A number of key policy groups and organizations have begun taking a hard look at the unemployment situation across the United States, and the subject has not escaped the attention of scholars at the Brookings Institution. Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr authored this 12-page report released in July 2009, and it offers a bit of analysis on the demand for emergency and safety net services across urban and suburban areas in the United States. For this work, they chose to focus in on the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas in order to analyze recent unemployment trends in these cities and their suburbs. They examined the changing demand for safety net services (such as unemployment insurance claims) over the past several years. It's a compelling look at the subject, and it's something that policy analysts, urban scholars, and others will find quite useful.