Giving Compass' Take:

• Authors writing for Brookings break down exactly where there are vulnerable industries that will be severely impacted by the COVID-19 recession. 

• How can donors help coordinate a response that addresses the recession in vulnerable cities and towns?

• Read how funders can address the needs of grassroots organizations. 

At first blush, it seems like the coronavirus pandemic is shutting down the economy everywhere, equally, with frightening force and totality. In many respects, that’s true: Across the country, consumer spending—which supports 70% of the economy—is crashing in community after community, as people avoid stores, restaurants, movie theaters, offices, and other public places.

Already, the layoffs have begun, with reports coming in from both big cities including Seattle and Atlanta as well as small heartland towns.

But as recession forecasts proliferate, it’s not necessarily true that all areas will be hit equally hard. In a huge nation made up of diverse places and varied local economies, a look at the geography of highly exposed industries makes clear that the economic toll of any coming recession will hit different regions in disparate, uneven ways.

To illustrate this, we mapped the employment geography of an array of industries vulnerable to disruption by virus-related demand declines, shutdowns, and layoffs.

The most exposed metro area nationwide is the oil-and-gas town of Midland, Texas, with 42% of its workforce in high-risk industries. Other major energy producers such as Odessa and Laredo, Texas as well as Houma-Thibodaux, La. also land in the top 10 most affected.

The numbers also underscore the massive size of the nation’s reeling leisure and hospitality sector. Kahului, Hawaii, Atlantic City, N.J., and Las Vegas all fall into the top five most recession-vulnerable metro areas, each with more than a third of their workforce in industries threatened by coronavirus-related uncertainties.

This suggests an important takeaway for policymakers: While essentially all of America will likely be affected by COVID-19’s economic effects, those effects will be distinct and varied from place-to-place. Given that, we must not only act quickly, but also attend to the unique regional and local impacts within this national crisis.

Read the full article about where COVID-19 recession will be hit the hardest by Mark Muro, Robert Maxim, and Jacob Whiton at Brookings.