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Patrick “Car-Free” Kennedy directs our attention to this University of California Berkeley look-see at the resiliency of the major metros in the U.S. And by “resiliency,” researchers are referring to a dozen indicators (among them: economic diversification, business environment, civic infrastructure, voter participation, the number of resident living in poverty) heaped into three categories (Regional Economic Capacity, Socio-Demographic Capacity and Community Connectivity Capacity) to which scores are assigned and the list was compiled.
Using those criteria, Dallas-Fort Worth comes in fairly low: 245th our of 361 metros ranked, with Rochester, MN, ranking placing first and College Station coming in dead last. Indeed, several of the so-called modern-day boom towns, Houston chief among ’em, rank low. Why? Says here that:
Traditional performance metrics, such as population or employment growth, yield rankings favoring fast-growing metropolitan regions in the South and West. The RCI favors attributes, including metropolitan stability, regional affordability, homeownership and income equality, often found in slower-growing regions.
Writes Kennedy, ordinarily no fan of lists, “it’s a pretty good list of data sets as far as so many of those generic city rankings come.”
