Dressed in the insulated overalls and coat he used to wear to construction sites in winter, Charles Warfield wandered Dolton on Wednesday trying to sell lumber scraps he engraved with Biblical messages and line portraits of President-elect Barack Obama.

The wood scraps are remnants of Warfield's last construction job. He was laid off in October, he said. Warfield, a fit 58-year-old with a gold hoop earring and neat dreadlocks, has searched Dolton for a new construction job, he said.

"Nobody's got anything. Nobody's hiring," Warfield said.

"The only things open in Dolton are nail shops and liquor stores."

Warfield's joblessness is not unusual in Dolton, one of two southeast Cook County municipalities saddled with unemployment rates that rank among the 10 highest for small- and medium-size cities nationwide.

Harvey has the third highest rate in the country at 21.5 percent unemployment, according to an Associated Press analysis of Census data collected between 2005 and 2007 and released last week. Harvey's rate increased by 45 percent since 2000.

Dolton has the seventh highest rate at 19.7 percent unemployment, according to AP. That is a 173 percent increase since 2000.

Cook County's unemployment rate in 2007 was up to 8.8 percent. Calumet City's rate is 14 percent. Lansing's rate is 5.8 percent.

Those numbers only stretch through 2007, a quaint memory in a still-fading economy. The U.S. Labor Department announced last week that new claims for unemployment benefits reached their highest level in 26 years as companies sliced their work forces.

"It's no longer a recession. It's called the Great Depression of the 1930s," said Bob Storman, spokesman for Thornton Township Supervisor Frank Zuccarelli. Thornton Township takes in Dolton and part of Harvey.

Storman offered the township's strained seasonal charity programs as evidence of the unemployment problem. Last year, the township had given out 1,000 boxes of food through its holiday anti-hunger program by mid-December. This year, 2,000 boxes already have gone out, Storman said.

Zuccarelli pointed to the township's holiday toy drive. About 1,500 children are involved in the toy drive this year. That's two times the number from last year, he said.

"More and more people have been losing their jobs over the last 12 to 18 months and people really haven't been paying much attention," Zuccarelli said.

Neither Harvey Mayor Eric Kellogg nor Harvey city spokeswoman Sandra Alvarado returned calls for comment. Dolton's acting Mayor Ronnie Lewis and economic development director Bert Herzog also did not return calls.

Zuccarelli said he is counting on Obama and national leaders to bolster the economy. Local officials need to focus on local need, Zuccarelli said.

"We just need to do what we can to help support the people until the economy is jumpstarted," he said.

Warfield blames President George W. Bush for the economy's implosion. But as he stood along an empty Lincoln Avenue in Dolton, a sense of inevitability sounded in his voice.

"Everything goes down, doesn't it?" he said.

Until the 1960s, Harvey was a manufacturing hub, said Dave Bartlett, a Thornton Township historian and longtime professor at South Suburban College in South Holland. But Harvey -- founded on the twin pillars of temperance and industry -- suffered as manufacturers moved their plants south after the boom years of World War II. Disinvestment punished Harvey, Bartlett said.

"Harvey, at one time, was the town of the south suburbs," Bartlett said.

Renzie Lacey III sees recent improvement in Harvey that isn't captured in the Census bureau's depressing numbers. Sitting in a classroom full of small desks at the school attached to Church of Jesus Christ Apostilic in downtown Harvey, Lacey, a teacher and church elder, said churchgoers seem upbeat and students aren't talking about financial trouble. And seventh-graders talk about home at school, Lacey said.

Lacey has been at the church 20 years. He recalled grassless lawns and abandoned homes on Turlington Avenue in the 1980s.

"I think the neighborhoods are getting better."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.