence Graham, it has a 23 percent unemployment rate." Kyser says it will be the middle of next year before the employment picture starts to turn.

"And then will take awhile to recover the jobs we’ve lost," Kyser says. "Its going to take several years because we’ve lost over 200,000 jobs in L.A. County over the past couple of years."

Kyser paints the whole economic picture in the new State of the City report put out by the Pat Brown Institute.

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