In advocating that we build a scorecard to measure how well the City of Richmond is doing, which I did last week, I said it should include measures of economic well-being, public-sector results in education, crime and delivery of key services, and quality-of-life indicators. At the very top of this performance pyramid should be placed long-term trends in population and employment. If you don’t have the kind of environment that attracts jobs and people, the rest of your efforts may mean little.
A decent snaphot can be compiled from several sources. Population, employment, poverty and wealth (using home ownership as a proxy) come from the U.S. Census Bureau (click this link for the spreadsheet that accompanies today’s column). Unlike the month-to-month statistics from other federal and state sources, the Census data provides longer-term views, including snapshots at the national, state, county and city levels. These are essential to allow us to look at the City of Richmond, the larger Richmond metropolitan area and the counties adjacent to the City.
Education data is more far-flung and open to conflicting interpretations. Apparent performance differences among Virginia jurisdictions can be due to variations in measurement approaches and not fundamental differences. You can find positive statistics at the Richmond Public School site and a substantial list of RPS shortcomings in the 2007 assessment provided by a group of chief executives representing 26 large Richmond-area employers.
In the crime and public safety category, there are oodles of raw data at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But a private company, CQ Press, puts out a city crime ranking service using the FBI numbers. It’s well-respected and widely used, and very unambiguous.
The best report-card metric here for the City of Richmond is that our population is rising again after years of being stagnant or of actually declining. This is huge.
Next, the CQ Press City Crime ranking reflects the great reductions in crime that continue to occur in the City of Richmond. Once near the top of “Murder Capital USA” listings, Richmond was 15th in 2006 (based on 2005 FBI data) and fell to 29th in CQ Press’ 2007 rankings. Expect another big fall when the 2008 rankings come out and, with fingers crossed, the trend should continue based on continued declines in the rates of murders and other serious crime so far this year. Give us another good grade.
Richmond’s performances in employment, poverty and home ownership are not ones you’d want to show your parents if this was your report card. The Census figures paint a consistently tough story, particularly in contrast to suburban conditions. Richmond is poor. Unemployment rates here are easily into double digits; poverty rates are double the state average and FOUR times higher than our neighboring counties and, home ownership rates are less than 50 percent, or two-thirds what they are in the state and most localities, excepting Chesterfield County, where just about everyone owns a home.
Schools? Despite some hard-fought classroom gains under departed Superintendent Deborah Jewell-Sherman, the Richmond Public Schools are in sorry shape. Administratively, too few people have been minding the store at RPS, and there is little reason to have confidence that the schools make effective use of their funds, at least according to blistering City audits performed in the past two years.
The School Board apparently hasn’t been an effective overseer, either. And while calls for an appointed board were controversial, when issued last year by the employer group, the group’s laundry list of RPS failings was pretty much right on target.
If the schools merit a failing or at least below-average mark, it needs to be said that they are a reflection of tough social conditions and poverty in much of the City. Anyone who would hold up school performance in the City against results in Chesterfield or even Henrico would need to include so many qualifiers as to render the comparison of limited value.
Behind this short list of indicators is a very impressive scorecard for Richmond called the "Greater Richmond Community Indicators Report," and produced by the Virginia Center for Urban Development at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The only wee problem with the report is that it is eight years old!
Commissioned by the Greater Richmond Chamber and the Greater Richmond Partnership, the Indicators Report was designed to be exactly what we need – an annual scorecard that would rigorously track key measures of Richmond’s performance and pay attention to whether conditions were getting better or worse.
Further, the researchers at VCU did opinion surveys and bounced their selected indicators off of community leaders to develop a strong list of measures that were seen as relevant and valuable by the very people expected to use them to lead the City and region in the years ahead. And, they looked carefully to make sure they had the “right” kind of indicators that were, the report said:
1) Bellwethers that reflect fundamentals of long-term regional health;
2) Can be understood and accepted by the community;
3) Are statistically measurable on a frequent basis;
4) Measure outcomes, rather than inputs.
What a great idea and approach!
Eight top-level topics were developed, each comprised of several indicators. Here are the eight, the grade achieved in that first report in 2000, and the individual measures included in each group:
Economic Performance -- B
Computer and Internet Use
Entrepreneurial Growth Index
Minority Business Ownership
Employment Growth
Educated Citizenry -- C
Number of Schools Meeting Accreditation Standards
High School Graduation Rates
Graduates Continuing Education
Our Built Environment -- B
Neighborhood Liveability Index
Jurisdictional Liveability Index
Housing Affordability
Home Ownership
Commuting Time
Our Natural and Recreational Environment -- B
Arts and Cultural Venue Attendance
Arts and Cultural Expenditures
Public Open Space
Richmond-Petersburg MSA Air Quality
Healthy Lifestyles -- B
Poverty Trends
Heart Disease Trends
Low-Weight Birth Rates
Safe Environment -- B
Local Crime Rates
Neighborhood Safety Index
Jurisdictional Safety Index
Civic Engagement -- C+
Voting Participation
Residents Thinking Regionally
Perceptions of Regional Success
Volunteer Engagement -- C+
United Way Giving
Volunteer Activity
Sadly, this report did not become a yearly event and we have no continuity for how we’ve been doing over the years. Some of the indicators were tailored for this particular project, and simply don’t exist elsewhere. The folks at the Chamber say that the Indicators gave way to what they call their Competitive Analysis report, which is a regularly produced look at how Richmond compares with other peer communities in a range of performance areas. That’s valuable information but it does not easily yield clear conclusions about whether things are getting better of worse in Richmond, which is what we want to know. Check out the links to these studies and let me know what you think.
Professor Michael D. Pratt, director of the Center for Urban Development, said the effort lost funding support after its second year and fell by the wayside. The good professor would be willing to resume this effort, and estimates his group would need about $30,000 for the annual study plus a web site to house the work.
So, consider yourself asked. This is a modest amount of money for a valuable result. The approach has been road-tested and the expertise is there to do the work.
Still, the initial 2000 report deals with the Richmond metropolitan area, not just the City. Both definitions are important but it’s the progress in the City of Richmond that is of fundamental importance here.
And the marks developed for the region in 2000 are going to be lower in most areas when we’re looking only at the City. For some useful insights here, check out a report last year on the needs of area youth sponsored by The Community Foundation. Worth reading in its own right, it also presents key statistical snapshots of the region that include individual localities. Whether its employment, income, schools or crime, the City of Richmond rarely fares well in comparison with its neighbors.
Move around the country and you’ll see even more jarring contrasts between center-city economies and their suburban “friends.” In city after city, struggling downtowns with large populations of low-income, disadvantaged residents exist side by side with prosperous suburbs. And when people in the center cities defy the odds and achieve success, they invariably leave to become part of the success stories of those adjacent suburbs.
The cities are more than the hole in these economic donuts. They can become black holes, sucking in what look to be disproportionate public resources and diminishing the successes of the surrounding jurisdictions. As many urban experts seem fond of noting, the United States is the only developed nation that has so dramatically turned its back on center cities.
Last time: We need a scorecard to track Richmond's progress.
Next week: Setting priorities.
About the author -- Phil Moeller, a communications consultant with JD Communications, was a columnist and business editor at The Baltimore Sun and Louisville Courier-Journal.
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