Daily reading includes the Creativity Exchange, inspired by the work of Richard Florida. Yesterday I saw this - Best and Worst Regions for Children.
Lot's of people talk about how important it is for regions to be good places for families and children. But few, if any, studies have provided detailed empirical evidence to compare cities and regions. A new study by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Center for Health Advancement has developed detailed rankings for the largest 100 metropolitan regions based upon measures of housing, neighborhood conditions, residential integration, education and health.Yikes...I've archived the full study, here - Children Left Behind [link to .pdf]. The full set of data can be viewed here - diversitydata.org
Worst Regions for Children...
Black Children
Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY; Chicago, IL; Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria, OH; Fresno, CA; Jersey City, NJ; Louisville, KY; Miami, FL; Milwaukee-Waukesha, WI; Mobile, AL; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY; Rochester, NY.
Hispanic Children
Bakersfield, CA; Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY; El Paso, TX; Fresno, CA; Hartford, CT; Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA; Milwaukee-Waukesha, WI; New York, NY; Providence-Fall River-Warwick, RI-MA; Rochester, NY; Springfield, MA; Syracuse, NY.
Sent out an email last nite about this new study looking for some understanding and interpretation of the data. Frequent fixBuffalo reader, Hank Bromley, wrote back...
The numbers are certainly atrocious. For what it's worth, Buffalo-Niagara Falls isn't actually in "last place" - it just comes first alphabetically in the group of a dozen or so metro areas that were at the bottom of the rankings in economic opportunity for black kids, and likewise for Hispanic kids.
In the section of the report on the rankings (beginning on p. 30), they explain that they used the data in five areas: neighborhood poverty, proportion of households headed by single mothers, homeownership, proportion of adults without a diploma, and unemployment - all measured at the neighborhood level, not the individual family. read the rest...
Artspace Archive • Annals of Neglect • BAVPA • Where is Perrysburg? • Broken Promises...
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2 comments:
Holy shit dude, I read the same thing this morning!
There is no denying it, the Buffalo-Niagara region is one of the most segregated in the nation.
Would like to see more about the criteria used for this study. Also, I couldn't help noticing that Rochester made both lists too. As I've said, all the upstate NY cities are on the same path as Buffalo, experiencing the same problems: loss of jobs, loss of people, loss of tax base, etc. It's just a matter of Buffalo being a bit further down the path than the rest. We're all in the "plywood belt" and it's time we all got "smarter about decline". Is there any cooperative effort among these cities? They have common problems, wouldn't you think there'd be common goals, too?
Chip
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