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D.C. residents who live in some of the city’s most economically challenged neighborhoods are collecting more paychecks than they have been, collectively, in years.
In Ward 7, the unemployment rate in May was 9.5 percent—the lowest since 2007. In Ward 8, the unemployment rate was 11.3 percent—the lowest since at least 2002, which is the year that the Department of Employment Services began calculating unemployment numbers by ward, according to a release from the agency.
The two wards still had higher joblessness rates than the rest of the city.
West of the Anacostia River, Ward 3 had the lowest unemployment rate at 3.3 percent, followed by Ward 2 at 3.5 percent, according to DOES’s preliminary May job estimates, which were released today.
The report also shows that the District’s overall unemployment rate was 6.1 percent in May. A study released last year by the Economic Policy Institute, when the unemployment rate was 6.8 percent, showed that the unemployment rate of the District’s black residents was 11 percent higher than that of their white counterparts.
While acknowledging that “the opportunity gap is most significant” in neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River, Mayor Muriel Bowser said in the release that the report demonstrates that “our city is on the right path to ensure that District residents have the tools and skills they need to land good paying jobs.”
The District’s total number of jobs is 781,000, according to the release. (In December, D.C.’s Office of Revenue Analysis released data stating that less than a third of D.C.’s workforce actually live in the city.)
