At a gathering of Bay Area employment experts held by The Chronicle this week, Gay Plair Cobb, chief executive of the Oakland Private Industry Council, said Oakland’s unemployment rate is 17.5 percent.

Angela Blackwell, chief executive of the Oakland nonprofit PolicyLink, which researches social policy solutions, said many groups with higher unemployment rates need special help.

If the jobless rate continues to climb, as is widely expected, that could generate pressure for another stimulus spending package. But given intensifying concern about the size of federal budget deficits — now projected to exceed $9 trillion within a decade — any new spending could be politically perilous.

The latest snapshot of the nation’s labor situation testified to the drastic improvement since early this year, when nearly 700,000 jobs a month were disappearing. Yet it also underscored the continued bleakness of the economic landscape.

“It’s a good picture compared to where we were, which was just a free fall,” said Dean Baker, a director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “But compared to anything else, this is just a horrible report. The rate of decline is slowing, but it’s not going to stop. We’re likely on a path toward more than 10 percent unemployment.”

Before the financial crisis, between 2.5 and 3.5 million Americans were homeless annually –living in shelters, temporary housing, on the streets or other public places. Now, as the numbers skyrocket, there is little safety net in place to catch them. If current trends continue, estimates suggest 1.5 million more people will become homeless over the next two years.

As I wrote in Mandate for Change, a book of recommendations for President Obama created by the Institute for Policy Studies, homelessness is a growing domestic human rights crisis.

During this Black history month the nation and the world anxiously watch the living Black history that is taking place with the first African American president. Yet at this very same moment the future of Black America is in an exceedingly precarious condition. State of the Dream 2009: The Silent Depression, a recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and United For A Fair Economy, highlights how the current economic recession impacts the racial wealth divide in this country.

Between 2000 and 2007, before the country was officially in a recession, Black employment decreased by 2.4% and saw their incomes decline by 2.9%. Between 2000 and 2005 the median family income of African Americans decreased and decreased more steeply than that for whites or Latinos.

Even in the best of times, people with low incomes have high unemployment rates and low wages. They are also more vulnerable to recessions than other workers, as the least skilled and least experienced are usually the first to lose their jobs in a downturn and the last to regain them when the economy recovers. The “safety net” that protects workers during times of involuntary job loss is tenuous for all workers but especially those with low wages. Unemployment insurance covers just over a third of all workers who become unemployed but less than half that fraction among workers earning low wages.