Web Wednesday: The Vitality Index
Everybody loves to rank stuff. The NCAA just seeded teams 1-68 for March Madness, for instance (and, incidentally, may your bracket hopes live long and prosper). But oftentimes rankings neither are useful for comparing things nor predictive of results. Creating an index— AKA, building a composite ranking system — can give much better results, [...]
Regional Snapshot: Metro Atlanta Housing Affordability
Highlights from this snapshot: Home prices continue to rise nationally. According to the National Association of Realtors, median sales price nationwide is now $257K, compared to around $190K in 2012. Fewer “starter homes” are being built, which is exacerbating the affordability crisis. In metro Atlanta, 44% of home buyers have incomes above $100K, meaning [...]
Regional Snapshot: 2019 Federal Opportunity Zones
The Opportunity Zones Program, enacted in 2017 as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, is designed to encourage long-term investment in economically distressed rural and urban neighborhoods across the country. Opportunity Zones are census tracts that have been nominated by governors and certified by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to receive [...]
Regional Snapshot: 2019 Economic Snapshot
This month’s Regional Snapshot provides an overview of the most relevant trends in our metro economy- topics include job growth by sector, changes in wage levels, and trends in residential and commercial (by type) permit and construction activity. Highlights from this snapshot: Metro Atlanta continues to be a national leader in job growth, though [...]
The Quarter: Highlights from Q3 2018
Our most recent update of The Quarter analyzes economic data in metro Atlanta for Q3 2018. The Quarter includes data on employment, home price indices, building permits, retail and office space, and more, with the goal of identifying what areas of our economy are striving and what areas are slower to recover. Visit The [...]
Friday Factday: Wage Changes for High, Middle, and Low-Wage Occupations
This week's Friday Factday is the last post in our three-part series visualizing Occupational Employment Survey (OES) data for 2017 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In our first post post using the OES data, we provided an interactive tool for comparing occupations by total employment, median annual wages, and the prevalence of regional employment in [...]