By Mary Milliken

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - In a depressed neighborhood in the City of Angels, hundreds of good jobs appeared to fall from the sky last week.

Young and middle-aged Los Angeles residents, mostly blacks and Hispanics, lined up down the block at an employment office for more than 600 jobs, paying $14 an hour and higher with free healthcare, at new JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels downtown.

But this was no miracle, nor was it a windfall from President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan. Rather, it was the payoff from years of work by City Hall to draw new investments and ensure jobs go primarily to locals.

And that is the problem. As the U.S. economy shows glimmers of improvement, there is not much even a city of 4 million people can do to take advantage of it quickly.

Los Angeles, the second-largest U.S. city, has a jobless rate of 13.9 percent. Like other big U.S. cities, it has few tools to spur jobs as the economy picks up again.

"This could be a two-year, jobless recovery," Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Larry Frank told Reuters.

Irena Seta, a coordinator at the employment center located near the Los Angeles Coliseum sports stadium, said many job-seeking clients are now unemployed up to 18 months, and she expects little improvement next year.

"It will probably be in 2011 when we see a vast increase in employment," said Seta, surrounded by hundreds of hopeful applicants for jobs located a few miles up the freeway.

STIMULUS YIELDS FEW JOBS

Torian Willis, 24, is a typical applicant. A construction worker unemployed for a year, he aims to get a job in the hotels' maintenance or housekeeping departments.

"The government has a lot of stuff to worry about right now, we have a lot of foreign issues to take care of, so every man has to take care of himself," Willis said.

But unemployment is a pressing domestic issue as the jobless rate surpasses 10 percent and forecasts point to a so-called "jobless recovery," an economic rebound in which companies use overtime, efficiency and other methods to raise production without hiring.

Obama has called a jobs forum in early December, but warns there won't be a second stimulus package from the federal government to jump-start job creation.

Thus far, the city of Los Angeles has received $44 million in federal stimulus funds for workforce training aimed at creating 12,000 jobs for the 270,000 out of work.

"Given the largess coming from the Obama administration, we can solve our problem in the tens of thousands, but our problem is in the hundreds of thousands," Frank said.