Baltimore will soon find out what it?s worth. Social Compact, a nonprofit research group based in Washington, D.C., is conducting a DrillDown study in Baltimore during 2007. The purpose of a DrillDown study is to uncover market strengths in underserved urban markets across the country.
“Urban areas are such places of rampant change and development, what happens in 2000 or 2010 may not be the same picture five years later,” said Ryan Sullivan, director of operation and senior research adviser for Social Compact. “[The study?s] not a prediction of the future or an understanding of the past, its a snapshot of the moment.”
The study will identify strengths in neighborhoods and create a neighborhood retail strategy.
Thecompany gets its information by conducting more indepth and aggressive studies than what a U.S. Census would. Social Compact states that it has uncovered aggregate household income that is $5.9 billion higher than those of census trend projections.
Many community groups are pitching in, including the Baltimore Development Corp., Baltimore Housing, the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance-Jacob France Institute at the University of Baltimore and the Baltimore City Office of Planning. These groups are working together to help obtain data for Social Compact.
The study will “look at many sources and provide information for Baltimore City that can be used in a multitude of ways,” said Matthew Kachura, the program manager at BNIA. “We hope to make [the study] replicable, and the findings should be able to be updated on a semi-annual to annual basis, and we are going to be doing that.”
The business will help to collect and provide information such as cost of living, cost of housing, cost of education and the ability of people in these areas to earn money in a given area. These, and similar statistics, would merge together to create what Social Compact refers to as a citywide baseline of economic indicators that can be updated over time.
These would provide valuable information that will hopefully help to attract new public and private investors.
Baltimore?s DrillDown study will be released sometime this summer.
