Except for the areas in and around Silicon Valley and San Francisco, Orange County is enjoying the best jobs picture in the state. The latest numbers pegged unemployment at just 4 percent in March, less than half the rate as recently as 2011.

The O.C. rate also is 1.4 percentage points below the 5.4 percent statewide level. That continues a decades-long trend of our county being 1 percentage point or more below California’s joblessness. It pays to have a local tax and regulatory climate that’s less burdensome than in most of the rest of the state. Although, admittedly, Silicon Valley and San Francisco are on such a different plane technologically than the rest of the world, they can tolerate more liberal policies, albeit with median home prices of more than $1 million.

“The Orange County jobs growth will continue,” with 8,800 new jobs created in March, Anil Puri told us; he’s dean of Cal State Fullerton’s Mihaylo College of Business and Economics. “All sectors are growing. Construction has finally started to rev up and is the sector with the largest growth this year. We expect unemployment to keep going down slowly.” Historically, he said, it was 3.4 percent in 2006 and 3.9 percent in 2007, just before the economic card table collapsed. “But we’re not saying it will go all the way down to that level this time.”

The downside to the growth is housing affordability also is going down because even the new construction is not meeting the “huge demand,” Mr. Puri said. “Income is not going up at the same pace” as housing prices.

Slow income growth isn’t the only problem. On Saturday, Sports Chalet announced it was shuttering all its 47 stores, 40 of them in California and seven in Orange County. Online competition hurt. But the state’s business climate, including a 50 percent boost in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022, didn’t help. Not everyone can get a high-paying job in the technology and government sectors.

So it’s time to cheer the ongoing recovery – and time to remove the constraints on needed housing construction.