Measuring Economic Distress in American Communities from 2013 to 2023

The last 12 years have been tumultuous. Everything from dramatic policy changes to the Covid pandemic has shocked the system, but wide economic disparities continue to be a defining issue in the United States.

Rural communities bear the brunt of hardship, but urban communities are facing economic distress, too, according to data from the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Innovation Group and analyzed by the American Communities Project.

While national average income and inflation appear to have modestly improved in recent years, this doesn’t tell the full story for many households. In many parts of the country, and for certain populations, wages have stagnated, the cost of living has steadily risen, and what we now call the “Affordability Crisis” has its roots in decades past. The pandemic imposed economic challenges on everyone, including the elimination of many jobs, and a weakened commercial sector.

Understanding the Distressed Communities Index

One way to understand these changes is by using measures of economic well-being. The Distressed Communities Index, created by the Economic Innovation Group, identifies counties and other local communities and assigns them a score based on various types of economic changes they experienced between 2013 and 2023, as recorded by the U.S. Census. While this analysis does not include the last few years, the trends that are revealed seem consistent with the state of the nation since 2024. When seen through the lens of the 15 types of American communities, the distress scores provide a way to understand who did better, who did worse, and why.

In general, rural areas started worse off, and declined more, across the entire decade, despite changes in presidential administrations, federal policies intended to assist them, and a partial economic recovery after the pandemic. This could mean that federal subsidies, even those of the Trump administration, haven’t helped these communities.

By giving each community type an average distress score, we sought to see in what ways different types of communities have experienced different economic changes and trends. This type of analysis reveals that some communities changed together while others diverged.

Parsing the Scores of Diverse and Less Diverse Communities

This analysis revealed some unexpected findings, and others that were not so surprising. The African American South and Native American Lands both started the decade of 2013–2023 as the most distressed of all the community types, suffering from entrenched poverty and low economic growth, and they ended the decade that way as well.

But the results for other rural communities were more surprising. Rural Middle America, and especially Aging Farmlands, became more distressed and experienced increased hardship as the decade wore on. Overall, the one community type that declined the most across the entire decade was the Aging Farmlands. These communities are disproportionally dominated by elderly farmers and are the least diverse racially and ethnically. Aging Farmlands have been strong supporters of the Republican Party. Donald Trump won 79% of their vote in 2020 and 77% in 2016.

It is interesting, therefore, that Trump’s economic policies appear not to have benefited them very much, nor most other rural communities. In fact, looking at the graph above, one can see that their economic distress score didn’t begin to climb until after 2015, right when one might expect them to benefit from Trump’s agricultural policies, including several billion dollars in financial aid packages.

A comparison with Rural Middle America is enlightening, because one might expect two types of rural communities to experience similar economic outcomes. While Rural Middle America saw increasing economic distress from 2013 to 2023, it has been much less, and didn’t really start until 2020, the year of the pandemic.

Graying America, which began in 2013 more distressed than Rural Middle America, ended up with a much better score, perhaps reflecting the movement of the elderly as they retire. The improvement in the economic distress scores for Graying America may be a statistical artifact of upper-middle-class Americans retiring to specific areas and elevating average household income by doing so.

Urban communities show a different pattern over the same time period. Big Cities and Urban Suburbs became moderately more distressed over the same time period. Big Cities were experiencing a slow and steady decline in economic distress until 2020, when distress increased quickly, and they have not recovered since. Urban Suburbs show the exact same pattern, though not as extreme. This jump in distress in 2020 was likely due to the pandemic. Except for Graying America, Exurbs experienced the most improvement across the decade.

The Pandemic’s Effect

The pandemic affected American communities almost across the board. Most got worse, but a few seemed to improve, including Native American Lands, LDS Enclaves, Graying America, and Evangelical Hubs.

Other community types, however, showed increasing distress during and after the pandemic, including Rural Middle America, Big Cities, and Urban Suburbs. The effect of the pandemic on urban areas makes sense, because population density is greater in those areas, making it easier for the disease to spread. Its effect on rural areas is more challenging to explain, although differences in local responses to social distancing and vaccination may be part of it.

Local v. National Economic Trends

One way to understand these trends is that localities with smaller populations, and less diverse economies, have not done as well as more densely populated areas with more businesses and other economic infrastructure. Another way is to understand that much economic growth, and decline, is local in nature, and doesn’t necessarily reflect national trends.

While the data presented here do not include the last few years since 2024, there is little to suggest that much has changed. America’s vulnerable communities continue to lag the rest of the country, and the burden of economic change continues to be borne unevenly.

What is evident is that many federal policies, intended to assist rural communities, have failed to do so. We are still in the midst of tumultuous economic change, and this is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.

Victor Wooddell is a graduate student in the Journalism program at Michigan State University. After earning an earlier degree in psychology at Wayne State University, he became a human resources manager, a nonprofit management consultant, and a college instructor. He has published articles with the Lansing City Pulse and many regional papers around Michigan, including the Detroit Free Press.