More than 50 million Americans live in economically distressed communities even as national unemployment has fallen to its lowest point since 2022. Damon Hewitt said those places are marked by inadequate jobs, poorer health outcomes, higher crime and frayed civic life.
The divide runs through the labor market. Prime-age employment nationally hovers around 80%, but in about one-third of American counties it trails the national average by five percentage points or more. In 2020, just over a hundred of the nation’s 3,000-plus counties accounted for half of all U.S. job growth, leaving vast parts of the country far behind the places where work is piling up.
Hewitt, who grew up in a timber town in the early 1990s as mill closures and job losses hollowed out the local economy, said the problem is not personal failure. “People in those communities aren’t doing anything wrong — they’re just not living in the right place,” he said. His warning lands now because the latest labor numbers show a national job market that looks sturdy on paper while the gains remain sharply uneven on the map.
The gap matters beyond unemployment. The economy has millions of open jobs, especially in healthcare, construction and the care economy, but many go unfilled because workers lack access to short, job-aligned training. Others are sidelined by childcare, transportation, geographic distance or unpredictable schedules. That leaves some communities with abundant vacancies and not enough people able to take them.
The pressure is likely to grow. A Gallup survey found that nearly one in four workers using AI say it is very or somewhat likely that automation will eliminate their job. For communities that never fully recovered from earlier economic shocks, that adds a new threat to places already struggling to hold onto employers, workers and tax revenue.
“When prime-age employment is weak, the damage compounds: fewer paychecks, a smaller tax base, and a growing sense that hard work does not lead anywhere,” Hewitt said. Place-based strategies have often attracted investment, but they also assumed opportunity would automatically reach local workers. The harder truth is that strong national data can coexist with local decline, and the communities left behind are at risk of slipping further as artificial intelligence reshapes work.