America is the land of unequal opportunity. These 13 maps show how class, education, and health inequities all intersect – with nonwhite, rural areas hit especially hard.

In much of the US, it’s harder for children to climb the economic ladder

Maps help bust myths.

One example: A major part of the American Dream is seeing one’s children end up better off than you were. That dream is not equally attainable across the US.

The above map, using data from a 2014 study, shows where in the national income distribution the average child whose parents are at the bottom quarter of that distribution ends up. That kind of mobility is much lower across the rural Southeast than in other parts of the country, with children there ending up landing in a similar spot in the income distribution as their parents.

As we’ll see later, these areas also have lower incomes and higher poverty. This map suggests these problems can carry on from generation to generation.

The share of adults with a degree is much higher in big cities and college towns.

Educational attainment is key to a thriving economy. College-educated Americans are more likely to be employed than workers with just a high school diploma, and wages for employed college grads tend to be higher than for nongrads.

And so, this map showing the share of adults 25 and over with a bachelor’s degree or higher largely follows similar trends like economic outcomes.

The northeast corridor and West Coast have highly educated populations, while much smaller shares of the populations in Appalachia and the Deep South hold a bachelor’s degree.

One exception in this map are several small counties with college towns in the South and Midwest with highly educated populations, such as Champaign County, Illinois; Lafayette County, Mississippi; and Story County, Iowa.

Another place where the urban-rural divide is clear is home values.

A big part of building wealth for US families is in homeownership, and this too shows big regional differences.

The coasts and large cities and their suburbs stand out for their sky-high home values. Parts of the Mountain West and Hawaii also have high median home values, while most of the rural parts of the continental US are much lower.

That difference in the value of owner-occupied homes can reflect other inequities. For many American families, the houses they live in are their largest financial assets. As of the fourth quarter of 2020, real estate made up the largest component of wealth for the bottom 90% of families.

Families living in places where real estate is less valuable could have a harder time building wealth than those who can invest in more rapidly appreciating homes.

Median household income tends to be much higher in big cities and their suburbs than in rural areas.

There are clear differences in household incomes across counties. On the one hand, the highly urbanized Northeastern corner stretching from Boston to Washington, DC, tends to be relatively affluent. So are the big cities on the West Coast, along with big inland metropolises like Chicago, Dallas, and Denver.

 

On the other hand, several largely rural areas have much lower incomes. There’s a stretch of low-income counties across the South, running from the Carolinas through Georgia and Alabama into the Mississippi delta. There’s a similar swath in West Virginia, southern Ohio, and Kentucky. Other rural areas with low incomes include parts of central South Dakota, New Mexico, and Arizona. 

As we’ll see throughout the rest of the maps, that basic economic disparity shows itself across many dimensions of American life.

Poverty follows a very similar pattern to income, unsurprisingly.

Widespread poverty is another tragic sign of the lack of equal opportunity available to Americans living in different places.

The share of people in poverty appears like a photo negative of median household income. Similar bands of high poverty cross the Deep South and Appalachia, overlapping areas with lower family incomes.

Other notable areas with high poverty rates include central South Dakota, parts of rural New Mexico and Arizona, and northern Alaska.

There were pockets of high unemployment before the pandemic in many of the same places.

One big factor in the economic divide is the number of job opportunities available in the region. Many of the same counties with low incomes and high poverty rates also suffer from persistently high unemployment.

While unemployment was very low across the US before the COVID-19 pandemic, rates were higher in Appalachia, the Mississippi valley between Louisiana and Alabama, and Alaska than in much of the rest of the country.

The income, poverty, and unemployment maps together show that there are large parts of the US that do not offer robust economic opportunities to their residents, like Appalachia and parts of the Deep South.

That partly reflects a nationwide urban-rural divide: A 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that counties in metro areas tended to have slightly higher economic growth than rural areas.

But the areas we’re looking at fare worse on these metrics than even other rural areas, like much of the Great Plains states.

The share of people without health insurance varies by state, with those that adopted Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion tending to have higher insurance rates than those that didn’t.

Access to healthcare is another key part of surviving and thriving in modern life, and it too shows regional divides.

State borders are much more visible on this map than on many others in this series. The share of the population without health insurance is much lower in states that adopted the Medicaid expansion provided for by the Affordable Care Act than in states that didn’t — compare uninsurance rates in Medicaid-expanding Louisiana and Arkansas to neighboring states like Texas, Missouri, and Mississippi, which all declined the expansion.

Still, within states, we can see similar divides between urban and rural counties. Many counties in southern and western Texas have high uninsurance rates, as do counties in central South Dakota and northern Alaska.

The economic disparities also show up in people’s health.

Health outcomes and access to healthcare are also unequally distributed across the country. Serious health problems tend to be more common in some parts of the country than others.

The share of residents with at least one disability was relatively low in the Northeast corridor and along the California coast. Meanwhile, disability rates were much higher in several Southern states, as well as in other rural areas.

Rural access to healthcare is an ongoing problem in the US. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “rural Americans are more likely to die from heart disease, cancer, unintentional injury, chronic lower respiratory disease, and stroke than their urban counterparts.”

Even broadband internet access shows a similar pattern.

America’s infrastructure, which provides a framework for economic success, is also geographically very uneven.

The share of households with a broadband internet subscription is much lower in rural counties in Appalachia, southern Texas, the Deep South, rural New Mexico, and central South Dakota than in many other parts of the country. Meanwhile, high-speed internet is nearly ubiquitous in big cities and on the coasts.

Broadband expansion is a key part of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, with $100 billion allocated to expanding internet access across the country. In the 21st century, high-speed internet access is an essential part of life and business, and places that lack wide access to broadband will suffer reduced opportunities.

Across US history, the types of inequities across class lines we’ve been looking at have been intimately tied up with racial inequities.

Many of the areas with poor outcomes we’ve seen in previous maps are also majority nonwhite. This map begins by looking at majority-Black counties.

As the above map shows, many of the counties with the largest Black populations fall along the same swath of Southern states that have had the worst economic, educational, and health outcomes. 

This should not be surprising — the legacy of slavery and segregation continue to this day, with racial inequalities persisting across a variety of metrics. Those ongoing inequities and racial wounds show up when comparing outcomes across the US.

Similarly, some areas with large Latino populations in the Southwest had high poverty rates and low incomes.

Many largely Latino areas also overlap with the socioeconomic problems throughout the series.

The majority-Latino southern part of Texas along the Rio Grande border with Mexico also had low health-insurance rates, even among counties in that non-Medicaid-expanding state. The region also had low access to high-speed internet.

Other areas with large Latino populations, like southern California and the Miami metro area, had better socioeconomic outcomes.

Areas with large American Indian and Alaska Native populations also face similar problems.

The history of American Indians in the US has more than its share of tragedy, from the devastation wrought from diseases brought from Europe to forced relocations. As these maps suggest, inequities persist to this day.

Central South Dakota, western New Mexico, eastern Arizona, and Alaska all have large American Indian or Alaska Native populations. Those counties also tend to have low median household incomes and high poverty.

 

Some predominantly white areas also face serious challenges.

The other region that shows up as struggling across most of our maps runs through Appalachia, with several counties in eastern Kentucky and western West Virginia struggling across economic, educational, and health lines. This map shows the share of white residents in each county that falls below the poverty line.

Appalachia has historically been somewhat poorer than many other parts of the US. In recent years, it’s been one of the epicenters of the opioid crisis that has torn through American communities.

Place matters, and it shows how many of America’s problems and inequities are interconnected.

This composite map, which overlays median household income, poverty, disability rates, and broadband internet access, shows the extent to which the same places in the country struggle with all these issues.

Understanding the overlap between economic, health, educational, and other disparities is a crucial step to solving those inequities. Seeing how they interact with one another, as in the maps above, can help with that understanding.