Place matters. The Harvard Equality of Opportunity Project has brought to the fore the importance of where we live, and especially where we grow up, in determining the directions that our lives take (Chetty and Hendren, April 2015). For ALICE in particular, local economic conditions largely determine how many households in a parish or state struggle financially. These conditions also determine how difficult it is to survive without sufficient income and assets to afford basic household necessities. In order to understand the challenges that the ALICE population faces in Louisiana, it is essential to recognize that local conditions do not impact all socio-economic and geographic groups in the same way. As an example, the ability to recover from hurricane damage differed between those who had insurance and those who did not. In terms of geographic differences, Louisiana’s prominent petroleum industry typically gets big investment headlines, but that attention often obscures the slow growth in other areas of the state. Parish unemployment statistics, on the other hand, clearly reveal where there are not enough jobs in Louisiana. Yet having a job is only part of the economic landscape for ALICE households. The full picture requires an understanding of the types of jobs available and their wages, as well as the cost of basic living expenses and the level of community resources in each parish.
ECONOMIC VIABILITY DASHBOARD
“The Economic Viability Dashboard provides a window directly into the economic conditions that matter most to ALICE households.”
The Economic Viability Dashboard is a tool that presents three parallel indices that focus particularly on the economic conditions that ALICE households face in Louisiana: Housing Affordability, Job Opportunities, and Community Resources. The ideal for a parish is to have good conditions in all three indices. The indices provide the means to compare parishes in Louisiana and also to see changes over time. The Economic Viability Dashboard provides a window directly into the economic conditions that matter most to ALICE households. The Dashboard offers the means to better understand why so many households struggle to achieve basic economic stability throughout Louisiana, and why that struggle is harder in some parts of the state than in others.
Economic Viability Dashboard Scores
ALICE households have to navigate a range of variables, and the Economic Viability Dashboard, using the best available proxies, illustrates them clearly. A common challenge is to find job opportunities in the same parishes that are affordable places to live for ALICE households. In addition, many affordable parishes do not offer key community resources such as access to quality schools, high levels of health coverage, and the types of community engagement that create social capital. The ideal locations are those that offer affordable housing, job opportunities, and high levels of community resources. For ALICE households, those locations are both most needed and hardest to find. The Economic Viability Dashboard shows that only three parishes in Louisiana score in the
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UNITED WAY ALICE REPORT – LOUISIANA
The cumulative Dashboard results are presented in the color-coded Louisiana parish map in Figure 28, and the detailed index results are presented in the table in Figure 29. Full results, as well as the methodology and sources, are in Appendix F. Index scores for each parish range from a possible 1 (worst) to 100 (best); they are then reported by groupings with the bottom third of scores labeled “poor” and colored dark blue; the middle third of scores labeled “fair” and colored medium blue; and the top third of scores labeled “good” and colored light blue.