Chicago Unemployment

We're sure conventions fleeing the city aren't helping matters any:

• The jobless rate in the Chicago metropolitan area rose to 10.4 percent in October from 10.1 percent in September and spiked from 6.1 percent in October 2008, the Illinois Department of Employment Security reported Wednesday.

  The area shed 178,600 jobs over the year, the biggest of all metropolitan areas, followed by the Lake County-Kenosha area, which lost 12,300 jobs.

And mortgages?

• Twenty-one percent of homes in the Chicago metropolitan area were underwater -- worth less than the mortgages being paid on them -- at the end of the third quarter. That is according to a report from California-based First American CoreLogic.

  A total of 324,448 properties in the Chicago area had negative equity.

Still a long road ahead. Maybe too long.