This State Has the Most Risk From Pandemic Fallout

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 22, 8:30AM EDT

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This State Has the Most Risk From Pandemic Fallout — © stevegeer / iStock via Getty Images

The COVID-10 pandemic hit the U.S. economy hard. The national unemployment rate was 3.5% in February 2020. It reached 14.8% in April, the highest level since 1948. Government assistance had some effect. Two rounds of stimulus payments from the federal government, totaling $400 billion, lifted 11.7 million Americans out of poverty, according to the Census Bureau. However, the results of the downturn and recovery were uneven, based on both income class and location.
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ATTOM, the real estate database company, has released its third-quarter 2021 Special Coronavirus Report. The report reviews county-level real estate data to find areas of the country that remain most vulnerable to the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. While this challenge has been mitigated by the recovery, it has not disappeared.

The primary conclusion from the report:

The report shows that New Jersey, Illinois and Delaware had the highest concentrations of the most at-risk markets in the third quarter – with the biggest clusters in the New York City and Chicago areas – while the West remained far less exposed.

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ATTOM arrived at its conclusion by reviewing the 50 counties most vulnerable to the real estate effects of the pandemic. It reviewed its own foreclosure, affordability and home equity reports. The total universe reviewed was 570 counties with sufficient data to make a complete analysis.

Twenty of the 50 most troubled counties were near New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia, as well as in Delaware. New York is the largest city in America, and Chicago ranks third after Los Angeles.

The eight counties in the Chicago area that made the list were Cook, DeKalb, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry and Will. In the New York City area, they were Essex, Hunterdon, Monmouth, Ocean, Passaic and Sussex in New Jersey and Rockland County in New York.

Only two counties in the western United States made the list: Shasta and Humboldt, both in California.

Click here to see which is the least expensive town in which to buy a home in each state.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.