The City With the Highest Unemployment in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 29, 11:30AM EDT

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The City With the Highest Unemployment in America — © Ole Schwander / iStock via Getty Images

The level of unemployment in America has been through dizzying changes in the past two and a half years. In February 2020, unemployment dropped to 3.5%, among the lowest levels in recent history. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed that up to 14.7%. In the time between the reports, the U.S. lost 20 million jobs. It took until recently for those to be recovered. Last month, the unemployment rate was 3.8%.
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The unemployment level varies significantly from state to state. The city with the highest jobless rate last month was Yuma, Arizona, at 21%. It has been hit by the perfect storm of a poor mix of local industries, a poor population and the drought that has spread across most of the region. No other city has such a negative combination of factors.

The monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics report that covers America’s 389 metropolitan statistical areas showed that the jobless rate dropped in 384 of them. The jobs recovery is underway in almost every part of the nation. Several cities had extraordinarily low unemployment, some under 2%. In Burlington-South Burlington, Vermont; Fargo, North Dakota and Minnesota; and Mankato-North Mankato, Minnesota, the figure was 1.7%.

Yuma’s unemployment rate was not only the highest in the nation. It grew by the largest percentage compared to August 2021, up 4.4% year over year. There were 21,161 people out of work last month in Yuma, out of a total working population of 105,518.
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Yuma is poor. The median household income is $52,183, well below the national number, according to the Census Bureau. Unemployment is 16.7%, which is well above the national figure.
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Drought levels in the area are not only high, but they also have been at one of the highest levels given to geographic areas by the U.S. Drought Monitor. The forecast for the group is that the problem could persist at current levels. Yuma is near the southern border of California, where the trouble also has been persistent.
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Part of the Yuma employment base is stable. Among the largest employers are the military and the government. However, the largest industry is agriculture, which has been decimated by a lack of rain.

The formula for Yuma’s job problem will not get any better. The city will remain among those with the highest unemployment in the country.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.