Two thirds of rural counties have fewer jobs today than in 2007

The number of jobs in rural America increased in the last year, but rural counties remain well below their pre-recession employment level.  A comparison of the geography of jobs in 2007 and October 2017 reveals how unequal the recovery has been. Cities have done much better than rural areas in recovering from the recession, which officially began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. Only 40 percent of urban counties have fewer jobs now than in 2007.In rural America, however, two-thirds of the counties had fewer jobs in October than in 2007.Job growth has been particularly concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. There are just over 9 million more jobs in the U.S. now than in 2007, but 87.5 percent of that gain has been in urban areas of a million or more people.The ten counties with the largest gains added just over 2.1 million jobs. Those counties included Harris, Tarrant, Dallas, Bexar and Travis in Texas; Los Angeles, Santa Clara and Riverside in California; Maricopa in Arizona and Kings County in New York City.