Good Luck Finding a Job in These Cities

The American public is regularly bombarded with the gloomy national jobless (down to 8.6 percent in the month of November). But the situation in your local area is much more relevant to most Americans, and unemployment numbers cary vastly by city. Indeed, some Americans are living in a near Depression, while some others, like the residents of oil-soaked North Dakota, are enjoying an unemployment rate at a 3.5 percent (along with some of the unpleasant side effects).

Job search aggregator Indeed.com looks at the 50 largest metropolitan areas each month, counts up the job postings, and cross references those with the city’s unemployment rate, as listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The result: the numbers of job seekers per every opening, or rough sketch of the worst cities in which to launch a job hunt right now.

Here is the list of the worst 10 cities to find a job, as reported by Forbes:

1. Orlando, Florida
   Number of job seekers per opening: 2.11
   Orlando faced big layoffs because of the housing bubble that popped, as well as a squeezed hospitality sector. Aside from Las Vegas, Orlando has the largest number of hotel rooms in the country and there were just fewer families flocking to Disney World after the recession hit.
2. St. Louis, Missouri
   Number of job seekers per opening: 2.12
   St. Louis has endured a much slower recovery than other cities.
3. Rochester, New York
   Number of job seekers per opening: 2.31
   Big tech companies have been cutting jobs big time, and not just in the recession wake. Rochester has been called a declining city for almost 10 whole years.
4. Memphis, Tennessee
   Number of job seekers per opening: 2.33
   Memphis has a very low high school graduation rate, and a large percentage of low-skilled workers, and so there are fewer qualified people to fill the growing education and health services sectors.
5. Sacramento, California
   Number of job seekers per opening: 2.70
   The real estate market seriously soured in Sacramento, like many other Sunbelt cities, and with a crippling budget deficit, California has been shedding some state jobs, mostly concentrated in the Sacramento area.
6. Detroit, Michigan
   Number of job seekers per opening: 2.75
   Last year, Detroit’s mayor estimate that half of the city’s population was unemployed. Only 16 percent of adult residents 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree.
7. Las Vegas
   Number of job seekers per opening: 3.10
   Las Vegas depends on Americas’ free-wheeling attitude toward cash. People are still very wary, it seems, about putting $500 on red.
8. Riverside, California
   Number of job seekers per opening: 3.25
   Riverside is another sunbelt city that is recovering at low speed, thanks most likely to the acute housing crisis that rattled it to the economic core.
9. Los Angeles, California
   Number of job seekers per opening: 3.48
   Foreclosures are high here, and finance and housing workers continued losing jobs even during the so-called ”recovery.”
10. Miami, Florida
    Number of job seekers per opening: 4.37
    Miami was struck badly by the housing crisis. It has the fifth highest foreclosure rate in 2010 (172,000 fillings), and by the end of that year, almost half the houses were worth less than the mortgage on them.