Ohio State, Ohio Housing Finance Agency develop Opportunity Index

Ohio State, Ohio Housing Finance Agency develop Opportunity Index

Tool can be used to measure neighborhood conditions across the state

As someone who grew up in southwest Ohio, Jason Reece is familiar with the impact a neighborhood's changes can have on its residents.

"I'm from Hamilton, which is one of those industrial legacy cities," he said. "In my own childhood, I got to experience what happens within a place when jobs disappear, when the housing market no longer functions. To me, that was a visceral experience."

That early exposure led Reece to his job as an associate professor of city and regional planning at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University, where he studies the role planning plays in a city's development.

Less than a decade ago, Reece, as part of the university's Kirwan Institute, collaborated with the Ohio Housing Finance Agency to create what is now known as the Opportunity Index and its interactive mapping tool.

The goal of the tool, Reece said, is to provide context for neighborhoods in the state. That context comes from 15 opportunity indicators in five categories: housing, education, transportation, employment and health.

"We used two kinds of knowledge [to create the indicators]: the research literature and extensive community engagement," Reece said. "We're looking at proximity to jobs, looking at the physical conditions of a neighborhood. Is it environmentally healthy? Are there parks? Is there access to food? How are the schools doing?"

When Reece began his work, data for the index was hard to find. That is no longer the case.

"This is a different era where we have oodles of data and all these different mapping tools," he said. "The challenge now is to make meaning of that and to figure out how to contextualize and use the information."

While the influx of data is a good problem to have, sometimes the figures don't paint a whole picture, said Reece.

"We recognize that the data and the map is a first look, it's a snapshot," he said. "There's a lot about neighborhoods that's qualitative, that's experiential. It's important to do a deeper dive into understanding the community, beyond just the data. But data is a good place to start."

Users of the tool can see where their neighborhood ranks on the index, from very high to very low opportunity. Just as important, though, is the Community Change Index, which lets users see how an area's housing market and social demographics have changed over time.

"You can get a feel for which direction neighborhoods are trending," Reece said. "You may have a neighborhood that isn't doing so well but when we look at the Change Index, we can recognize that it's actually on an upward trajectory. It's a helpful tool."

As Reece knows, a person's neighborhood can shape their future in myriad ways.

"There's the old real estate adage, 'Location, location, location.' That's very much the case in the context of what we've learned, in regard to why the quality of your environment matters so much," Reece said.

These impacts go beyond the individual, he said.

"If you think about young people, these environmental factors have the deepest impact on youth development and the ability for kids and families to thrive. … If we know kids are in challenging environments, then we also know that if we improve those environments, kids are going to see better outcomes. Those kids are the labor force of the future, the leaders of the future. Making sure families are healthy and in safe environments is critical - that impacts our entire region."

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