Top Stories Montgomery

Are Alabama’s metro areas strong enough to bounce back from stresses such as the recent recession and the destructive April tornadoes?

While only time ultimately will tell, a new resiliency index shows a few metro areas in the state are more likely than the others to come back strongly from adversity. The rankings may surprise some Alabamians.

The Resilience Capacity Index is the work of Kathryn Foster, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, done for Building Resilient Regions, described as “a national network of experts on metropolitan regions funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and administered by the University of California, Berkeley.

“The index measures more than 360 U.S. metros for their capacity to handle stresses ranging from economic recession to natural disasters. It creates a single statistic for each region based on the region’s performance across 12 economic, socio-demographic, and community connectivity indicators.

“What it does tell us is that some regions are structurally more prepared than others, and thus have greater capacity to bounce back in the wake of stress,” Foster says.

The program with the index allows people to compare and contrast metro areas and assess their relative strengths and weaknesses.

The metros are split into five divisions ranked from Very High to Very Low. The nation’s most resilient metro according the index is Rochester, Minnesota, and none of Alabama’s 12 metros scored in the top group of 72 metros.

Alabama placed one metro — Huntsville — in the second tier, three in the middle tier including Birmingham, which ranked 185 but best among the middle tier areas from the state. Seven of the state’s metro areas finished either low or very low including Mobile, and perhaps surprisingly, the university communities of Tuscaloosa and Opelika-Auburn.

HOW ALABAMA’S METRO AREAS RANKED:

Very high

(none).

High

98. Huntsville, Alabama.

Medium

185. Birmingham, Alabama.

198. Gadsden, Alabama

206. Montgomery, Alabama.

Low

229. Mobile, Alabama.

234. Florence, Alabama.

237. Decatur, Alabama.

268. Dothan, Alabama.

Very Low

305. Anniston-Oxford, Alabama.

327. Tuscaloosa, Alabama

343. Auburn-Opelika, Alabama

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.