Opportunity & Asset Mapping WebinarOpportunity Mapping Technical Assistance Webinar

Supported though the Sustainable Communities Technical Assistance Program Provided by the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development.

Additional support provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation & the Ford Foundation’s Metropolitan Opportunity Program

Presented to the Chittenden County Regional Planning DepartmentFebruary 21st 2012

Jason ReeceDirector of Research

The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & EthnicityThe Ohio State University

Social Equity Technical Assistance Provided in Partnership with PolicyLink & the Program for Environmental & Regional Equity

Reece.35@osu.edu

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Opportunity“Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the

tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardies acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.

We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid?”– Malcolm Gladwell “Outliers”

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Community & Access to Opportunity: Profound Impacts on Human Development, Health & Well Being

Community & Health

Development of Our Opportunity Community Model and Opportunity Mapping

Opportunity Based Housing(powell)

Opportunity Mapping(Reece & powell)

Opportunity Communities (Reece, Rogers & powell)

Evidence from Housing Mobility Programs and

the Regional Equity Movement

GIS Development: Neighborhood Indicators Initiatives and the Human

Development Index

The Metropolitan Opportunity Structure

(Galster & Killen)

Theories of Spatial Racism and Structural

RacismSystemic DisadvantageSocial Determinants of

Health

Previous Opportunity Mapping Projects• Chicago (2004) (Leadership Council for

Metropolitan Open Communities)• Baltimore, MD (2005) (Thompson v. HUD –

MD ACLU)• New Orleans (2005)• Cleveland (2006) (Presidents Council of

Cleveland)• Austin, TX (2007) (Green Doors)• African American Male Study (six region

study) (2007) (W.K. Kellogg Foundation)– Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los

Angeles, New York

• Detroit, MI (2008) (MI Roundtable)• Massachusetts (2009) MA Law Reform

Institute• Connecticut (2009) CT Fair Housing Center• New Orleans (2009) (Greater New Orleans

Fair Housing Center)

• Miami, Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa Bay, FL (2009) (Miami Workers Centers)

• State of Ohio (2010) State of Black Ohio Research Initiative

• Seattle, WA (2010) (Northwest Justice Project)• Portland, OR (2010) (Urban League)• California (Multiple Sites) (2010) (The California

Endowment)• Jacksonville, FL (2011) (The Jacksonville Children’s

Commission)• San Francisco Bay Region (2011)• Merced County, CA (2011) (The California

Endowment)• Gulf Coast of Mississippi (2011) (Gulf Regional

Planning Commission)• Galveston, TX (2011)• Columbus, OH (2011) (Columbus Community

Development Collaborative)• Greater New Orleans (Greater New Orleans

Foundation)

Why use mapping to support community advocacy?

• Internal Capacity Building– Creating a “common space” for dialogue

and group learning• To provide an entry point for starting

consensus building or collaborative discussions among diverse stakeholders

• Developing collective narratives about “place”

– To target resources and build internal capacity• To provide a local resource to identify

areas of greatest need in communities and assess “gaps” where need is not being met by on-going advocacy efforts, local initiatives, investments or policy initiatives.

• To help build local organizational capacity in understanding opportunity challenges and needs

Why use mapping to support community advocacy?

• External Capacity Building– Raising awareness (building

external capacity)• To raise attention and

awareness• To identify solutions to

remedy barriers to opportunity

• To call for systems change from various stakeholders

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Impact“From an institutional perspective, involvement with this project has required us as an organization to reach out to potential partners we have not interacted with before. We have developed relationships with organizations working on issues such as smart growth, health disparities and education which have helped to inform and direct our fair housing work.”

• -Erin Boggs, Deputy Director, Connecticut Fair Housing Center

“We have program outcome data on every program we fund, but we have never had a way to show impact upon a population or neighborhood. Opportunity mapping is a powerful tool that demonstrates the value of our work in a graphic and easy to understand way….our city budget continues to shrink but as we go forward we’ll be working on ways to refocus some of our investments.” • -Linda Lanier, Executive Director/CEO, Jacksonville Children’s Commission

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Impact“Within legal services, the mapping data is the foundation for a new place-based advocacy that seeks to bring intensive and comprehensive legal resources and social services to change outcomes in several low-opportunity zip codes or neighborhoods.” • -Fran Fajana, Director of the Race Equity Project, Massachusetts Law Reform

Institute

“The story of how our maps were created resembles the children’s story Stone Soup, in which a hungry community started out with nothing but a pot of water with stones and ended up with a rich soup that fed everyone because each person contributed something. Creating these maps was a community building experience that promises to have benefits that go beyond the maps themselves.” • –Andree Tremoulet, Ph.D. Housing Services Specialist, Washington County, OR,

Department of Community Development

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Our Disclaimers• We must use census geographies to represent neighborhoods or

communities (these are not always accurate representations)

• The opportunity index shows the relative distribution of how places along the coast rank in comparison to each other on a number of data based indicators

• The map and the index only represents what the indicators utilized and data collected presents – interpretation and use of the map must be a locally driven activity– Data cannot capture everything, but we use as much data as we can gather to

represent conditions

Field Mean standard deviation

Poverty rate 0.13 0.089882842

Unemployment rate 0.06 0.046389502

Households public assistance % 0.04 0.035978555

Owner-occupied units %_2 0.67 0.174428203

Avg commute time 25.28 5.569263641

Assoc deg 0.29 0.13

Education

RaMP Math Proficiency Total (%) 68.94604 20.5361

RaMP RaMP Reading Proficiency Total (%)

72.36774 92.139206

Fr_Red_lunch0.381057 0.239793086

Employment0.426245 7.798211

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Opportunity Mapping & SCI• The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has developed a

national opportunity index, measuring conditions along the Gulf Coast (its mandatory to use an opportunity index in sustainable communities planning activities)

• We have been working with the local consortiums in several SCI regions to develop a locally created opportunity index, to better represent the local input, to generate a more accurate opportunity map and to realize capacity building and engagement benefits from the process

• Opportunity to utilize HUD data with other local data to create a robust opportunity map

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How do you map opportunity?(Technical Perspective)

• Step 1: Selecting indicators– Multiple indicators clustered around particular opportunity

topics (education, economy, health and safety etc.)

• Step 2: Locating data • Step 3: Analyzing the data and created a composite

map for each opportunity topic• Step 4: Combining all the topical maps to create a

final opportunity map

Identifying and Selecting Indicators of High and Low Opportunity

• Established by input from Kirwan Institute and direction from the local steering committee

• Based on certain factors– Specific issues or concerns of the region– Research literature validating the connection between indicator and

opportunity• Central Requirement:

– Is there a clear connection between indicator and opportunity? E.g. Proximity to parks and Health related opportunity

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Mapping Communities of Opportunity: Methods and Indicators

• How do you map opportunity? – Data representing community conditions was gathered for

neighborhood (census tracts) across the region• Data for all indicators of community conditions was aggregated to the

census tract level and analyzed to create a comprehensive opportunity index for the census tracts (neighborhoods) throughout the region

• Significant geoprocessing involved• Geographic transformation• No weighting of variables (although indicators are analyzed in three

separate categories – and these are averaged)– The opportunity index is then mapped and census tracts are broken

into quintiles based on their opportunity score• Very Low, Low, Moderate, High, Very High• 1/5 of tracts clustered into each category based on final opportunity

score

Methodology:Calculating Z Scores

• Z Score – a statistical measure that quantifies the distance (measured in standard deviations) between data points and the meanZ Score = (Data point – Mean)/ Standard Deviation

• Allows data for a geography (e.g. census tract) to be measured based on their relative distance from the average for the entire region

• Raw z score performance– Mean value is always “zero” – z score indicates distance from the mean– Positive z score is always above the region’s mean, Negative z score is always below

the region’s mean– Indicators with negative effect on opportunity should have all the z scores adjusted to

reflect this phenomena

Methodology:Calculating Opportunity using Z Scores

• Final “opportunity index” for each census tract is the average of z scores (including adjusted scores for direction) for all indicators by category

• Census tracts can be ranked– Opportunity level is determined by sorting a region’s census tract z

scores into ordered categories (very low, low, moderate, high, very high)• Statistical measure• Grounded in Social Science research• Most intuitive but other measures can be used

– Example• Top 20% can be categorized as very high, bottom 20% - very low

Methodology: Averaging Z scores

• Z score averages assume equal participation of all variables toward “Opportunity Index” calculations– No basis to provide unequal weights

• Issue of weighting should be considered carefully– Need to have a strong rationale for weighting– Theoretical support would be helpful– Arbitrary weighting could skew the results

Regional Employment LandscapeMississippi Gulf Coast

Employment by TAZ

0 - 25

26 - 100

101 - 200

201 - 500

501 - 11366

Adjacent Counties

Employment by TAZ

0 - 25

26 - 100

101 - 200

201 - 500

501 - 18085

Forests/Preserves

No Jobs or Population

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Opportunity Index & Indicators(Example from an SCI project)

Education

• Math & Reading Proficiency

• High School Graduation Rate

• Student/Teacher Ratio

• Student Poverty• Adult Educational

Attainment• Private School

Title I Rate

Mobility & Transportation

• Mean Commute Time

• Access to Transit• Automobile

Access

Economic

• Employment Access

• Jobs Within Transit Corridor

Housing & Socioeconomic

• Foreclosure• Vacancy• Poverty• Cost-Burdened

Households• Home Ownership

Public Health & Safety

• Proximity to Toxic, Superfund Sites

• Release of Toxic Substance(s)

• Access to Healthy Food

• Proximity to Parks and Open Space

• Fire Hazard• Flood

Vulnerability

Comprehensive Opportunity Index

Opportunity Indicators and Development of the

Opportunity Map

Housing & Socioeconomic Index

Map (5 Indicators)

Public Health & Safety Index

Map (6 Indicators)

Transportation Mobility Index

Map (3 Indicators)

Educational Opportunity IndexMap (6 Indicators)

Economic & Opportunity Index

Map (2 to 4 Indicators)

Comprehensive Opportunity Map: Representing Five Sub-Index Maps

(And 22+ Individual Indicators)

Creating the Composite Opportunity Map

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Education Opportunity Score

Economic Opportunity Score

Housing & Neighborhood Score

Final Opportunity Score (Map)

Domains of Child Well-Being (Simplified for this Analysis)

ChildWell-Being

Neighborhood

Health and EnvironmentEducation

Child Well-Being Indicators

Neighborhood indicators Education and school related indicators

Health and environmental indicators

Neighborhood poverty rate Population on public assistance Unemployment rate Share of households headed by single parent Home ownership rate Housing vacancy rates Foreclosure rate Adult educational attainment Crime rates

Free and reduced price lunch students Teacher qualification Teacher experience Student/Teacher ratio Test results (Math and Reading) Non-promotion rate

Children with diabetes, asthma, cancer Low birth weight babies Teen births Access to healthcare facilities Availability of healthcare professional Access to affordable food Exposure to toxic waste Access to parks and open spaces

Outcomes: Engagement, Education & Communication

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How do you map opportunity?(Process Perspective)

• A hybrid of data driven analysis and mapping combined with extensive community and stakeholder engagement

• Various ways to engage stakeholders and the public– Driven by a locally led advisory group (who can act as data liaisons, assist in

“ground truthing” maps, and in designing analysis)– Stakeholder or community participatory forums– Outreach to media and communications– Use of online interactive mapping tools

• We also sometimes supplement the analysis with asset mapping and trend analysis (understanding shifts in opportunity in the regional landscape)

• Working with SCI consortiums we have prepared specialized indicators which have emerged out of committee work related to the sustainability planning process

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Linking Mapping, Data & Capacity Building to Understand and Support Food Security in Mississippi

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Linking Mapping, Data & Capacity Building to Understand and Support Food Security in Mississippi

Methodology Issues/Concerns for this Effort

• Indicator selection– …and relevance to your community (buy in from consortium on indicators

used)– Geographic scale (slightly different approach for more rural communities)– Process is critical – engagement and local buy in

• Painful geographies!– Schools – one of the most important domains to analyze but always difficult to

assess• Working with upcoming HUD data – integrating your work with HUD

analysis• Supplement data (consider participatory mapping and other subtopic

analysis – which can work its way back into the map)

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Considerations in Rural Areas

• Need to go deeper in respect to units of geographic analysis– Block groups or blocks– Indicators and analysis should reflect the unique rural

characteristics of the community

• More data challenges with ACS and margins of error with traditional census data

• Smaller geographies allow the possibility to do creative and important participatory work and local data collection

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Want to Learn More?Resources & Reference Materials

• Mapping for Social Justice– The Kirwan Institute Study:

• Utilizing GIS to Support Advocacy and Social Justice

• More on Opportunity Mapping– The Kirwan Institute Reports

• Communities of Opportunity: A Framework for an Equitable & Sustainable Future

• The Geography of Opportunity: A Review of Opportunity Mapping Research Initiatives

– All Available on-line at: kirwaninstitute.org

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Want to Learn More?Resources & Reference Materials

• Mapping & Advocacy – Two recent articles from Clearinghouse Review– Jason Reece and Eric Schultheis. Poverty’s Place: The Use

of Geographic Information Systems in Poverty Advocacy. Clearinghouse Review Journal of Poverty Law and Policy. January-February 2009.

– Maya Roy and Jason Reece. Poverty’s Place Revisited: Mapping for Justice & Democratizing Data to Combat Poverty. Clearinghouse Review Journal of Poverty Law and Policy. July/August 2010.

• To access, visit Clearinghouse Review at:– www.povertylaw.org/clearinghouse-review