The Distressed Community Index (DCI) was designed by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) to provide a simple way to identify and evaluate distressed communities around the country, as well as to understand key economic challenges on a local and regional level.
About the index on the map above: The scores range from 0 to 100, moving from dark green in the most prosperous zip codes to dark red in the most distressed ones.
There also is an infographic on the DCI website that ranks the top and bottom cities for each indicator. Users can identify how a target geography performs in those seven metrics, and compare it to other communities throughout the country. The result is a first-of-its-kind interactive “heat map” of distress and prosperity.
The DCI index is organized on its mapping website in tabs, each providing a different view of the data. Some tabs allow you to drill deeper into a geographic area.
For example, if you click on the bubble representing Detroit in the “Cites” tab, you will be taken to a map of that city where you can explore pockets of distress by zip code. And, if you click on Nevada in the “States and Counties” tab, you can get more information for a specific county in that state.