Of all 58 California counties, only Marin, San Mateo and San Francisco bettered Orange County's 4.0 unemployment rate in September, according to state employment data, yet when it comes to individual cities only two in the state are better when it comes to finding jobs than Rancho Santa Margarita, at least according to one source's calculations.
]
WalletHub compared 250 Golden State cities when it came to job-finding prospects because “things are looking good for job seekers in California,” which the personal finance website bases on the National Conference of State Legislators finding we added 36,200 new jobs in August, the largest increase among 32 states that saw their employment numbers go up.
After crunching numbers related to monthly median starting salaries to employment growth to housing and transportation costs to 13 other key metrics, WalletHubbers found that only No. 1 Palo Alto and Pacifica were better cities for finding jobs than Rancho Santa Margarita.
The next best city to rank near the top was No. 9 Lake Forest, followed by Aliso Viejo (15), Cypress (19), San Clemente (28) and what we should now refer to as “the cluster:” Irvine, Brea, Mission Viejo and Tustin (Nos. 44 through 47).
Also, Newport Beach (51), Costa Mesa (56), Orange (58), Buena Park (59), Huntington Beach (64), Laguna Niguel (67), Yorba Linda (70), Dana Point (74), Fountain Valley (80), Fullerton (93), Santa Ana (109), Anaheim (115), Stanton (126), La Habra (134), Placentia (141) and San Juan Capistrano (147).
Apparently the worst place in the county to find a job is No. 151 Westminster. At least they beat Long Beach at 165. The worst in the state is Westmont ranked at No. 250.
Individual categories found Rancho Santa Margarita in a tie for first with Palo Alto and San Rafael in lowest unemployment rate for high school graduates (Cypress is No. 5), and Irvine rated No. 2 in highest number of job opportunities, behind only San Francisco.
Meanwhile, San Juan Capistrano is fifth from the bottom in lowest unemployment growth–or should they remove the double negatives and make it worst in employment growth? Either way, nothing to crow about at the next chamber mixer.
Long Beach finds itself in two un-brag-worthy categories: lowest number of job opportunities, where it's only worse in Fresno and Los Angeles, and highest unemployment rate for high school graduates, which has the port city is in a tie at the top (bottom?) with San Jose, Fresno, Sacramento and Merced.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.