24 Distressed Communities Index (DCI)
24.3 Description
- DCI examines economic well-being at the zip code level in order to provide a detailed view of the divided landscape of American prosperity
- Combines seven complementary metrics into a broad-based assessment of community economic well-being in the United States (no high school diploma, housing vacancy rate, adults not working, poverty rate, median income ratio, change in employment, change in business establishments)
- Captures 99 percent of the U.S. population and covers more than 26,000 zip codes and more than 3,000 counties (those with over 500 people) as well as nearly 800 cities (those with at least 50,000 people)
24.6 Collection Methodology
- Constructed using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 5- Year Estimates for 2011-2015 and Business Patterns data from the years 2011 and 2015
- Distress scores are calculated at each scale by ranking geographic units on each of the seven metrics, taking the average of those ranks, and then normalizing the average to be equivalent to a percentile
- Produces a range of distress scores from 0 to 100
24.8 User Guide/Data Dictionary
Methodology available at: https://eig.org/dci/methodology .
24.12 Special Notes
- National rank: 1 (most prosperous) – 100 (distressed) or 1 (most prosperous) – 5 (distressed)
- Suggested citation: EIG: Economic Innovation Group Distressed Communities Index. http://eig.org/dci Economic Innovation Group Distressed Communities Index. Available at http://eig.org/dci. Accessed on [Insert date].