Framing Paper for Measuring Disparity and Opportunity Session NNIP Portland 2012

2:15-3:45 – Thursday Afternoon

The concepts of neighborhood disparity and neighborhood opportunity have been much discussed in our past meetings and are important topics in the field at this point.  This session explores approaches to measuring them so we can move toward making them operational in our work.

Disparities in the Context of Concentrated Poverty (Shared Indicators Analysis).   The first part of this session is built around the current stage of our Shared Indicators work.  We will review the initial Urban Institute paper you have seen.  For the 100 largest metro areas, it reports on how the number of low income tracts, and the poor population within them, grew over the 2000 to 2005/09 period.  This then goes farther to report on things about which there has been virtually no prior analysis: (1) whether, and by how much, conditions in the low income neighborhoods themselves have improved or deteriorated; and (2) trends in disparities between conditions in low income and higher income neighborhoods.

HUD Neighborhood Opportunity Indicators. The concept of “opportunity neighborhoods” has been important in deliberations about mobility and community development strategies in recent years.  It will surely be fundamental in the successful development of the White House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative.  The approach is multi-dimensional, with a focus on how the population group of interest should be central to an assessment of neighborhood opportunities.

In this session, Kurt Metzger will start by offering his perspective on the session and introduce the presenters, Tom Kingsley and Phyllis Betts .