A striking disconnect remains in the US economy: continued growth and softening inflation versus Americans’ pervasive pessimism and uncertainty about the future.
“I think people are just uncertain,” President Biden recently told Yahoo Finance in an exclusive interview. “And that’s why we’ve got to be steady, stay the course, and continue to produce these incredible jobs.”
Insight into the disconnect arises from a deeper look into the lifeblood of the US economy: the states, cities, and towns that make it run. Data from the Economic Innovation Group’s (EIG) Distressed Communities Index shows that as of 2023, local economies across America still hadn’t fully recovered from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to EIG, which uses US Census Bureau data to sort districts by economic well-being, roughly 52 million Americans live in a “distressed” zip code. That’s up from 50 million in 2018.
Distress scores are calculated based on weighted factors. Those factors include the number of residents with a high school diploma, the poverty rate, the number of adults not working, the housing vacancy rate, the median income ratio, changes in employment, and changes in the number of business establishments.
EIG discovered that in recent years, urban areas across the country have become increasingly “distressed” while the surrounding suburbs are considered more “prosperous.”
Take Cleveland: August Benzow, research lead at EIG, told Yahoo Finance that “almost every zip code in the city…
