Detroit, Michigan
Tennessee
Cincinnati, Ohio
Charlotte, North Carolina
Murphy, North Carolina
Georgia
Blairsville, Georgia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The United States has higher rates of “death by drug overdose” and “dependence of drug disorder” than any other country in the world. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of drug overdose deaths increased over 3 times between 1999 and 2018, claiming the lives of over 750,000 Americans. The 80,003 verified deaths by drug overdose during the mostly recently reported 12-month period (May 2019-June 2020) are the highest ever recorded, with an acceleration observed during the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown measures.
Opioids are by far the largest factor in total overdoses. According to Our World in Data, the United States opioid overdose rate was “twice as high as the second country — Libya […] and up to 40-times higher than in some countries in Europe (like Italy, Hungary or Poland).”
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Homicides increased in the city by 40% from 2019, and would reach a reported 499 lives lost by year’s end.
Raleigh, North Carolina
“Central Prison in Raleigh has been in continuous service since 1884. It serves as the admission point into prison for adult male felons sentenced to 20 years or more, and is the main medical and mental health center for male offenders.” The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, far exceeding the global average. There is a reported prison population of about 2.1 million people.
Maggie Valley, North Carolina
Middletown, Pennsylvania
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
In July 2020, the United States House of Representatives proposed $694.6 billion to be spent on the 2021 military budget. This includes the funding of 91 new F-35 aircraft ($9.3 billion), 16 MQ-9 Reaper air vehicles ($344 million), the Army’s Long Range Hypersonic Weapon ($811 million), the Afghan Security Forces Fund ($3.05 billion), the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative ($275 million) and Israeli cooperative research and development programs ($300 million).
Flint, Michigan
Hendersonville, North Carolina
Washington, DC
The United States has an estimated homeless population of over 567,000 people on any given night in 2019 according to data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Among these people are reported approximately 37,000 veterans and 35,000 unaccompanied youth. In addition “2.5 million and 3.5 million individuals make up the sheltered homeless population in the U.S. This includes shelters, transitional housing centers, and ‘tent cities’” according to the Poor People’s Campaign.
Racial disparities in homelessness are particularly marked. Black Americans have a rate of homelessness about five times higher than that of white Americans, while American Indians and Alaskan Natives have a six times higher rate. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, “racial and ethnic disparities in homelessness are not improving significantly over time.”
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
With a rate of 25.7%, nearly 400,000 of Philadelphia residents lived below the federal poverty line according to data reported by the Pew Research Center. More than half of those residents (14.0% of the city’s population) live in a state of “deep poverty” in which a household of four has an annual income of only $12,300.
The United States has remarkable levels of income inequality. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, by September 2020, “the total wealth of all the billionaires- $3.8 trillion today — is two-and-a-half times the $1.5 trillion in total wealth held by the bottom half of the population, or 165 million Americans.”
While the United States real economic output per person (real GDP per capita) has almost doubled with a 91.1% increase in the past four decades ($30,077 in the first quarter of 1979 compared to $57,429 in the fourth quarter of 2018 according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, adjusted to 2012 dollars), this has barely registered in the inflation-adjusted wages of average Americans. The Congressional Research Service reports that during the same time period (1979-2018), the average real wage for Americans in the 50th percentile increased by only 6.1% (14.9 times less than the growth of population-adjusted economic output), and actually decreased by 5.1% for men. Those in the 90th percentile saw a 37.6% increase in wages, while those in the 10th percentile received essentially the same wages 40 years later (1.6% increase).
Cincinnati, Ohio
Wilmington, Delaware
The number of small businesses open in the United States decreased by approximately 27% from January 1, 2020 to November 1, 2020, and small business revenues decreased by more than 28% according to the Opportunity Insights research group based at Harvard University. According to the National Restaurant Association approximately 110,000, or one in six (17%) of the nation’s restaurants have now permanently closed. A third of the remaining owners predicted they would not make the next six months.
Forest City, North Carolina
Forest City, North Carolina
Georgia
Amazon’s sales increased by 40% in the second quarter of 2020, with over $88 billion of total sales. Since the March explosion of coronavirus cases, Amazon.com Inc.’s stock price has jumped from $1785 (March 13) to $3004 (November 2). CEO Jeff Bezos’ wealth was valued at $203 billion on October 13, an increase of 80% from March 18, 2020.
By October 13, 2020, the wealth of United States billionaires had increased approximately 32% ($931 billion) since the start of COVID-19 pandemic, with record numbers continuing to register on Wall Street. Notable profiteers among the nation’s then 644 billionaires included Elon Musk of Tesla (277% gain in net worth), Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (85% gain in net worth), and Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest mortgage company (656% gain in net worth).
Cincinnati, Ohio
“Virtual education” was rolled out progressively over the past two decades and by the 2017-18 school year included 297,712 students in full-time virtual schools and 132,960 students enrolled in “blended schools.” According to a report conducted by the National Education Policy Center in 2019, “the graduation rates of 50.1% in virtual schools and 61.5% in blended schools fell far short of the national average of 84%.” The authors suggested to “slow or stop the growth of virtual and blended schools and the size of their enrollments until the reasons for their relatively poor performance have been identified and addressed.”
Increased screen time and use of social media have been attributed to negative mental health impacts for children and adolescents. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “the suicide rate for persons aged 15-19 was stable from 2000 to 2007, and then increased 76% from 2007-2017. " For persons aged 10-14, the suicide rate “nearly tripled from 2007 to 2017.” A number of factors may be combining to create this alarming trend. According to a CDC report from June 2020, 25.5% of Americans surveyed in the 18-24 age group “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days” and 24.7% had “started or increased substance use to cope with pandemic-related stress and emotions.”
Detroit, Michigan
Cherokee, North Carolina
Cherokee, North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Hendersonville, North Carolina
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta, Georgia
Black households have about ten times less wealth than white households, when median household wealth is compared. According to the Brookings Institution, “a close examination of wealth in the U.S. finds evidence of staggering racial disparities. At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in 2016”.
The annual cost of imprisonment was estimated at $37,499 for “Federal inmates in Bureau prisons” by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Black Americans are incarcerated at a rate approximately six times higher than that of white Americans, accounting for 33% of the prison population compared to 12% of the country’s population, according to the Pew Research Center. For Black men aged 35-39, “about one-in-twenty […] were in state and federal prison in 2018.”
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Immigrants comprise approximately 13.7% of the United States population according to the US Census Bureau. The share of immigrants working in the construction workforce has steadily increased in recent years, reaching 24.4% in 2016, including 31% of carpenters, 37% of construction laborers, 45% of roofers and 54% of plasterers and stucco masons, as reported by the National Association of Home Builders.
Bryson City, North Carolina
“Roughly half of hired crop farmworkers lack legal immigration status” according to the USDA. During the period 2014-2016, it was estimated that only 27% of crop farmworkers were born in the United States, and 73% were immigrants. Among frontline meatpacking workers, 51.5% surveyed were born outside the United States during the period 2014-2018, as summarized by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. By September, outbreaks of COVID-19 had occurred in at least 494 slaughterhouses nationwide according to The Washington Post.
In the Salinas Valley of California, a study by UC Berkeley and the Clinica de Salud del Valle Salinas revealed that 13% of crop laborers in the state’s $50 billion agriculture industry tested positive for COVID-19 during the period June-October 2020. This was about 3 times the state average, with an additional 7% having antibodies to COVID-19, revealing a population infection rate of 20% before the late year surge in cases. About 7% of participants reported the loss of a loved one from the virus. Among the same surveyed population (96% Latino), 51% had “inability to the pay the bills”, 37% had “low or very low food security” and 20% had “difficulty getting medical care or medication”.
Bryson City, North Carolina
Approximately 17.1% of the United States’ GDP went to healthcare according to recent data, with an almost quadrupling of costs per person over the past four decades ($2,900 in 1980 vs. $11,200 in 2018, measured in 2018 dollars). “The United States has dramatically higher health-care prices than other advanced economies. This is the case for surgical procedures, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs, and almost any other type of healthcare service” according to the Brookings Institution.
Moreover, “life expectancy at birth is the lowest” and “maternal and infant mortality are the highest” for the United States in comparison to the sampled advanced economies such as Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan, where policies such as prescription price controls and universal healthcare are instituted. 28.8 million Americans adults did not have health insurance in 2019, with an estimated 12 million workers losing their employer-sponsored health insurance during the COVID-19 pandemic by summer’s end.
Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Flint, Michigan
The city of Flint has experienced decades of economic decline. Once a thriving hub of the automotive industry, area employment by General Motors peaked around 85,000 workers in the 1980s, although the city’s population had already begun to fall from its height of 200,000 residents in the 1960s. Flint “once boasted the highest median income in the state thanks to General Motors” according to Michigan Live. General Motors was the largest private employer in the country by 1979 with 618,365 workers, the highest number it would reach.
Flint is now among the nation’s poorest cities with a 45% poverty rate reported in 2016. The city’s 58% childhood poverty rate that same year was three times the national average. A state-declared financial emergency in 2011 and the Flint water crisis beginning in 2014 have added to severe challenges faced by the city’s approximately 100,000 residents.
Flint, Michigan
Great Smoky Mountains, North Carolina
The spring arrived three weeks early or more in much of North Carolina and the Southeastern United States, making it the earliest onset of spring on record.
A record number of 10,274,679 acres of forest were burnt by fire nationwide in 2020, mostly in the Western United States. This exceeds the recent ten-year annual average by 3.5 million acres and makes it the most destructive fire season on record since consistent reporting methods began in 1983 according to the National Interagency Fire Center. California experienced five of its six largest fires ever recorded, Colorado had its three largest fires on record and Oregon had a record 1,221,234 acres burnt during the official 2020 fire season.
A combination of heatwaves and a severe megadrought exacerbated by climate change, as well as poor forest management practices have been cited as reasons for the record 2020 fire season. NASA observed that the 130°F mark registered in Death Valley during August may the “highest ever reliably recorded on Earth” and that Los Angeles had its hottest day ever recorded (121°F) on September 6.