Insights

The proposal is a one-way contraction. Nothing is gained anywhere, and 6,030 tracts lose. Those 6,030 tracts are not the affluent enclaves the TEA reforms were written to exclude — they are the places whose economies have deteriorated in the last year or two. What survives skews toward areas whose five-year averages are still propped up by the 2020–2021 pandemic shock, including hundreds of tracts with six-figure median incomes and unemployment below the national average.