Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of Norwood News stories exploring the issue of unemployment in the Bronx.

Hitting its highest peak in nearly two decades, the Bronx’s unemployment rate reached a staggering 14.1 percent in February — the most recent month for which local data is available — with approximately 77,701 residents in the labor force here unable to find paying work.

Though the borough has been pegged in recent decades as a place of rebirth, having rebounded from the devastation and neglect of the 1970s and 1980s, the Bronx continues to carry the highest unemployment rate of all the counties in New York State, and by a significant margin. The jobless rate for New York City in February was 10.2 percent, and the state’s overall rate was 9.2 percent.

“The Bronx has, historically, had a much higher unemployment rate than most of the other boroughs,” said James Brown, an analyst with the New York State Department of Labor.

But the numbers don’t show the whole picture, experts say. Unemployment rates, by government definition, only count residents who are actively looking for work within the last 30 days. This means the 14.1 percent number does not include large swaths of people who may have given up on the job hunt long ago, or who exited the workforce to go back to school, or raise families. It also fails to consider the population of workers who are off the books — a common practice in the Bronx, where many residents are foreign-born or undocumented.

“You always have to treat the number with a certain amount of skepticism,” said Ken Small, director of development at BronxWorks, a nonprofit that offers job training and other services. “The government has very interesting ways of defining who is employed and who is not employed.”

While the accuracy of the number might be contested, most experts agree that the Bronx has a jobs problem. A number of factors and circumstances, both social and economical, play a role in the borough’s work woes, they say.

The borough lacks the kind of industries that lend easily to employment, according to Small. The Bronx’s largest employers are in the healthcare, retail, and nonprofit sectors, which are often the hardest hit during a recession.

“We don’t have a Silicon Valley in the Bronx,” Small explained. “The jobs that are here are largely nonprofit jobs, and to some extent retail jobs. The nonprofit industry is dependent on Washington funding, and the retail sector here in the Bronx continues to struggle.”

The borough took a hard hit over the last few years, shedding several hundred manufacturing jobs when the Stella D’Oro cookie factory closed in 2009, and then Old London Foods, the makers of Melba toast, shut down their Bronx plant just a few months later. Plans to turn the vacant Kingsbridge Armory into a shopping mall, which supporters argued would have boosted the area’s employment opportunities, were killed in 2009 in a fight over wages.

Since then, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., and the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp. have been courting various developers in attempts to lure them to the borough. This year, an electric truck manufacturing company and online grocer FreshDirect have announced moves to the Bronx, and a new mall — complete with a Macy’s department store — is planned to open in Bay Plaza in the next few years.

But some say the unemployment issue is more systemic, and can’t necessarily be fixed by a few new local businesses.

“It’s largely tied to labor force demographics,” Brown said. “The Bronx’s working age population has a much higher number of people, proportionately, who have not completed high school, and a fairly large number who indicated a difficulty speaking the English language. Unemployment is pretty closely coordinated with education.”

The Bronx’s graduation rate is lower than those of the other five boroughs. In 2010, 54.7 percent of Bronx high school students received their degrees, compared to 65.1 percent of the city overall.

“We have communities in the Bronx where large numbers of folks do not have sufficient formal education,” Small said. “It’s critical in this labor market to not only have a high school diploma but to have some certified-skills training, or to have at minimum a two-year college degree.”

Mark Naison, a history professor at Fordham University who directs the school’s urban studies program, said the unemployment rate is related to large pockets of Bronx communities where many residents are embroiled in the criminal justice system — either on probation or parole or have criminal records.

“The reality is, people here are really poor, and many of them can’t get legal jobs because of criminal record or legal status,” he continued. “It’s not a pretty picture.”

Small, however, is slightly more optimistic. While the borough’s unemployment numbers might remain the highest, the area is faring better overall than many other places in the state whose local economies have flat-lined in recent years, he said.

“If you look around the Bronx, and you look at some other upstate communities, like Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo—those places have a post-apocalyptic look to them, a totally devastating look about them,” Small said.

“I don’t see that in the Bronx now, as much as I would say 35 years ago, when you would literally just see stretches of abandoned buildings. I would venture to say that there’s a hopefulness, and a sense of opportunity that wasn’t here previously.”

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.