But there’s another type of left-behind community that’s gotten far less attention. These towns are located in the suburbs of the American west, in regions hit hard by the housing crisis—Southern California, Las Vegas, and Arizona. Hemet, a suburb of Riverside, California, with a population of 84,000, ranked eighth on EIG’s most distressed small-and-mid-sized-cities list. In Hemet, according to the group’s report, employment fell 15.5 percent between 2011 and 2015, while it grew 9.4 percent nationwide. The number of businesses in Hemet dropped 4.8 percent over that time period. The median home price, at $237,000, is still 30 percent lower than it was in 2006.

Why hasn’t Hemet found surer footing? For one thing, the region where Hemet is located was decimated by the housing crisis, with among the highest foreclosure and unemployment rates in the nation; many families are still recovering. But Hemet’s problems are also the result of structural changes in the economy—changes that have been underway for decades but were masked by the heady days of the housing boom. Middle-class jobs have been disappearing while high-wage and low-wage jobs have grown—but in different geographic locations. High-wage jobs are often located in big cities, while low-wage jobs are in relatively cheap locations like suburbs and small cities. This dynamic changes the housing markets of these cities, too, with big cities getting more expensive as more high-wage workers migrate there, and low-wage workers leaving cities to seek more affordable housing in the far-away suburbs they can afford. Now that the dust of the recession has cleared, it is evident that the geography of poverty has changed in America. Hemet is emblematic of just how fast—and just how dramatically—this has happened.

I first visited Hemet in 2010, when, as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, I stumbled across a one-time luxury development that real-estate agents were, at the time, calling a “gated ghetto.” Dozens of families in the community, called Willowalk, had lost their homes to foreclosure and investors had swooped in, bought up the properties, and rented them out, often not checking references and not maintaining the properties. Homeowners were shocked when renters with Section 8 vouchers moved in next door.

When I returned to Hemet this November, I assumed that the development would have bounced back in the seven years since. The houses are huge and Willowalk features a community pool, a lake, and walking trails, all features that, in California’s booming real-estate market, would make the development seem like a steal. But not much has changed in the seven years since I first visited. If anything, the situation has gotten worse for people who remained.

“The crime level just keeps getting higher,” Toni Willden, who bought her home in 2005, told me recently, about Willowalk. The gates that keep out nonresidents get broken once or twice a week, she said. Just about everybody in town knows the code to the gates anyway—I got it by asking the clerk at the hotel where I was staying. Another woman, Amy Aschenberg, whose family in 2014 bought a five-bedroom home overlooking a pond, told me that she and her husband realized they’d made a mistake soon after buying their home. The gated community was filled with renters, who didn’t keep up their homes and who hosted parties late into the night, especially in the summer. Home burglaries—in the middle of the day—happened with alarming regularity. “I would never have moved here if I had known what this place was,” Aschenberg, 36, told me recently.

This gated community is an example of how some neighborhoods that were once middle-class are becoming poorer. “The lack of construction in coastal cities has forced people who are marginally educated and low-income to move inland,” said John Husing, the chief economist of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership. Median rents in Hemet rose just five percent between 2009 and 2016; in Los Angeles, they rose 20 percent, according to Census data.