Welcome to the Nation's Worst Town for Job Hunters

EL CENTRO, Calif. (June 15) -- Mark Mendez has always preferred working outdoors -- "man's work," he calls it -- to being in an office, and in April 2007 he landed a pretty good job at a gravel and sand pit about 30 miles west of here in California's southeast corner.

Then the housing bubble burst. Here, as elsewhere, the economy seized up like an engine running out of oil. Construction contracts soon disappeared, and, in August 2007, Mendez's job went with them. He hasn't worked full time since then, part of a pool of economic misery in a place with a staggering 27.9 percent unemployment rate -- the worst metropolitan rate in the nation, even though it's down a bit from a high of 31.3 percent last August.

The repercussions have been severe. Imperial County, which covers the irrigated desert farmland surrounding El Centro, forms the deepest part of what has become a regional economic sinkhole. Yuma, Ariz., an hour's drive to the east, reported a 24.4 percent unemployment rate for April. The rates are a little better to the north and west, from Las Vegas through California's desert suburbs in Riverside County, but at 14 percent they're still well above the national rate of 9.7 percent and nearly on a par with Detroit, with all its emblematic woes tied to the collapse of the auto industry.

For Mendez, the future is as bleak as the present. "I've got no leads," he said, sitting at a job-search computer at a local unemployment office. "Nothing at all."

In the best of times, Imperial County suffers from an unemployment rate often triple the national average, a result of seasonal fluctuations in the need for laborers to work the fields, Imperial County's third-largest employment sector after government, and transportation and utilities.

There's also a statistical anomaly driven by El Centro's proximity to Mexicali, a larger city across the border in Mexico, and how the unemployed are counted, said Jim Gerber, an economics professor and director of the international business program at San Diego State University.

"Its location across the border from a much larger Mexican city means that there is a large floating labor force," he said. "The data for Imperial County is skewed by this, such that the layoffs and out-of-work laborers are not actually counted correctly."

Regardless, the recession has cut broadly into the region's economy, including local and state government workers affected by the state budget crisis. And it has introduced workers from other economic classes to the pain of unemployment.

"We have this different echelon of the working poor who are in professional jobs that are suddenly either without a job or finding that, if they were living paycheck to paycheck before, even a 20 percent decrease in their pay is huge," said Trish Ribail, executive director of the Imperial Valley Food Bank, which acts as a conduit for more than 60 local agencies.

"When the economy first started taking a nosedive, we started getting a lot of calls from people wondering about our programs," she said, adding that the agency's load has increased by about one-third from before the recession. "We heard people say, 'We used to give to the food bank -- we never thought we'd be calling the food bank for help.'"

The lost jobs have sucked millions of dollars from the local economy. In the first quarter of 2006, before the economic crisis began, retail sales of taxable goods here in El Centro and the surrounding Imperial County totaled $518 million. In the first quarter of 2009, sales had dropped 17 percent to $430 million, according to the state Board of Equalization, which collects sales and other taxes for distribution to local governments.

It is the national crisis writ small. Less cash flow and tight credit threatens the bottom lines of private companies. Jobs are cut and hiring is frozen until managers gain confidence that the recession is over -- and revenues pick back up. So far, that hasn't happened, which leads to cuts in taxes paid for local government, spreading the economic troubles to other employment sectors.

Juerg Heuberger, director of planning for Imperial County, said local officials were meeting with a delegation from China about possibly adding a wholesale distribution center in the region, but otherwise there is little economic development on the horizon -- despite the region's proximity to Mexico, a potential conduit for trade. Buildings stand empty on Main Street, with its portico-shaded sidewalks. For-sale signs dot neighborhoods, and abandoned homes, their yards now weed lots, stand out like missing teeth.