Big City Job Loss: Private Sector Decline For Chicago, New York, and L.A.

The American Interest reports:

America’s largest cities are failing at the number one task that can help the inner cities: creating jobs. Between April 2001 and April 2011, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles lost more than 668,000 private sector jobs. Unless that changes and changes dramatically, our inner cities will continue to decay and millions of lives will be unnecessarily blighted. Worse, the millions of new immigrants now streaming into our cities in the latest Great Migration will form the nucleus of a new and larger underclass that could haunt this country for the next one hundred years.

The first and most important precondition for returning health to poor urban neighborhoods is the creation of large numbers of private sector jobs that relatively unskilled people can do. These jobs are unlikely to be in large scale manufacturing plants. The days when domestic manufacturing anchored an emerging urban working class and provided a ladder into the middle class are as dead as the days when family farms gave the majority of the American people secure livelihoods.

The struggles of Blue America.