Markets with Big Improvements in Unemployment Rates

A handful of major U.S. apartment markets saw unemployment rates improve by large margins over the past year. The U.S. average unemployment rate dropped 8.7 percentage points year-over-year to stand at 5.7% in April, according to seasonally unadjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While all the nation’s largest 50 apartment markets saw unemployment rates drop from the pandemic peaks seen last April, the most improved was Las Vegas, where the unemployment rate declined 24.3 percentage points year-over-year. Despite such improvement, however, the April 2021 reading of 9% was still one of the worst showings in the U.S. The only other large market to see improvement of more than 20 percentage points was Detroit, where the unemployment rate of 3.7% as of April 2021 was 20.9 percentage points under the year-earlier showing. Unlike what was seen in Las Vegas, the latest reading in Detroit was the third-best unemployment rate among the nation’s top 50 markets, behind only Salt Lake City and Raleigh/Durham. Five other major apartment markets recorded jobless rate declines of more than 11 percentage points, including Cleveland, Providence, Orlando, Nashville and Fort Lauderdale.