Thanks to the Urban Institute for putting together this interactive map showing how the 100 most populous areas rank in terms of economic security. By combining data on unemployment, declines in home values in recent years, housing affordability and the rate of serious mortgage delinquency, the map offers a more robust look at the interrelated elements affecting economic security in the country’s metro areas, assigning letter grades and numeric rankings.
An interesting element of the map is the ability to change the weighting of each of the four factors. (Slide all the way to the right on the map and all the way down to see this feature.) By default each is set to 25 percent, but if you’re really more interested in how housing affordability affects a metro area’s economic security, you can bring its value up and push the others down and the map re-ranks accordingly. For example, the worst performing metro for housing affordability alone is Honolulu, but when all factors are evenly weighted, the worst is Las Vegas-Paradise.
If you want to see all the data in a spreadsheet, click on any one of the metro areas, then click on the Excel option, and you’ll get all the data for all 100 metro areas.
