Greater New Haven Community Index 2013 Benchmarking the People, Economic Opportunity, Health Needs, and Civic Life of Our Region A Core Program of DataHaven DATAHAVEN Celebrating 20 Years of Data for Community Action In Collaboration with Community, Government and Scientific Partners Greater New Haven Community Index 2013 Benchmarking the People, Economic Opportunity, Health Needs, and Civic Life of Our Region Lead Sponsors NH HD New Haven Health Department with funding from the Prevent. Promote. Protect. Donaghue Foundation and Kresge Foundation Carolyn Foundation Contributing Sponsors ANNIE E. CASEY FOUNDATION UNITED WAY OF GREATER THE UNITED ILLUMINATING NEW HAVEN COMPANY AND SOUTHERN NEWALLIANCE FOUNDATION CONNECTICUT GAS Special Thanks To Lead Author and Program Director Co-Authors MARK ABRAHAM SARAH CONDERINO JEANNETTE ICKOVICS Executive Director, DataHaven Master of Public Health Candidate, Yale Professor and Director, Community School of Public Health Alliance for Research and Engagement at the Yale School of Public Health NICHOLAS DEFIESTA Research Assistant, DataHaven AUGUSTA MUELLER Senior Community Benefits AMANDA DURANTE Administrator, Yale-New Haven Epidemiologist, City of New Haven Hospital Department of Public Health JONATHAN PARK MARIO GARCIA Yale University President’s Public Director, City of New Haven Service Fellow, DataHaven Department of Public Health MATTHEW HIGBEE Research and Communications Associate, The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven Recommended Citation Abraham, M, et al. (2013). Greater New Haven Community Index 2013. New Haven, CT: DataHaven. Copyright and Permission to Use This report and associated materials are copyright 2013, DataHaven, New Haven, CT. Please contact DataHaven for permission to reproduce any of the text, images, or graphics in this report. DataHaven and its partners strongly encourage requests from organizations that wish to use this information or conduct further analysis to benefit community action. Contact information is listed on the back cover of this report or on our website. i Greater New Haven Community Index 2013 Benchmarking the Progress of Our People and the Economic Opportunity, Health Needs and Civic Life of Our Region The purpose of the Greater New Haven Community Index Our neighborhoods are influenced by a delicate ecology is to begin a story about the opportunities and challenges of human capabilities, economic investments, resident that face the metropolitan region where we live, work, perceptions, and civic engagement. To improve our quality study, and play. We invite you to continue it by engaging of life, we must make measurable progress within each of your neighbors, policy makers, businesses, and institutions these areas. in a dialogue about the future of Greater New Haven. We believe that the research in this report – much of Broader changes within the community have a particularly it published for the first time – enables us to see, as a acute impact on our schools and colleges. Although community, things that we might not otherwise see, and do, in-school factors like peer groups and teacher quality can together, things we could not otherwise do. 1 shape how successful our students are, the overwhelming majority of academic achievement is predicted by factors A Unified Region from outside the classroom: the health of the students By national standards, each of the thirteen cities and and their families and the wellbeing of the neighborhoods towns that comprise Greater New Haven are unusually where they grow up. 2 small in terms of land area (see pages 3-4). The proverb that “all politics is local” is as true today as it was hundreds Toward a Stronger Region of years ago when these boundaries were drawn, primarily We are witnessing rapid economic and environmental based on walking distances. But over time, the population change both at home and abroad. We know that the best and infrastructure of our region has grown significantly. way to strengthen our community’s resiliency is to ensure Today, over two-thirds of workers within each municipality that each of our neighborhoods becomes a place of great either commute into Downtown New Haven or to another opportunity for persons of all ages and backgrounds. nearby city or town. We intend to update this Community Index on a regular Using any definition of what constitutes a “city,” our basis and improve its underlying data. We hope that it individual towns are as intertwined and dependent upon will serve as a jumping-off place for your stories, and for one another as are the individual neighborhoods of any a robust discussion of the best ways to measure – and other major city in the world. accelerate – the progress of our region. Mark Abraham Executive Director, DataHaven DataHaven Greater New Haven Community Index 2013 ii Preface At their best, rankings like these can help us come together around key issues of public interest using easy- Measuring to-understand data, while providing further context on how such measures might diverge by age, race, gender, Quality of Life neighborhood, or income status. Unfortunately, in a time where editorial fact-checking has become optional, there are also many media outlets that use misleading data to try to garner headlines. For example, several rankings directly compare densely-packed Northeastern Quality of life rankings can help bring a broader context municipalities of a few square miles to consolidated to any discussion of community issues. Dozens of such metropolitan areas in the West that are up to 50 times rankings are published each year by researchers and larger in land area. This approach results in “grape to advocates. Connecticut tends to perform well on them by watermelon” comparisons that are statistically invalid national standards, but we could do better. The table below and essentially meaningless. Also common are economic contains examples of some of the most recent rankings, competitiveness rankings that penalize Connecticut for which can be tracked each year as an indicator of change. having a relatively high number of public employees and/or unions, without justifying why they view those as negative Throughout this report, and in our other work, we have indicators. Since progress depends on having good data, drilled down into statewide data by neighborhood, we often have to set the record straight. 3 income, and demographic group in order to assess the performance of specific communities over time. The prosperity of Greater New Haven is linked to the prosperity of the state, as well as the broader Northeast region. While differences exist on specific measures, statistical portraits of our 13 towns often look similar to those of Connecticut as a whole. State Rankings i.1 Ranking: #1 Best, #50 Worst Report (Year) – Publisher CT MA RI NY NJ Measure of America (2013) – Social Science Research Council 1 2 14 8 3 Composite ranking of life expectancy, education and median earnings. America’s Health Rankings (2012) – United Health Foundation 6 4 10 18 8 Study of health behaviors, environmental and social barriers to health, health care and disease risk. State Energy Efficiency Scorecard (2012) – ACEEE 6 1 7 3 16 Assessment of policies and programs that promote energy efficiency. Kids Count (2013) – Annie E. Casey Foundation 9 3 26 29 5 Composite index of children’s economic security, education and health. New Economy Index (2012) – Information Tech & Innovation Fdn (ITIF) 9 1 23 11 10 Index of digital economy, economic dynamism and global integration. State Technology and Science Index (2013) – Milken Institute 9 1 17 13 15 Study of economic performance in technology and science. State Long-Term Services and Supports Scorecard (2011) – AARP 11 30 34 41 22 Measures systems that help older people and adults with disabilities. State of Wellbeing (2012) – Gallup 16 10 37 30 32 Composite score based on happiness, emotional health, economic wellbeing and other topics. Civic Life Index (2007) – Corporation for National & Community Service 26 28 42 48 46 Composite score based on volunteering, civic engagement and charity. DataHaven Greater New Haven Community Index 2013 1 Table of Contents DataHaven Greater New Haven Community Index 2013 Chapter 1 page 2 Introduction: The Greater New Haven Community Index Chapter 2 page 9 People Chapter 3 page 31 Economic Opportunity Chapter 4 page 45 Community Health Needs Chapter 5 page 65 Civic Life and Conclusion Chapter 6 page 76 Appendices 2 Unlike typical economic measures like tax revenue or “gross domestic product,” the information in this report is based Introduction primarily on how individuals in our region are doing in their day-to-day lives. We do not claim that this first edition of the Community Index is comprehensive; it is a work in progress, and we intend to add to it over time. We selected indicators to include based on the work of many other local and state- The Greater New Haven Community Index identifies wide initiatives over the past decade, such as the State of information (indicators) that can be used by citizens and Connecticut’s Common Cross-Agency Population Results policymakers to help answer questions about the progress Work Group, The Community Foundation for Greater New of our people and our neighborhoods over time. These Haven “Learn” website, the 2003 Greater New Haven Com- questions, grouped by chapter, include: munity Compass, the community-based advisory boards of the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE) at the Yale School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University, and other programs, each of which has benefited Chapter 1: How happy and optimistic are we? All from years of work by area residents. 4 In cases where things considered, how do we compare to other information about our region was not readily available from metropolitan areas in the United States? existing public sources, we conducted our own research. Chapter 2: Is Greater New Haven becoming more Many of the topics in this report have been the subject diverse? Which areas are retaining children and of other studies.