Flint Unemployment at 4.6%, Better Than National Average

The dying city of Flint, Mich., has a 4.6% unemployment, which is rate below the national rate of 4.9%. The data mask the crippled housing market and poverty rate, and the underlying pay level of the city’s residents. Poison water is one among a number of deep-seated problems in Flint.

Flint’s unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the same as that of Houston and better than San Diego’s 4.7% rate. However, in Flint 41.6% of the people live below the poverty line, against a national rate of 14.5%. The median household income in Flint is $24,679, against a national average of $51,939.

Flint’s largest employers, beyond relatively small facilities left from the car industry, are government and medical centers, each of which has a presence in all cities. But the chance to move from these low-paying jobs to higher-paying ones is the lack of significant large, private enterprises.

Flint shares one of the troubles of a number of the old cities in the Rust Belt. It has lost a huge amount of its population since the auto industry boom period of the 1960s. According the Census Bureau, Flint had a population of 196,940 in 1960, which stayed flat for a decade and then fell to 99,002 in 2014. The remaining population lives in a city where crime is rampant. Homicides jumped 71% last year to 48, an extraordinary count for a city so small.
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What lies ahead for the city’s residents is more of the same. No single major piece of evidence shows that high-paying jobs will return to the city, nor that the large auto manufactures will move their factories back from places such as Louisville and Mexico. The city’s infrastructure makes it an unlikely place to relocate any business, even if Flint did not have drinking water problems.

Flint may have a relatively low unemployment rate, but based on almost every other statistic, the city is doomed.