EDITOR’S NOTE: Neighborhoods by the Numbers is a six-day multi-part series profiling Nashua neighborhoods by digging into economic data. Coming tomorrow: Nashua River West.

French Hill is one of Nashua’s best-known neighborhoods, a place where big, old trees decorate sloping streets and some residents trace their ancestry back to the French-
Canadian millworkers who gave the spot its name more than a century ago.

It’s also a neighborhood where unemployment in recent years has hit Great Depression-era levels.

Hillsborough County Census Tract 105, which roughly corresponds to French Hill, has the worst unemployment rate of all 18 Nashua neighborhoods at 20.1 percent between 2007 and 2011, according to Census data. Unemployment levels are worse there than in both the Tree Streets (14.2 percent) and Crown Hill (11.8)

“I’ve been trying to get a job for three years,” said Ryan Mixon, a 23-year-old who was walking back to French Hill with his guitar hanging across his back after performing on the Main Street sidewalk.

Mixon said when he plays on the street, hoping passers-by will throw him a dollar or two, people often yell at him to get a job. What they don’t understand, he said, is that he’s been trying.

“This is my alternative, how I make my living,” he said.

Given a chance, though, he said he’d take any job he could find.

“I’ve cleaned grease traps before, and I would gladly do so again for minimum wage,” he said.

The reasons why unemployment cluster in certain areas – the 20 percent level in French Hill contrasts with a rate of 3.4 percent in the area around Bicentennial Elementary School, for example – are complicated. At least some of it, though, can be tied to education. A quarter of people in French Hill didn’t graduate from high school, and just over 10 percent have a bachelor’s degree or more. Conversely, in the Bicentennial Neighborhood, only 4 percent don’t have a high school diploma and 64 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

National statistics show high school dropouts are about three times as likely to be unemployed as college graduates. And even when they are working, people with less education tend to make less money, which draws them to neighborhoods like French Hill where there are lots of apartments and rents are relatively low.

Raymond Easley, of Clinton Street, said he spent eight months out of work “by choice” over the past year. He’d been employed at a factory through a temp agency, but that job was eliminated, and the only temp jobs that came up after that were in landscaping.

“I wasn’t going to work for $7.25 an hour,” he said.

Easley said he couldn’t collect unemployment and made ends meet though “hustling.”

Now, though, Easley said he’s got a second-shift factory job.

“I make $10.50, and I’m happy,” he said. “It makes a difference in how I walk, my eating habits, how I sleep.”

People who fit the government definition of “unemployed” aren’t the only ones who aren’t working. In Census terms, retirees, stay-at-home parents, full-time students and people who have given up on finding a job are all considered outside the labor force.

Even though unemployment is highest in French Hill, the average household income is about $36,000, which is higher than the Main Street neighborhood with a modest unemployment rate of 7.6 percent.

That’s because a majority of people in the Main Street neighborhood are not in the workforce at all—neither working nor looking for work. As a result, it has the lowest average income in the city at $20,200 per household.

Overall, in French Hill, 58 percent of adults were working during the time covered by the Census data.

Disability also plays a factor. Just over 10 percent of the households in French Hill were receiving Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, which generally goes to people with disabilities. Jarretta Copeland, social services coordinator of the Tolles Street Mission, said the problems of unemployment and disability can be linked. She said many people with disabilities – particularly mental illnesses– are able to continue functioning if they’re working. If their job goes away, though, they may find they’re not able to find a new one.

“Sometimes mental illness was suppressed, especially if the person had a purpose,” Copeland said. “If they only had friends in their jobs and not many people from outside their employment, they don’t know what to do.”

In many homes, jobs with low pay, disabilities and periods of unemployment conspire to make it harder to achieve stability.

Pammy Baird said she and her fiance moved to an apartment in a four-unit Tolles Street building a few months ago when he got a job at the Merrimack outlet mall. Because the job was seasonal, he’s now collecting unemployment benefits. Baird, who suffers from schizophrenia, receives disability benefits. She said it’s particularly hard for her fiance to find a job because he can’t drive: his license was suspended for unpaid fines at a time when they didn’t have the money to pay them.

“You hit the food pantries on the right day,” she said. “And prayer works, too. We pray.”

View an interactive map of the 18 neighborhoods in Nashua at www.nashua
telegraph.com.