Southern Growth Offers Index Tool for Creating Stronger Communities

The bottom line for all regional economic development initiatives should be improving the quality of life for the area's residents. A new report from the Census Bureau — revealing the increased percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty and median household income remaining flat again, after two years of decline — provides a not-too-subtle reminder for the technology-based economic development (TBED) field.

Also released on Tuesday, the Southern Growth Policies Board's new index provides a useful tool for southern communities to track quality of life measures as part of their regional economic development strategies.

Released at the Southern Governor's Association meeting in Greensboro, Georgia, The Southern Community Index is a working plan to track the Southern states' progress in building healthy and vibrant communities as part of an integrated economic development strategy for the region. The Index includes 15 quality of life measures considered to be the building blocks of vibrant communities — from access to healthcare, homeownership rates, crime rates and employment rates to levels of civic engagement and leadership diversity.

Communities play a vital role in building a thriving economy, and the quality of life in the Southern region is largely a product of people's experiences in their local communities. Southern Growth's research has long suggested that building quality communities is the underpinning of long-term economic development. The goal of the Southern Community Index is to bring attention to quality of life issues and to encourage communities to create their own vision and metrics for developing successful and healthy communities.

The Index includes state-by-state data and summaries of community development initiatives in the Southern Growth states — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

The full report can be viewed in pdf format at

http://www.southern.org/pubs/communityindex/Community%20Index.pdf