Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence, Woonsocket

Prepared by David Coe, Rachell Calhoun, Liz Giancola, and Lauren Wolf

Inspiration for this project came from a partnership with the Rhode Island Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Latino Policy Institute (LPI) to collect the upward mobility metrics about the four core cities in Rhode Island - Providence, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, and Central Falls - as a model for how this project might be used by policy-makers. Most of Rhode Island’s poverty is concentrated in these four core cities. Our partners at these institutions are interested in understanding what is happening there, and in using this data to collaborate with policy experts to find out why it is happening.  Moreover, because inequity in America is disproportionately experienced by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, they were particularly interested in these metrics broken down for specific races and ethnicities. They plan to use our work as a stepping stone to apply for grants to build off of our findings.

Population

Strong and Healthy Families

Financial Wellbeing

Income

Metric: Household income at 20th, 50th, and 80th percentiles

Description: This set of measures reflects financial resources available to low, middle, and high-income households as well as the extent of income inequality.

Source: American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data, 2019

Housing

Housing instability and homelessness

Metric: Portion of public-school children who are ever homeless during the school year

Description: The proportion of public-school children who are ever homeless is based on the number of children (age 3 through 12th grade) who are enrolled in public schools and whose primary nighttime residence at any time during a school year was a shelter, transitional housing, or awaiting foster care placement; unsheltered (e.g., a car, park, campground, temporary trailer, or abandoned building); a hotel or motel because of the lack of alternative adequate accommodations; or in housing of other people because of loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason. The share is the percent of all public school students in those schools experiencing homelessness.

Source: US Department of Education via EdFacts Homeless Students Enrolled 2018-2019 School Year

Notes: See appendix

Health

Access to and utilization of health services

Metric: Health Professional Shortage Area ranking for primary care providers

Description: The Health Resources & Services Administration designates an area as having a shortage of Primary Care providers for an entire group of people within a defined geographic area and indicates the severity of the shortage with the HPSA Score using values from 0 to 25, where higher scores indicate a greater shortage. 

Source: Health Resources & Services Administration

Notes: There is no overall Health Professional Shortage in Providence County. However, there is a shortage for low-income residents. 

Neonatal Health

Metric: Share of low-weight births

Description: The proportion of babies born weighing less than 5 pounds 8 ounces (<2,500 grams) out of all births

Source: National Vital Statistics System, Natality on CDC WONDER, Natality public use data 2019

Note: The data is only available at the county level.

Overall Low-Weight Birth Rate: 8.59%

Black or African American Low Weight Birth Rate: 11.33%

Hispanic or Latino Low Weight Birth Rate: 8.56%

Not Hispanic or Latino Low Weight Birth Rate: 8.37%

White Low Weight Birth Rate: 7.65%

More than One Race Low Weight Birth Rate: 5.91%

Asian Low Weight Birth Rate: 5.67%

Supportive Communities 

Local Governance

Political participation

Metric: Share of the voting-eligible population who turn out to vote

Description: This measures the share of the voting-eligible population who voted in the 2020 presidential election.

Source: MIT Election Data and Science Lab for 2020 Election pulled from the Harvard Dataverse and American Community Survey 2020 5-year data. 

MIT Election Data and Science Lab, 2022, "U.S. President Precinct-Level Returns 2020", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JXPREB, Harvard Dataverse, V1

Neighborhoods

Economic Inclusion

Metric: Share of residents experiencing poverty living in high-poverty neighborhoods

Source: American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data, 2019

Description: A neighborhood is defined as a census tract. A high-poverty neighborhood is one in which over 40 percent of the residents are experiencing poverty. 

Racial Diversity

Metric: Neighborhood exposure index, or share of a person’s neighbors who are people of other races and ethnicities

Description: This is a set of metrics constructed separately for each racial/ethnic group and reports the average share of that group's neighbors who are members of other racial/ethnic groups. This is a type of exposure index. For example, an exposure index of 80% in “Hispanic or Latino“' means that the average Hispanic or Latino resident has 80% of their neighbors within a census tract who have a different ethnicity than them. The higher the value, the more exposed to people of different races/ethnicities. The exposure index was calculated using the Census Scope Exposure Index Formula for each race at the tract level.

Source: ACS 5-year data, 201

In Central Falls in 2019, the average Hispanic or Latino Resident had 32% of their tract-level neighbors who did not identify as Hispanic or Latino. 

Transportation access

Metric: Transit trips index

Description: This metric reflects the number of public transit trips taken annually by a three-person single-parent family with income at 50 percent of the Area Median Income for renters. This number is percentile ranked nationally into an index with values ranging from 0 to 100. Higher scores reflect better access to public transportation.

Source: Department of Housing and Urban Development Accessed via API

Assumptions: Converted the index (hh6_transit_trips_renters)  given to percentile ranked nationally. 

Metric: Low transportation cost index 

Description: This index reflects local transportation costs as a share of renters’ incomes. It accounts for both transit and cars. This index is based on estimates of transportation costs for a three-person, single-parent family with income at 50 percent of the median income for renters for the county. Values are inverted and percentile ranked nationally, with values ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the value, the lower the cost of transportation in that neighborhood.

Source: Department of Housing and Urban Development Accessed via API

Notes: Inverted the original metric (hh6_t_renters) then converted to a percentile ranked nationally. Mapped the two indicated variables from tract to place for core RI cities and by CNTY_FIPS for the national dataset.

Safety

Exposure to crime

Metric: Rates of reported violent crime

Description:  Violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Rates are calculated as the number of reported crimes per 100,000 people. The FBI cautions using UCR data to rank or compare locales because this can create, ‘misleading perceptions which adversely affect geographic entities and their residents.’

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Uniform Crime Statistic (UCR) Crime in the United States, 2019, accessed via api.usa.gov; American Community Survey 5-year data, 2019 

Notes: The data was taken from each reporting agency’s 2019 data (Pawtucket Police Department, Woonsocket Police Department, Central Falls Police Department, and Providence Police Department). 

Exposure to crime

Overly punitive policing

Metric: The number of youth aged 18 or under who were in the care or custody of the Rhode Island Training School at any time during the calendar year, including youth in community placements while in the care or custody of the Training School.

Assumptions: To calculate the rate of crime per 100k residents the ACS population data was used for each city

Source: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/

Opportunities to Learn and Earn

Education

Access to preschool

Metric: Share of children enrolled in nursery school or preschool

Description: This metric measures the share of a jurisdiction’s three to four year old children who are enrolled in nursery or preschool.

Source: ACS 5-year data, 2019

Effective public education

Metric: Average per grade change in English Language Arts achievement between third and eighth grades

Description: This metric reports the average annual improvement in English (reading comprehension, written expression) observed between the third and eighth grades for each jurisdiction.

Source: US Department of Education, 2018-2019 school year

Notes: For values in the original dataset that were reported as ranges less than or equal to 10, the median value was used. Ranges larger than 10 were not used. If there are multiple averages, the final was more than one school in the city, values were calculated using an average of differences within the city, weighted by the number of test takers. 

Assumptions: See Appendix

Work

Employment

Metric: Employment-to-population ratio for adults

Description: This metric is the ratio of the number of employed adults in a given jurisdiction to the total number of adults in that age range living there.

Source: ACS 5-year data, 2019

Appendix

Housing instability and homelessness

• 4400015 Blackstone Central Falls are 10% of students in that district. Since there are 6 students and ten percent is less than a person, this number was excluded from the final dataset.
• 4400031 Highlander: 44.6% of students are in Central Falls, since only one student total reported this number was excluded from the final dataset.
• 4400021 Achievement First has 62% of students from Central Falls so we took 62% of the total homeless number 

Access to and utilization of health services

Definitions: What is a Health Professional Shortage Area?

• HPSA Score : This attribute represents the Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) Score developed by the National Health Service Corps (NHSC) in determining priorities for assignment of clinicians. The scores range from 0 to 26 where the higher the score, the greater the priority.
• “Designated” and “Proposed For Withdrawal” was used to indicate currently having a health shortage
• The cities are indicated in HPSA City or HPSA Component Name, there are a small number of facilities so this was inspected manually, so if this is replicated care should be taken to label cities appropriately
• The average HPSA Score was calculated for each city
• Mental Health: Providence County as a geographical region did not have a HPSA score, but the low income population in that region does have a score at a county level: 12. Because all cities are within that county, they share the same score. 
• Primary Care: Geographical Region for each city did not have a HPSA score, the HPSA for low income population was included.

Effective Public Education

Processing differences in percent proficient from grade 3 - 8:

• If the numbers were suppressed to protect student privacy, the mid range number was chosen for ranges less than or equal to 10.
• If the range was more than 10, that number was not used
• If the percent was “PS” , it was not used
• Yearly average difference was calculated across grades 03 - 05 for 2018-2019 school year. 
• https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/ was used to look up school location
• LEAID: 4400015 BlackStone Valley Prep only has two grades in Providence (7,8) so only those two grades were used
• LEAID 4400031 Highlander only had k-6 in Providence, so only those were included. 
• LEAID: 4400021 Achievement First  has two schools in Cranston five in Providence All their numbers were included because it was not possible to separate by grade
• If there are multiple averages, the number of total valid tests taken was used to weight the average of those differences for the final city level difference