Wide variation in L.A.'s jobless rate

You can get a flavor of the county's large, diverse economy by looking at the monthly employment numbers. The overall unemployment rate in March was 9.9 percent (10.2 percent seasonally adjusted). But there's huge variation within L.A. County. That's not unusual, even in good times, but given the still-high jobless levels throughout much of the county, the disparity is striking between, say, the beach cities and portions of South L.A. County. From the EDD:

Agoura Hills 4.4%
Avalon 4.7%
Bell Gardens 15.8%
Beverly Hills 6.9%
Burbank 8.0%
Calabasas 4.5%
Commerce 18.8%
Compton 17.0%
Culver City 6.8%
Downey 8.0%
El Monte 12.3%
El Segundo 4.9%
Hawthorne 12.9%
Hermosa Beach 4.4%
Inglewood 12.4%
Lancaster 14.0%
Long Beach 10.9%
Los Angeles 11.0%
Pasadena 7.6%
Redondo Beach 5.2%
Santa Monica 8.2%
Torrance 4.9%
West Hollywood 8.4%

From this week's Business Update on KPCC:

Mark Lacter: It all depends on how you do the counting. Point is, when you see a big headline about unemployment going up or down - or the number of jobs added to the workforce being better or worse than expected - you're only getting the barest snapshot of what's going on.

Steve Julian: And yet, these news stories - along with the analysts' comments - are in our faces.

Lacter: And they can influence public attitudes about where the economy is headed. What we do know is that this has been a strange recovery - largely because the recession was the result of a financial crisis, and those downturns historically are devastating to the job market, and can take years to sort out. You have entire industries that have gone through restructurings - businesses that are fundamentally changed from what they were in 2007. It's not necessarily all bad, but it is different, which is why you can't draw too much from a single month's unemployment rate - whether it's good, bad, or indifferent.