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Unlike the last recession, today's unemployment hot spots are all over the map.

The five states with the highest unemployment rates — Michigan, Rhode Island, South Carolina, California and Oregon — all have something in common, though: a heightened exposure to the root causes of this downward spiral.

The collapse of housing. The implosion of the auto industry. The meltdown of financial services. The exodus of manufacturing.

Arizona is among the fast-growth states suffering from mass job losses in the housing industry, but the state was still in the middle of the pack for joblessness in November.

The state's unemployment rate in November was 6.3 percent, or 22nd-highest among the states and the District of Columbia.

All states are feeling the pain, but the worst are getting hammered on multiple fronts:

● The rotten housing market has punished California lenders and builders, taken an ax to Oregon's timber industry and soured the prospects for construction workers in Rhode Island, where buyers from neighboring states helped drive up home prices.

● The steady decline of the manufacturing sector has punished Rhode Island and South Carolina, where laid-off factory workers lack the training and job opportunities in an increasingly high-tech economy.

● Due to a combination of high energy prices, a strong dollar and competition from overseas, manufacturers have been manhandled for most of this decade — and ground zero for the loss of factory jobs is Michigan.

Its crumbling auto industry explains a large part of the state's nation-leading unemployment rate of 9.6 percent. Around the state, and across the country, the state's automakers have had to close plants and showrooms, cut back workers' hours and reduced wages as consumers' appetite for new cars dwindles along with their job security.

But it is also being felt in states such as South Carolina, where German automaker BMW has cut 500 temporary workers, and in California, where many of the dealerships have shut down.

"What makes this a different recession," said Rebecca Blank, an economist at the Brookings Institution, "is that it is so widespread."

During the 2001 recession, which was largely tied to the dot-com collapse, the West had a disproportionate amount of the jobless burden: Oregon, Washington, Alaska and California had the highest unemployment rates. (Mississippi and Washington, D.C., were tied with California.)

One region of the country has largely avoided the country's real-estate and manufacturing woes, and as a result has been spared the worst of the recession's pain. A contiguous cluster of rural states — Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Utah — had the lowest unemployment rates in November, ranging from 3.2 percent to 3.7 percent. The Labor Department on Friday said the national jobless rate in December was 7.2 percent.

Historically high prices for energy and grains have been a boon to their economies, although recent declines in commodity prices are beginning to bite, economists said.

For the majority of the country, the air has come out of a decade-long housing bubble, with home prices falling an average of 20 percent in the past year and almost one in 10 mortgages either overdue or in foreclosure. A wide swath of industries is feeling the pain, including real-estate agents, bankers, builders, lumber companies and furniture makers.

The real-estate bust is at the heart of mounting job losses in California, which has seen its unemployment rate reach 8.4 percent, the third-highest in the nation. In the year that ended in November, 71 percent of the non-farm jobs lost in California were housing-related.

Many of the nation's leading mortgage lenders — Countrywide Financial, New Century Financial, IndyMac Bancorp and Fremont General Corp. — were based in California and have since been bought by larger banks or have gone bankrupt.

As the country's leading lumber producer, Oregon has taken a direct hit from housing, with sawmills producing sharply less than a year ago. The slump has cost Oregon about 1,000 logging jobs in the past two years and more than 7,000 jobs in wood manufacturing, which includes plywood mills and the production of door and window frames, said David Cooke, an economist in Oregon's employment department.