2017 Competitive City Update: Poverty Beyond Income

March 27, 2018

Louisville has made great strides in reducing child poverty over the last several years, but 1 in 5 Louisville children still live below the poverty line. As they grow up, they will face obstacles in education, health, quality of life, and other areas, making poverty difficult to escape even years down the road. Addressing the cycle of poverty in our community will require new approaches, new perspectives, and new data.

The Greater Louisville Project will share its findings on the barriers that keep families and children in poverty in the 2017 Competitive City Update on April 10th. The report,  Poverty Beyond Income, examines some of the interconnected barriers that perpetuate generational poverty in Louisville. While poverty poses a large challenge to our community, addressing the issue in a comprehensive manner would result in transformative change for Louisville. The data gathered indicate that due to the many human, social, community and, of course, financial costs of poverty, Louisville is missing out on $200 million per year of economic growth.

Join the Greater Louisville Project to learn more about how Louisville can address generational poverty, improve the lives of its children, and become a more competitive city.

Report Release Event

Tuesday, April 10th
2:00 – 3:00 P.M.
Louisville Urban League

RSVP HERE

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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.