2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

220 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
enabling agencies to target scarce resources to raising public awareness
about emerging social or health concerns to informing the design of
interventions to address those problems. Undergirding all the examples
are two basic principles: the importance of bringing together data across
silos and the central role of partnerships and community engagement. 1
The Need for Neighborhood Data
to Inform Larger Jurisdictions
The ability to compare data across neighborhoods is important for several
reasons. First, there is evidence of considerable variation in neighborhood
conditions and population well-being depending on place. National,
state, or even municipal measures of social indicators mask these differences.
Indicators for particular neighborhoods can reveal populations in
great distress even when things are generally improving for people overall.
Indeed, the existence of problems in health, economic opportunity,
or service quality is often starkly revealed when indicators in one neighborhood
are compared with another or with regional averages. Such differences
often provide justification for changes in public policy, program
delivery, or distribution of resources, as demonstrated by the three indepth
case studies in this chapter. Disparities in human well-being can
guide efforts to mobilize communities to act on improving conditions,
and neighborhood indicators that reveal pockets of concern can be used
to target resources to areas where they are needed most.
Second, the growing recognition that place matters has increased the
awareness of the need for neighborhood indicators in research and practice.
The consensus about the powerful influence of place has been driven in
large part by the virtual explosion of the scientific literature on placebased
disparities and neighborhood effects on the life course of individuals
(van Ham, Manley, Bailey, Simpson, and Maclennan 2012). Many
studies demonstrate that disadvantaged neighborhoods have higher rates
of negative outcomes for children, youth, and adults that are of societal
concern, such as poor school performance, antisocial behavior, health
problems, and victimization (Ellen and Turner 1997; Leventhal and
Brooks-Gunn 2000). Place-based inequality in access to decent housing
(Mueller and Tighe 2007), good schools (Duncan and Murnane 2011;
Nelson and Sheridan 2009), job opportunities (Fernandez and Su 2004),
and transportation options and healthy environments (Weiss et al. 2011)