Annie Lowrey of our sister site the Washington Independent reports some good economic news for the country: Unemployment in April dropped in nearly all major metropolitan areas around the country compared to the same month in 2009. Unfortunately, that decline seems to have passed over the Detroit area completely.

Today, the Labor Department released its April survey of unemployment in 372 metropolitan areas across the United States. And it is a very good report: The rate of joblessness dropped in 346 areas, rose in 12 and remained flat in 14. That is a significant month-to-month improvement, as in March, unemployment fell in 257 metro areas and climbed in 89.

The report bodes well for Friday’s major jobs report. Economists expect the economy to have added 500,000 jobs and the overall unemployment rate to track down. The data will be slightly skewed because of temporary census hiring. Still, it will hopefully augur an accelerating recovery, given that the weekly initial jobless claims and other metrics have stagnated.

But the original report says of metro Detroit specifically:

Of the 49 metropolitan areas with a Census 2000 population of 1 million or more, Detroit-Warren-Livonia, Mich., sustained the highest unemployment rate in April, 14.8 percent…

The largest over-the-year percentage decrease in employment among the metropolitan divisions was reported in Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Mich. (-3.9 percent), followed by Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich. (-3.7 percent), Lake County-Kenosha County, Ill.-Wis., and Oakland-Fremont-Hayward, Calif. (-3.5 percent each), and San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, Calif. (-3.4
percent).