While the economy and the job market have boomed in the post-Financial Crisis period , Americans living in distressed zip codes which are increasingly rural are struggling to find stability.

And their path to progress poses a catch-22 situation, according to a researcher from the Economic Innovation Group.

Young people are kind of trapped in debt in distressed communities, EIG Research Director Kenan Fikri told Yahoo Finance. And they dont really have a pathway to get out of their situation and be able to afford moving to a prosperous metropolitan area to try to turn the situation around. So its really in a catch-22 that individuals who are trying to advance themselves from these communities end up landing.

An EIG report , originally published in October 2018, looked at around 25,800 zip codes 99% of the U.S. population and compared two periods: 2007 to 2011, and 2012 to 2016. One of the primary reasons for the distressed communities being left behind, researchers found, was a lack educational attainment.

Yet when residents from these distressed communities tried to bridge that gap by attending college, they ended up burdened by student debt, creating a worse situation financially.