[Excerpt] A major study of the New Haven region, published by DataHaven with other local partners, ranked it as the 19th best performing metropolitan region out of the 130 largest U.S. urban areas.
The Greater New Haven Community Index 2013: Benchmarking the People, Economic Opportunity, Health Needs, and Civic Life of Our Region offers statistical details down to the neighborhood level “to illustrate the opportunities and challenges that face the area where we live, work and play,” said Mark Abraham, executive director of DataHaven and the report’s lead author.
Other co-authors and sponsors included The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, Yale-New Haven Hospital and the New Haven Health Department.
The report will be updated regularly to identify how leaders can make progress on the region’s problems, and groups 12 local towns in the definition of the region in addition to New Haven.
They are the Inner Ring towns of East Haven, Hamden and West Haven; the Outer Ring of Milford, Orange, Woodbridge, Bethany, North Haven, Branford, North Branford, Guilford and Madison. It also grouped each of them by household income and for the neighborhoods within New Haven.
For the entire region, it found that 82 percent of residents were happy with the area where they lived, with an equal number satisfied with their job or activities they participate in daily. This dropped to 68 percent satisfaction for New Haven alone, but three-quarters of city residents were happy with their jobs.
One major finding is that the prosperity of the suburban towns increasingly depends on the growing number of jobs within New Haven. Most commuters who hold jobs within a two-mile radius of New Haven City Hall — 62 percent — earn a “living wage,” but only 38 percent of employed workers who live within that same area hold such a job.
