The COVID-19 outbreak has swelled the ranks of the unemployed far beyond that which was seen during the Great Recession. In fact, unemployment increased more in three months of COVID-19 than it did in two years of the Great Recession. The graph below compares June 2020 employment rates for places in the Coachella Valley with the 2019 average. 

The drastic rise in unemployment has disproportionately affected households with low incomes. Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers based at Harvard University, has created a useful website called Track the Recovery to provide the latest COVID-related economic data to help inform local stakeholders. For today’s digest we used the site to look at recent employment data. These data are only available at the state level (some data on the site are available at the zip code level). By June 27, employment rates decreased 9.9% in California compared to January 2020, representing the sixth highest dip in the United States. Only New York, the District of Columbia, Nevada, Vermont, and Hawaii dropped more, with Hawaii dropping 27%.

But if you look at the data more closely by income bracket, you see that drops in employment vary greatly by household income. In households with incomes of less than $27,000, employment dropped 26.4% in California. Only Arizona and Vermont had higher drops, at 26.4% and 31.1%. By contrast, California households with incomes above $60,000 had a drop of employment of only 2.6%, putting our state in 7^th place for biggest drops in employment in this income bracket. The map below shows the proportion of households in the Coachella Valley with incomes of less than $27,000. 

Sources: Opportunity Insights – Track the Recovery, Esri Business Analyst 2020