Talk:Standard of Living
From SmarterCities
Please post your comments and responses about the Standard of Living description, data sources or survey questions here. We welcome your thoughts and opinions. CityWiki is open to diverse points of view; the opinions expressed by contributors, online commenters, and the editors are their own and not necessarily those of NRDC.
Contents |
Employment Figures
Comment received via email from Lee Epstein: percent owner-occupied housing is good, and families below poverty line (I guess) gets a negative point or two. HOI is also a good criterion. I suggest also the percent employment or unemployment as a very good indicator of economic and social strength, economic diversity, etc.
Owner-Occupied Housing
One observation is that using percent owner occupied will separate out most college towns.
- Thank you for the comment. While we used percent owner-occupied housing from the U.S. Census in the last report, we will not be using that statistic again. As you suggest, it favors home ownership over renting and doesn't encompass the affordability of housing as we would like.
- But do you or any other reviewers here recommend looking beyond housing affordability and poverty measurements to measure standard of living? This criterion is currently drawing from a limited number of data sources and includes no survey questions.--SmarterCities 17:18, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
Affordable Housing
Comment received by email from Barbara Samuels, Managing Attorney—Fair Housing, ACLU of Maryland:
I was interested in your “Smarter Cities” sustainability criteria related to housing affordability and liveability. I think there are a couple of things not being captured in the indicators you are using and a problem with some of the ones you are using.
1. A key element of sustainability should measure whether a city and region is losing or gaining affordable housing, especially housing provided through government housing programs, through its development practices and public policies. A sustainable city/region is growing its affordable housing stock in proportion to needs and population growth. A city/region that is NOT sustainable has a stagnant supply, or worse, is experiencing a net reduction. Net loss of affordable housing can occur through market practices, but often is the result of public policy actions (e.g. Demolished public and/or HUD assisted housing without one-for-one replacement of lost units; urban renewal projects that destroy more affordable housing than they produce; releasing owners of assisted housing from long-term use affordability restrictions, etc.). A ‘sustainable city/region” should have policies or ordinances that expressly address this and pledge ‘no net loss’ of affordable housing through government funded actions. Some do have such policies (e.g. St. Paul, MN; Seattle), but most do not have express policies. A city/region should get a higher score for sustainability if it has a ‘no net loss’ law or written policy. A city/region should also get a higher score if its count of federally subsidized housing is increased or at least maintained, and a lower score if it is decreasing.
2. You seem to be using poverty rate as a positive measure of quality of life, affordability and sustainability. This seems kind of backwards way to measure affordability, because a city with a high poverty rate likely has a low quality of life and is not sustainable. Instead, you should measure affordability based on the number (see above) and distribution of affordable housing and the degree to which poverty level or low income households are integrated into the larger community. For example, you could use a dissimilarity index to measure whether poor households are distributed evenly across the city/region, or whether they are concentrated in a few areas. A city/region with a low score on the dissimilarity index would be relatively integrated by income and would be more sustainable than one marked by concentrated poverty in some areas and little poverty in others.
3. Similarly, you seem to be using the “presence” of affordable housing as a measure of affordability and qualify of life. I’m not sure how this factors into the analysis, but you want to be careful that this is not just be measuring concentrated poverty in cities, and reflecting public policies that confined affordable housing to inner-cities. A better indicator would be the distribution of and “access” to affordable housing across a region. You could similarly measure whether affordable housing is clustered or concentrated in a few places, or equitably and evenly distributed across the city/region. A region is more sustainable if its affordable housing is equitably distributed than one where clusters of affordable housing is contributing to concentrated poverty. You could also measure whether affordable housing is located in areas with schools that rank above (or below) the state average on school performance measures. This would be another way to measure how equitably distributed the affordable housing is. Third, you really need to consider whether housing is affordable and up to standards as opposed to just counting housing that is low cost, but may be substandard or unhealthy. For example, you should definitely count the incidence of lead poisoning.
4. For lots of related reasons, it is also the case that a racially/ethnically segregated city/region is less sustainable than one that is more integrated. Therefore, you should also score a city/region higher on the sustainability index if is more racially integrated according to accepted measures (dissimilarity, exposure, isolation indices).
One final observation from someone who works in the housing field, not the environmental field. These “sustainability” measures seem to give a lot of weight to envirnomental considerations, and to a lesser extent, transportation. But when looking a cities and urban regions, housing and economic indicators are at least as important in measuring sustainability.
Title
Consider whether "Quality of Life" might better describe this section, as opposed to "Standard of Living"
