Editor’s Note: This continues our series on health and socioeconomic issues affecting Santa Rosa County.
MILTON — Santa Rosa ranks second of 67 Florida counties for social and economic factors, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute’s latest County Health Rankings.
Santa Rosa’s current unemployment rate is 3.7 percent. Unemployment has declined in recent years. In 2006 it was at its lowest, 3 percent; it spiked to 6 percent in 2008 and then to 9 percent from 2009-2011. The rate has been trending downward since 2012 and continues to drop in the county, Florida and the U.S. as a whole.
Approximately 211,000 jobs were created in April, and the national unemployment rate dipped to 4.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job growth increased in leisure and hospitality, health care and social assistance, financial activities and mining.
According to the Office of Economic Development in Santa Rosa County, the unemployment rate is at a 10-year low; the last month that registered a 3.7 percent unemployment rate was in the fall of 2007.
“I believe the low unemployment rate can be attributed to the growth of the general economy, housing construction is on the rise, and … it will continue to grow with the need of 1,500 new houses to keep up with demand,” Shannon Ogletree, director of the Office of Economic Development, said. “Then on top of housing construction is the demand for services that (are) needed for the residents.
“For too long, our residents were required to drive to Pensacola for their shopping needs; however, retailers are starting to see the pent-up demand for the county and starting to take notice on locating here.”
According to Ogletree, there have been new companies coming to the county such as AppRiver, Avalex, HT Hackney and Goldring Gulf Distributing, along with many others that were not located here 10 years ago that are contributing to the success of Santa Rosa County.
“If these companies are successful, then we all are successful,” Ogletree said.
Although the overall unemployment rate is dropping, the rate is much higher for black Americans. During the third quarter of 2015, unemployment nationwide among black people was at 9.5 percent compared to 4.5 percent for whites, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Some data show that education is the main cause for this gap. A higher percentage of white Americans, 41 percent, obtain college degrees, compared to the black population’s 22 percent.
However, according to the Economic Policy Institute, differences in education can’t fully explain the gap. Research from Valerie Wilson, an economist at EPI, suggests that for black Americans with the same level of education as white Americans, the unemployment rate is consistently nearly twice as high.
Unemployment is highest for those who attended no college. Among those who hadn’t completed high school, white Americans had an unemployment rate of 6.9 percent; black Americans, 16.6 percent.
A gap is still present for those who have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, with an unemployment rate of 4.1 percent for black Americans compared to 2.4 percent for white Americans with the same degree, according to Wilson’s findings.
White Americans who only obtained a high-school diploma have a similar unemployment rate to black Americans who completed at least a college education: 4.6 percent versus 4.1 percent respectively.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: County's unemployment rate at 10-year low