From the Editor: Study ranks St. Mary among 'distressed' areas

For more than three years, St. Mary has blamed an economic downturn on a prolonged slump in oil prices dating to autumn 2014. Depressed energy prices eliminated about one St. Mary job in every five and reduced collections from the sales taxes that make local governments run.
But a report by an economic think tank suggests that rural communities beyond St. Mary, beyond the oil patch and even beyond Louisiana face other kinds of struggles.
The report is the Distressed Communities Index compiled by the Economic Innovation Group, which describes itself as “a bipartisan public policy organization, founded in 2013, combining innovative research and data-driven advocacy to address America’s most pressing economic challenges.”
The report looks at economic and social factors in the nation’s counties and 26,000 ZIP codes, basing its work on U.S. Census Bureau data. The report gives each ZIP code a “distress score” and a “distress ranking” and divides them into fifths, or quintiles. The bottom one-fifth contains the communities that the group characterizes as distressed.
“These 5,225 zip codes are the places that have fallen through the cracks of the U.S. economy,” the report says. All St. Mary ZIP codes are in that bottom fifth.
“… The U.S. economy contains a diverse and fragmented landscape of economic well-being —one in which many communities are flourishing, while far too many are left behind,” the report’s introduction says.
And, later: “This report intends to bring renewed attention to those forgotten places and people.”

Beyond the oil patch
The Census Bureau data are averages from 2011-15, a period that covers only about the first third of the drop in oil prices into the $30-$40 per barrel range. Prices stabilized in the $50-$60 range late in 2017, but recovery has been slow.
ZIP codes far outside traditional energy-producing areas like Louisiana are struggling by the Economic Innovation Group’s standards. Most of the distressed ZIPs are concentrated in the Southeast, stretching upward along the Mississippi River and into Appalachia.
The group itself found the underlying causes difficult to characterize. Utah, New Hampshire, Minnesota, North Dakota and Colorado were the states with large concentrations of relatively prosperous ZIPs to distressed ZIPS. Mississippi, West Virginia, Arizona, the District of Columbia, Indiana, North Carolina and Ohio had high concentrations of distressed communities.
In Louisiana, about 30 percent of the people live in distressed communities, according to the report. Across the Southeast, about 23 percent of people live in those communities. For the nation, the figure is 15 percent.
Many of the distressed ZIPs have relatively large minority populations, but others are almost exclusively white. The southern states with large distressed communities are largely red states, but the distribution defies political labels.
Money
According to the report’s data, all St. Mary communities except Berwick lost employer businesses 2011-15, while the total number of U.S. employers grew by 4.2 percent.
Employment fell significantly in Patterson and Berwick, and rose slightly in Morgan City and Franklin, while U.S. employment grew by 9 percent.
The number of adults not working and the poverty rate were higher here than across the country, median household incomes were generally lower in St. Mary than in the United States as a whole.
Morgan City and Franklin both had relatively high housing vacancy rates, compared with the nation’s.
Education is widely considered to be a remedy for economic ills, and St. Mary has managed to put together a good school system, ranking near the top third of the state’s districts in accountability scores. That’s despite the fact that a large proportion of low-income students — 70 percent — presents obstacles to achievement.
Even with the good schools, the percentage of St. Mary’s over-25 population without high school diplomas is often twice the nation’s 13.3 percent rate. Many more have only a high school diploma.
Lack of post-secondary education is rapidly becoming a difficult economic obstacle to overcome.
In 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median weekly earnings for all workers was $885. The median for holders of bachelor degrees was $1,156, and for those with two-year degrees, $819.
For those with just a high school diploma, the median weekly wage was $692. And for those who didn’t complete high school, the median earnings were $504.

Health
The ramifications go beyond money. A struggling economy can be hazardous to your health.
The Economic Innovation Group’s data say that the life expectancy in distressed communities is five years shorter than in the rest of the nation. Mortality rates are 25 percent higher in distressed counties, and for cancer, pregnancy complications, suicide and violence are even higher.
One result is that the nation spends significantly more on Medicaid in those distressed areas despite the less favorable outcomes, the report said.
The nation’s distressed ZIP codes have 30 million fewer people than the top fifth in the rankings, but the distressed ZIPs have three times as many people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps.
In summing up, the report says much of the nation hasn’t experienced a deep, sustained recovery since the Great Recession of 2008-09.
“It is fair to wonder,” the report’s conclusion says, “whether a recovery that excludes tens of millions of Americans and thousands of communities deserves to be called a recovery at all.”
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review. Reach him at bdecker@daily-review.com.