WORKPLACE ISSUES : City-by-City Look at Unemployment Rates Finds Few Surprises

Where’s the lowest unemployment rate in Orange County? You probably won’t be surprised to find that it’s in Coto de Caza, the smallish, affluent South County suburb nestled against the mountains. Unemployment there is 0.4% of the 1,600-person work force.

The highest of the county’s 31 cities? Santa Ana, where a large number of workers are Mexican immigrants in low-wage service and factory jobs.

The central county city ran an unemployment rate of 9.7% for April--15,000 of its 157,000 workers were jobless that month, or about a fifth of all the jobless in the entire county.

The reason is about what you’d expect: “The higher the socioeconomic characteristics of a community, the lower the unemployment rate,” said Eleanor Jordan, county labor market analyst for the state Employment Development Department.

The rate for the whole county in April, incidentally, was 5.5%. (That was the lowest in a year.)

Other, larger cities and their unemployment rates:

Anaheim, 9,700 people out of work, 6.4%; Costa Mesa, 2,000 people, 4.6%; Fullerton, 3,500 people, 5.3%.

Garden Grove, 5,500 people, 7.1%; Huntington Beach, 4,700 people, 4.2%; Irvine, 2,500 people, 3.9%.

Newport Beach, 1,400 people, 3.5%; Orange, 3,400 people, 5.3%; Westminster, 2,800 people, 6.6%.