The Distressed Communities Index (DCI) is a customized dataset examining economic distress spanning nearly every community throughout the country.
As we found in a recent survey of likely voters in presidential swing states, a significant portion of Americans still feel like the recovery has left them behind — six years after the official end of the Great Recession. The DCI demonstrates that they don’t just feel it, they live it — over 30 million Americans to be exact — in communities defined by slow job growth, vanishing businesses, and fewer opportunities to move up the economic ladder.
