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How Columbus Compares to 15 Peer Cities

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Started 3 months ago by News
Latest reply from NDaEast

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News
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Uniquely Columbus
By Doug Caruso
The Columbus Dispatch
Sunday February 12, 2012 5:35 AM

You can tell a lot about a city by the company it keeps. Community Research Partners compares the Columbus region with 15 other metropolitan areas. Some of them, such as Charlotte, N.C., and Indianapolis, are economic competitors. Cleveland and Cincinnati are in-state rivals. Some are places with qualities we aspire to: Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore., for example.

READ MORE: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/02/12/uniquely-columbus.html

Posted 3 months ago #
lazyfish

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16th out of 15??? Children w/o a working parent and population in poverty, not good. 14th for obese adults seems about right.

I'm not sure why we are in the same category as Chicago and Minneapolis. I can remember when Austin had the same population numbers as Dayton. Growth there is a bit overwhelming and pretty tacky. I guess the impending water wars will sort that out though.

Posted 3 months ago #
howatzer

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Ohio State wasn't mentioned a single time in that article..... which leads me to ask if students were counted in the "poverty" statistics?

Posted 3 months ago #
jbcmh81

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Some points to consider:

1. The population/growth positions don't include 2010 Census data, so are highly questionable as they are based on estimates and not counted growth.
2. The headline of the article is very misleading by suggesting that Columbus is underpaid. I did not see any mention of a Cost of Living index. Those cities that tend to have higher living costs also tend to have higher wages to offset it. Someone making $100K in Columbus is doing well, but making that in Chicago would put you in a much lower brackett. The median income should be put into context, which it definitely isn't.
3. Columbus improved on 7 catergories, stayed the same on 6, and fell on 6, showing that the city/metro is, at worst, maintaining or improving on 2x as many catergories as it is falling.
4. The average score across all those counties was 6.9. I'd call that pretty damn good.

Posted 3 months ago #
JeepGirl

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jbcmh81 said:
Some points to consider:

1. The population/growth positions don't include 2010 Census data, so are highly questionable as they are based on estimates and not counted growth.
2. The headline of the article is very misleading by suggesting that Columbus is underpaid. I did not see any mention of a Cost of Living index. Those cities that tend to have higher living costs also tend to have higher wages to offset it. Someone making $100K in Columbus is doing well, but making that in Chicago would put you in a much lower brackett. The median income should be put into context, which it definitely isn't.
3. Columbus improved on 7 catergories, stayed the same on 6, and fell on 6, showing that the city/metro is, at worst, maintaining or improving on 2x as many catergories as it is falling.
4. The average score across all those counties was 6.9. I'd call that pretty damn good.

Or you could say that the city is not improving or falling in 2x and many categories as it is improving. That's the fun in numbers.

Posted 3 months ago #
Walker
The KLD / Downtown
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lazyfish said:
I'm not sure why we are in the same category as Chicago and Minneapolis.

According to the article, the study was done against a mix of comparable cities around the US, as well as regional neighbors. I assume Chicago and Minneapolis are the latter.

Posted 3 months ago #
howatzer

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Doesn't anyone else make the connection between the low income and low median age.....?

Posted 3 months ago #
Walker
The KLD / Downtown
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howatzer said:
Doesn't anyone else make the connection between the low income and low median age.....?

Yup. It does make sense that a city with a higher number of college students and new college grads would have a lower level of income.

Posted 3 months ago #
6a
Westgate
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Having lived in Charlotte for four years, I've always found one striking difference between here and there. Columbus loves to compare itself to Charlotte, which is fine, as there are striking similarities. However, Charlotte loves to compare itself to Atlanta. It's like the old saying about the Blue Jackets - we'd love to make the playoffs again, but other teams are trying to win the Stanley Cup.

Posted 3 months ago #
bman
New Albany
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Walker said:
Yup. It does make sense that a city with a higher number of college students and new college grads would have a lower level of income.

I would guess most if not all of the cities we were compared against have a large university component.

Posted 3 months ago #
howatzer

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bman said:
I would guess most if not all of the cities we were compared against have a large university component.

what matters is the ratio of students to total population, not the absolute number. I don't have the time go digging through the numbers, but out of that sample, only Austin seems like it would have a comparable student ratio. All the others have much smaller schools or are much bigger cities.
also, i don't see any other reason why columbus would have a particularly low median age except for the influence of OSU-asaurus.

Regardless, an entire article about columbus demographic and income patterns without mentioning OSU is either asinine or is pushing an agenda.

Posted 3 months ago #
labi
Weinland Park
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howatzer said:
Regardless, an entire article about columbus demographic and income patterns without mentioning OSU is either asinine or is pushing an agenda.

What agenda would you infer from this? I'm not sure I see an obvious one. I think the mixture of good, bad, and indifferent rankings pretty much resists being reported as part of an agenda.

Posted 3 months ago #
howatzer

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labi said:
What agenda would you infer from this? I'm not sure I see an obvious one. I think the mixture of good, bad, and indifferent rankings pretty much resists being reported as part of an agenda.

That columbus's poverty is exceptional, without regard to the influence of having a relatively large student population, could be seen as benefiting the agenda of an organization that receives much of it's funding from the United Way, among other urban development non-profits.

Posted 3 months ago #
jbcmh81

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JeepGirl said:
Or you could say that the city is not improving or falling in 2x and many categories as it is improving. That's the fun in numbers.

Sure, only if you didn't consider that out of the 16 cities, Columbus was in the top 5 of 5 of the 7 catergories that saw no change. I'd be more worried if it was stuck at the bottom. Regardless, it is ONLY 16 cities and too much can't be made out of the list in any case.

Posted 3 months ago #
CbusIslander
Cbus Islander
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6a said:
Having lived in Charlotte for four years, I've always found one striking difference between here and there. Columbus loves to compare itself to Charlotte, which is fine, as there are striking similarities. However, Charlotte loves to compare itself to Atlanta. It's like the old saying about the Blue Jackets - we'd love to make the playoffs again, but other teams are trying to win the Stanley Cup.

Maybe it is because Atlanta is very close geographically and both were experiencing rapid housing boom at the same time. I guess if Columbus was doing the same comparison we would aim to be the next Chicago. It could be the negative cogitation of the immediate surrounding rust belt cities. I think comparing us to the young sun belt cities is more equal compare to the midwest cities that had there peak population and influence 50 to 100 years ago.

Yes, the lower the median age would mean lower wages.

If you see how far columbus has grown the past few decades it will need sometime to think of it as a potential global city.

Happy 200th Birthday Columbus!

Posted 3 months ago #
labi
Weinland Park
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howatzer said:
That columbus's poverty is exceptional, without regard to the influence of having a relatively large student population, could be seen as benefiting the agenda of an organization that receives much of it's funding from the United Way, among other urban development non-profits.

But it's the Dispatch that is publishing the story, not "an organization that received much of its funding from the United Way." I don't know that I've ever heard anyone claim that the Dispatch was on the side of the evil development nonprofits, and I don't believe it now. I'm more inclined to think that you just aren't comfortable with the reality of how much poverty we really have in Columbus. Which I guess is your prerogative.

Posted 3 months ago #
Walker
The KLD / Downtown
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howatzer said:
what matters is the ratio of students to total population, not the absolute number. I don't have the time go digging through the numbers, but out of that sample, only Austin seems like it would have a comparable student ratio. All the others have much smaller schools or are much bigger cities.

Correct. I don't have the info in front of me (will have to dig for it) but I have seen rankings that show that Columbus has the second highest college population per capita in the US, behind Boston.

So obviously, there are good and bad things that go along with that (young, educated demographic - but lower income levels and "false" poverty).

Posted 3 months ago #
bjrobinson
Columbus
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As it was previously stated, the data used in this study does not take into to account the 2010 census data. Therefore, I do not think these statistics are representative of Columbus to date. I would venture to guess that we have increased in many of the aforementioned categories throughout the past few years.

Posted 3 months ago #
howatzer

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labi said:
But it's the Dispatch that is publishing the story, not "an organization that received much of its funding from the United Way." I don't know that I've ever heard anyone claim that the Dispatch was on the side of the evil development nonprofits, and I don't believe it now. I'm more inclined to think that you just aren't comfortable with the reality of how much poverty we really have in Columbus. Which I guess is your prerogative.

No, I'm uncomfortable with shoddy and/or biased "analysis" published as front page news without any examination the source of the analysis or its findings beyond the groups own press release. I don't have any doubt that there is poverty in columbus, but this type of garbage just fogs the picture rather than helping anyone actually understand the problem. If not accepting the dispatch article blindly and verbatim makes me a poor-bashing ogre, well then that's my prerogative. I guess that's how things are nowadays... express some skepticism over something and that automatically makes you a "denier". Sad.

Posted 3 months ago #
johnwirtz
Evanston, IL
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howatzer said:
Doesn't anyone else make the connection between the low income and low median age.....?

Interesting point. I would also be interested in seeing the correlation between low income/poverty and violent crime.

Posted 3 months ago #