Financial distress, county by county.

Macon and Bibb County merged their governments in 2014 after four failed attempts over eighty years. The promise was efficiency. A decade later the consolidated county ranks second in the nation for household financial distress. The administration unified. The condition it was supposed to address did not.

Tunica County built an economy out of rooms. Gaming floors, hotel towers, buffet halls, back-of-house corridors where 13,000 people used to clock in and out. Four casinos have closed since 2014. A hotel complex with more than a thousand bedrooms has stood empty the whole time. The county ranks third of 3,144 for household financial distress and it has 9,234 people left to fill what remains.

The fourth most distressed county in America sits inside the Richmond metro. Its nearest neighbor scores 37 points lower. The boundary is the mechanism.

The top peanut county in Georgia produces $370 million in annual farm output as of 2019. Forty-two percent of its residents have debt in collections. The yield leaves. The cost stays.

Eighth most distressed county in America. First in Missouri. Population peaked at 46,857 in 1940. Fourteen thousand remain. The drainage never stopped.

In 1896, someone discovered tobacco grown under cloth shade was worth ten times the price. The shade left. The county is still under it.

A county that produces $293 million in cotton and soybeans, exports four professional musicians from a single small town, and hasn’t had a hospital in nearly eight years. CDI 79.2, Serious zone, 80th of 3,144 counties. The gin separates what’s valuable from where it was grown.

Wayne County keeps being unmade. The town was drowned for a dam. The courthouse burned three times. A tornado killed six people in 2025. Each time, people rebuilt. The structural poverty score stayed first in Missouri.

A Navy aviation facility and low unemployment exist five miles from the most distressed census tract in North Carolina.

The most documented poor county in America. Ninety-five years of songs, films, and television. The documentation changed nothing.

Sugar, prisoners, clean water. Everything Glades County produces is for somewhere else. There is no hospital.

George Parr ran Duval County for thirty-three years. They called him El Patron. He's been dead since 1975. The poverty he managed is still here, managed now by a different patron.

Burlington made backhoes for 87 years. The plant closed. The arithmetic that held the county together stopped working.

Yakima County produces $2.3 billion in crops on Bureau of Reclamation water and sustains its workforce on Medicaid, SNAP, and a federally qualified health center network. Both irrigation systems are external. Both are politically vulnerable.

The county is writing an ordinance for what happens when vineyards die. Not buildings. Not businesses. The land itself.

The name Tucumcari likely derives from a Comanche word meaning ‘to lie in wait.’ The town that took that name is still waiting.

The seat of federal power scores Elevated. Housing Cost Burden scores Serious. FHA borrowers are defaulting at the highest rate of any large-volume county in the country, eleven miles from the agency that insures their mortgages.

A clinic screened thousands of patients for the disease a mine left in their lungs. The clinic just closed.

Three bronze foundries in a county of 7,674 people. Fifty-six percent national forest. The decisions about it are made in Portland.

Housing Cost Burden scores 79.8. The composite reads Healthy. The price filter decides who gets counted.

The second-least distressed of 3,144 counties. Twenty miles downhill, child poverty is in the 85th percentile. Prosperity doesn’t descend.