The U.S. economy is booming — just not where 50 million Americans live

I was in high school in the early 1990s when the timber town where I grew up took it on the chin. Mill closures and job losses left workers and families who had done everything right scrambling just to survive. Local stores struggled, schools tightened budgets, and public services shrank. For many, lost paychecks led to lost faith in the system in the country.

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During 12 years in Congress and now at The Rockefeller Foundation, I have seen that my hometown is similar to too many others. More than 50 million Americans live in economically distressed communities, marked by inadequate jobs, poorer health outcomes, higher crime, and frayed civic life.

We tend to lose sight of those distressed communities because overall job numbers are excellent. Last week’s data showed that unemployment is at its lowest point since 2022. Nationally, what’s called prime-age employment — jobs for those between 25 and 54 — hovers around 80%. But that masks deep geographic fractures. In about one-third of American counties, prime-age employment lags the national average by five percentage points or more — the definition of a “distressed community.” 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.

People in those communities aren’t doing anything wrong — they’re just not living in the right place. Economic opportunity in the United States has become astonishingly concentrated. In 2020, just over a hundred of America’s 3,000-plus counties accounted for half of all U.S. job growth.

Communities that never fully recovered from previous economic shocks risk falling even further behind as artificial intelligence reshapes work. While technology has always changed jobs, the speed and scale of AI are different, and people sense it. A Gallup survey finds that nearly one in four workers using AI say it’s “very” or “somewhat” likely that AI and automation will eliminate their job.

So, how do we get more Americans working amid this level of economic change? Communities, working with states, employers, and federal partners, need to leverage new breakthroughs in how we get people connected to, and able to stay in, jobs.

First, we need to take place seriously, but differently than before. Traditional place-based strategies helped attract investment into communities, often by landing marquee employers or large capital projects. In many cases, that mattered. But too often, those strategies assumed opportunity would automatically reach local workers.

What’s different now is that access to work depends less on where investment lands and more on whether local systems actually connect people to jobs. In communities making progress today, workforce agencies align training with real hiring commitments, employers help shape local pipelines, and practical barriers like childcare and transportation are treated as part of the jobs system, not afterthoughts.

Second, jobs policy can’t stop at job creation. The U.S. economy has millions of open jobs, especially in healthcare, construction, and the care economy. Many go unfilled because workers lack access to short, job-aligned training to give them new or updated skills that match what employers are actually hiring for. Other times, workers are sidelined by practical barriers outside the workplace — like childcare, transportation, geographic distance, or unpredictable schedules. Communities making progress focus on alignment, not just supply. Training programs are designed with employers so credentials lead directly to hiring. Employers invest in retention and advancement, not just recruitment. And work-enabling infrastructure, especially childcare and benefits systems, is treated as part of the jobs system, because without it, people can’t reliably show up to work or stay attached as jobs change.

Take my hometown on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where communities long anchored by timber and natural-resource jobs have faced a slow, uneven transition. In some places, prime-age employment lags the national average by double digits. In response, local leaders have not chased one-off projects. Rather, they have organized a coordinated response that aligns workforce development, economic development, and supportive services around a simple goal: connecting people to existing jobs and emerging opportunities in maritime work, manufacturing, clean energy, and natural resources. That includes employer-driven training through the local community college, modern workforce partners that help people navigate transitions, and investments that reduce barriers like childcare and transportation.

Third, we need to modernize how we respond to disruption. Too many workforce systems — the combination of employers, training providers, public agencies, and benefits programs that connect people to jobs — were designed for a world in which job loss was episodic and recovery followed a relatively predictabl