Through interviews with the Quality of Life Cabinet
and a public meeting that engaged Civic League
leaders, City staff and elected officials, the project
team identified the following set of priorities:
•
Economic well-being, specifically access to
affordable housing.
•
Access to multi-modal forms of transportation.
•
Mental health and physical health.
•
Youth programming.
The project team determined that youth programming is already addressed by one variable in the
2006 NQL Study and chose to focus on the first three priorities in the list above for further
exploration. After further exploration of the recommended mental health variable, the project
team discovered that mental health data at the zip code scale is protected for privacy reasons
under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The considerations and
final variable recommendations of the project team for each of these priorities are listed in Table
1.
Table 1. Additional Variable Considerations and Recommendations
Topics
Considerations
Final Variable Recommendation
Source
Housing
Measure the affordability average
housing costs in each NSA for
families currently seeking assistance
with housing.
Affordability score: Ratio of 1/3 of an
average family’s income to the average
rental cost by NSA.
Local
data;
ACS
2012
Transportation Measure how often various forms of
multi-modal transportation are used.
The percentage of daily commuters who
walk, use public transit or bike to work.
Census
2010
Additionally, the project team decided to split the 2006 variable titled “Percent Housing
Reinvestment” into two variables encompassing different aspects of housing investment. These
variables include:
•
New residential building permits by NSA.
•
Percent residential addition investments by NSA.
Finally, the 2006 variable titled “Percent Affordable Housing” was updated to reflect census data
instead of local data and was retitled “Homeowner Housing Costs as a Percentage of Income.”
The 26 final analytical variables are listed in Table 2 on the following page. A detailed
description of the method for calculating each analytical variable is presented in Appendix A.
November 2014
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