Homeownership has been shown to correspond with increased educational achievement, civic participation, and health. Boosting homeownership rates is important because homeowners are typically more invested in their communities and can help ensure that Louisville is a prosperous city for all.
Louisville currently ranks 6th among its peers in the overall percentage of housing units that are owned.
That puts Louisville in the middle tier of its peers 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 lag behind their peers on this indicator.
Homeownership rates appear to be trending upward after they declined significantly in the years following the Great Recession. In Louisville particularly, the homeownership rate has spiked in recent years. It now sits at nearly 62%. That is above the peer average of nearly 60%.
Greenville saw a sharp uptick in its homeownership rate in recent years, making it the best performer of the group. Memphis did not see the same rebound in its homeownership rate and instead saw its rate decrease by more than 8 percentage points since 2000. Louisville ultimately saw a smaller decrease in its homeownership rate than its peers.
Homeownership rates among men in Louisville fell significantly following the Great Recession and have been rising modestly in recent years. In contrast, homeownership rates among women in Louisville increased slightly after the Great Recession and have since remained relatively flat.
The White homeownership rate sits significantly above the homeownership rates of other races in Louisville and its peer cities. In Louisville, the rates among Black and Hispanic homeowners are roughly equivalent.
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.
