Dear friends,
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, local, regional, and state leaders around the country have been working hard to channel historic levels of federal support toward an inclusive economic recovery. Yet too often, the lack of timely, comparable data has made it challenging to understand whether and how the recovery has benefited their residents and communities. To clarify that picture, this week Brookings Metro released Metro Monitor 2023, which offers the most comprehensive look to-date of how the COVID-19 recession and recovery have impacted growth, prosperity, and inclusion in the nation’s metro areas.
While the pandemic affected every metro area, an accompanying analysis finds that metro areas’ distinctive economic starting points—coupled with variation in the intensity and duration of the pandemic’s health and economic impacts—ensured that there was no one uniform story of recovery. The Monitor finds that the nation’s 192 largest metro areas exhibited four distinct inclusive growth trajectories during the pandemic downturn and recovery: “tested,” “stagnant,” “resilient,” and “emergent.”
While every region was represented in each growth trajectory, there were some clear spatial patterns in the data. Metro areas in the West (such as Denver, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle) were considered on balance to be tested, meaning they ranked in the top half of inclusive economic growth prior to COVID-19, but slipped into the bottom half during the pandemic. Northeast metro areas (such as three out of the four metro areas in Connecticut, both metro areas in southern New Jersey, and Springfield, Mass.) skewed toward stagnant, with inclusive growth scores that ranked in the bottom half both before and during the pandemic. The South’s metro economies proved more resilient than the rest of the country (including 11 out of 16 metro areas in Florida), meaning their inclusive growth scores ranked in the top half of the distribution in both periods. Finally, about 30% of Midwest metro areas were emergent, rising from the bottom half to the top half during the pandemic, including Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Kansas City, Mo.
The report also found that the pandemic dislodged the relatively strong long-run performance of the nation’s very largest metro areas. During the 2010s, metro areas with populations greater than 1 million outpaced the rest of the nation on most of the 12 indicators that the report uses to measure inclusive growth. But the Metro Monitor now identifies more than 40% of these very large metro areas as “tested,” including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston.
These metro areas’ losses appeared to be smaller metro areas’ gains. The report classifies two-thirds of metro areas with populations between 500,000 and 1 million as either “resilient” or “emergent,” while metro areas with populations between 250,000 and 500,000 registered more mixed performances. Whether this changed landscape reflects a pandemic-induced blip or something more enduring remains to be seen.
One thing is clear: Local, regional, and state leaders need to understand their own post-pandemic economic trajectory and invest strategically in the foundations of a robust recovery. As Brookings’s Amy Liu and Peter Rezk recently wrote, there’s no shortage of issues currently dividing leaders in state government from their counterparts in cities and metro areas. As those authors conclude, however, strong and broadly shared economic growth is a priority that can cut across party and geographic lines. For practitioners and policymakers across the country, the data in Metro Monitor 2023 can help guide that much-needed collaboration.
