ASk A Researcher
October 2011
More to love: Compass revises economy and workforce measures and adds a host of neighborhood profiles
By Craig Helmstetter, Ph.D., Minnesota Compass
Last spring and summer, Minnesota Compass convened two advisory groups -- a statewide advisory group to take a fresh look at our Economy and Workforce key measures, particularly in light of the volatile economy in the last few years, and a local group to advise us on the creation, presentation, and application of neighborhood indicators for the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Here are Craig Helmstetter's thoughts on the variety of new data that has just been released on Minnesota Compass.
How is our economy doing?
Thanks to our most recent advisory group, we have a new answer: Minnesota’s economy is doing relatively well. Not great, but good. Compared to all other states, Minnesota ranks:
- 12th in Productivity, measured as Gross Domestic Product per workforce-aged adult,
- 12th in Median Household Income, and
- 7th in Educational Attainment, measured as the proportion of adults age 25-34 with a Bachelors degree or more education.
A stellar advisory group – one of our largest to date, including representatives of all sectors and political persuasions from all across the state – met over the summer and selected these measures as being the best tip-of-the-iceberg representations of our overall economy. Special thanks to the advisory group’s co-conveners: Kathy Tunheim, CEO of Tunheim Partners and now serving as Governor Dayton’s special advisor on job creation, and Bill Blazar of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce.
This was our first official convening of a group to check back over a topic area to see if we are still tracking the best indicators. Our plan is to do this for all of the topics over the next couple of years, to ensure that Compass key measures remain relevant. We started with Economy & Workforce, since our original key measures were established just prior to the Great Recession, and certainly a lot has changed since then! The group also expressed a lot of interest in moving beyond a handful of key measures, to establish a more comprehensive “jobs and economic vitality dashboard.” We currently are pursuing resources for this initiative and hope to launch it early next year.
So overall the state is doing okay economically – but what about where I live?
While statewide information is useful, taking action often requires local information. That is why, just like in other topics, we look at each of the Economy & Workforce Key Measures from a lot of different angles. Where ever possible we show how things look for the state’s regions, counties, and even for each of Minnesota’s 52 cities with 20,000 or more residents.
For example, the areas with highest median household incomes in our state are:
- By region: The Twin Cities, at $63,333
- By county: Scott, at $84,128
- Among Minnesota’s 52 largest cities: Chanhassen, at $98,913
In addition, if you are interested in areas within Minneapolis or Saint Paul you now have a brand new resource – a whole series of Neighborhood Profiles that show a host of information at a very local level. They show, for example, that Minneapolis’s Southwest Community has a median household income of nearly $86,000 and the median income of Saint Paul’s Macalester-Groveland is about $74,000.
What was that? Compass now has neighborhood-level data?
Yes! Thanks to generous support from the McKnight Foundation, and the insights of yet another all-star advisory group, we are proud to announce that Compass now features data profiles for each of the neighborhoods in Minneapolis and Saint Paul! Special thanks to advisory group co-conveners Sarah Hernandez of McKnight’s Region and Communities program, and Jeff Washburn, President of the Metropolitan Council of Community Developers, and Executive Director of the City of Lakes Land Trust.
Our new Minneapolis-Saint Paul Neighborhoods page, provides access to an 8 page data profile for each of Saint Paul’s 17 neighborhoods (which coincide with the city’s district council jurisdictions), and each of Minneapolis’s 87 neighborhoods. We also provided profiles for each of Minnepolis’s 11 “communities” – each of which contains 2 or more neighborhoods. That’s 115 profiles total!
You can access the profiles through an interactive map, or you can click “View List” above the map on the right and navigate to your favorite neighborhood by name. This new page also includes links to several other providers of local-level data, as well as some other relevant neighborhood-development oriented organizations in the Twin Cities.
What is the most interesting information in the neighborhood profiles?
That is hard to say. There is sooooo much information in these profiles, and sooooo many of them, that I am sure we will be finding interesting data in them for several months. I was, of course, personally interested in the neighborhoods where I have lived: Did you know that nearly 90 percent of households in Minneapolis’s Marcy-Holms neighborhood rent? Or that over 80 percent of the homes in Saint Paul’s Summit Hills neighborhood were built before 1940?
I was also interested in some of the extremes that you can find in the profiles. For example:
- Just how many jobs are there in each city’s central business district? Nearly 124,000 in Minneapolis’s Downtown West neighborhood and just over 47,000 in Saint Paul’s Capitol River/Downtown area.
- Like to get to know your neighbors? Saint Paul’s West Side neighborhood has a very low rates of residential turnover, with roughly 85 percent living there at least a year. The Nokomis community tops that list in Minneapolis.
- Looking for some property? Nearly 20 percent of the housing units in Minneapolis’s Jordan and Hawthorn neighborhoods stood vacant during the 2010 Census.
- Want to learn another language? Go to the Frogtown/Thomas-Dale neighborhood in Saint Paul, or the Phillips community in Minneapolis – in both areas more than 40 percent of residents speak a language other than English in the home.
- Love public transportation? So do people in Powderhorn community, where nearly 1 in 5 use public transit to get to work, as do 1 in 7 workers in Saint Paul’s St. Anthony Park neighborhood.
We would love to hear what you find interesting in the profiles, and how you put them to work.
Anything else?
Yes. Analyst Alert! The data-savvy among you can find a link to a gigantic data file just below the map on the new Neighborhoods page. It includes nearly all of the information that went into the much more user-friendly profiles, complete with margins of error and more detailed source documentation. This is a gold mine for planners, data wonks, and masher-uppers of all stripes. We can’t wait to see how you use this data – let us know!
Craig Helmstetter, senior research manager at Wilder Research, is the lead researcher on the Minnesota Compass team. He holds a master's degree in community and regional planning and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Oregon.
