Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has gone through an acute recession in 2020, a rapid jobs recovery in 2021, and high and sustained inflation in 2022.
To measure how local economies were faring during one of the most volatile economic periods in recent memory, Brookings Metro launched the Metro Recovery Index in 2020. It included critical insights on certain elements of economic recovery, including jobs, home prices, rents, and commuting patterns. But data was not yet available to measure whether the gains of the recovery were being shared inclusively across people and places.
Now, three years since the beginning of the pandemic, our newly released Metro Monitor provides the first comprehensive look of how the crisis impacted inclusive growth across 192 U.S. metro areas with populations of at least 250,000.