America's poorer counties are new investment boomtowns: study

There's an unprecedented building boom underway in America. With it has come a less-noticed phenomenon: a surge of investment into communities left behind in the last economic expansion.

Why it matters: Poorer counties with lower employment rates have attracted a large share of the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated for clean energy projects, semiconductor mega-factories and more.

If sustained, the investment surge has the potential to help reshape local economies — a sharp departure from the 2010s, a period that saw more muted investment in these parts of the...