Our Approach

Benchmarking our Deep Drivers against our peers allows us to see Louisville’s progress relative to communities like ours rather than in isolation. These benchmarks enable us to hold ourselves accountable for the work we are doing to create a more competitive city. The GLP is supported by a consortium of philanthropic partners allowing us to achieve our mission independently while remaining integrated into the community.

Peer cities are communities like Louisville. Every ten years, researchers at the University of Louisville perform an analysis of cities across the country using 70+ indicators that are almost exclusively economic in nature. Through a variety of statistical techniques, they cluster the results to come up with a list of cities most similarly situated to Louisville.

Which cities are our peers?

Birmingham, AL
Charlotte, NC
Cincinnati, OH
Columbus, OH
Grand Rapids, MI
Greensboro, NC
Greenville, SC
Indianapolis, IN
Kansas City, MO
Knoxville, TN
Memphis, TN
Nashville, TN
Oklahoma City, OK
Omaha, NE
St. Louis, MO
Tulsa, OK

More On Our Peer Cities

Data Philosophy

The Greater Louisville Project aims to be to be a credible, respected source of shared metrics and analysis. By identifying the greatest challenges and opportunities in our community we work to draw focus to the points of greatest leverage or strategic disruption. This work serves two purposes: to highlight the challenges and opportunities facing Louisville, and to help guide public, private, and philanthropic investment and policy that can move Louisville into the top tier of its peer cities.

Our team relies on accessible and simple data to compare Louisville’s competitiveness to its peer cities. The data must identify a shared goal, be actionable, and speak to a variety of stakeholders, creating prime opportunity for concerted, collective, and targeted action that can be leveraged to build a stronger and more competitive Louisville.

Why Deep Drivers? What are the Deep Drivers?

When the Greater Louisville Project launched it commissioned the 2002 Brookings Institution Report, “Beyond Merger: A Competitive Vision for the Regional City of Louisville.” The report identified six areas for progress: primary education, postsecondary education, economic development, creating quality neighborhoods, investing in working families, and balancing metropolitan growth. Since then, the GLP has homed in on four Deep Drivers of Change: Education, Jobs, Health, and Quality of Place. The Deep Drivers of Change signal a few big but attainable goals that can inform our civic agenda by highlighting both the possibilities and challenges facing Louisville.

Data Building Community

The Greater Louisville Project shares data and research around indicators at the community level and relative to our peer cities. We rely on partner organizations, including other non-profits, government agencies, and educational institutions, to help track and report data to the community at a neighborhood or school level.

The GLP seeks to support organizations that help to create a data-driven culture in Louisville, including quarterly Civic Data Meet + Greet gatherings. Contact us for more information about getting involved in these opportunities to extend and contribute to our data-driven culture.

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

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

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.