Louisville’s economic development efforts should focus the quality of jobs created, not just the quantity. Emphasizing job growth in high-wage sectors will help more families achieve financial stability and reinvest their expendable income into the community. Additionally, the percentage of high wage jobs is an important factor for individuals who are considering moving to Louisville and joining the workforce.
Louisville currently ranks 13th among its peer cities in the rate of workers employed in high wage jobs, with 41.3% of its workforce employed in high wage jobs. Jobs are determined as high wage if their categorical assignment within the American Community Survey has a median income of greater than $35,600. These industries include management professionals, law enforcement, and construction/maintenance.
Louisville is in the middle of its peer group according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers, cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red are a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.
There is a clear geographical divide in where workers in high wage occupations live. In the map to the left, areas where more workers in high wage occupations live are displayed in purple, while areas containing fewer can be seen in blue and white.
More workers in high wage occupations live in eastern Louisville in communities such as the Highlands and Northeast Jefferson, where the highest percentage reaches 62%. In comparison, western and southern Louisville communities have the fewest workers in high wage occupations with rates as low as 16% in the California neighborhood.
Scroll over the map to see values for each census tract. Zoom in to see street names that form the boundaries of each tract.
Since the year 2000, Louisville has trailed behind the peer mean, hovering around the 25 percentile. The city is less than one percentage point below the 25th percentile and sits at 39.9%.
Louisville has never risen above the peer mean during the period of data collection shown on the graph. The percentage of Louisvillians in high wage occupations currently stands at 39.9%, below the 42.1% peer mean. Knoxville, the most improved peer city has outpaced the peer mean since 2000. Memphis, the least improved city has fallen below the peer mean since 2000.
Louisville has a consistent gap between Black and white residents in high wage occupations. Since 2013, the gap has widened. Forty-four point 4 percent of white Louisvillians are employed in a high wage occupation. This is below their peer mean of 48.5%. Only 25.7% of Black Louisvillians are employed in high wage occupations. The gap between Black Louisvillians and the peer mean for Black people is wider than the gap for white Louisvillians and their white peers.
Females in Louisville began outpacing males in Louisville prior to the year 2008 in the percentage of individuals employed in high wage occupations. While both groups are currently below their respective peer means, females in Louisville are closer to their peer mean than males.
For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.
Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).
Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.
