America’s Most Distressed Cities: Where Happiness Is at Its Lowest!
Across multiple well-being surveys and data sources, the nation’s most distressed cities tend to cluster in the Rust Belt and parts of the South and Appalachia. For example, WalletHub’s 2025–26 happiness index of 182 large U.S. cities places Cleveland, Detroit, and Memphis at the very bottom of the list. These cities share extremely high poverty […]