Help Wanted USA: Hiring hotspots emerge, but mobility an issue

NEW YORK (Reuters) - It's not like the people in Fort Wayne, Indiana aren't sympathetic with America's unemployed. It's just that they're not seeing as many of them as the rest of us.
While most of the country is saddled with stubbornly high unemployment, numerous new construction projects and thousands of new jobs have made this Midwestern city of nearly 250,000 a pocket of relative prosperity.
"We've gotten not only a lot of jobs, but a lot of good-paying jobs," says Andi Udris, president of the Fort Wayne-Allen County Economic Development Alliance, "Sometimes you get lucky."
Fort Wayne added 8,000 jobs in the past year, almost half of the 18,000 it lost during the recession, including many in manufacturing. Its jobless rate has dropped by 1.3 percentage points to 8.1 percent.
That all helped to propel it to the top of the Fiscal Times' 10 Best Places to Find a Job list.
And it's not alone. There are other places with help wanted signs offering jobs with high wages. They're places like Wichita, Kansas; Worcester, Massachusetts and Twin Falls, Idaho.
That's particularly good news for the 5.9 million long-term unemployed Americans (those out of work for at least 27 weeks and still actively looking for a job), many of whom may soon lose their unemployment benefits.
Almost a third of the nation's 13.9 million unemployed haven't worked in at least a year, and nearly half are no longer receiving unemployment checks. That number could increase if Congress doesn't extend before year-end the emergency unemployment benefits of up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states.
Fortunately for them, hiring has been creeping up. Private-sector employment increased nationally by 104,000 in October and the U.S. jobless rate crept down to 9 percent from 9.1 percent in September.
"I think we're getting a little bit of hiring. The firing has stopped and the net is giving us a small amount of job creation," says Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price.
Much of the hiring has been in places like North Dakota and Iowa and in industries that support energy and agriculture, said Bob Lerman, an economist at the Urban Institute and a professor at American University.
"What we're missing from other business cycles is residential and other construction," he says. "That normally picks up when interest rates go down."
This time the extent of the housing bust has prevented that.
The new jobs are coming to Worcester, Massachusetts, where unemployment has slipped to 7.7 percent, thanks to additional employment at local colleges, hospitals, financial firms and manufacturers.
"We don't necessarily hit home runs," says David Forsberg, president of Worcester Business Development Corp. (WBDC) referring to getting a big company to relocate to the city. "But we have done very well at expanding the base."
In Fort Wayne, homegrown ventures like Vera Bradley hired more than 800 employees this year. Known for its colorful handbags and preppy accessories, the company, which was founded in 1982, has been growing sales at a strong pace.