International Downtown Association Vitality Index Expanding the index into 2020 and beyond (DRAFT), Technical Report BI-2024-5

The Vitality Index measures key characteristics that make a downtown vital, strong, and active. The UVA Biocomplexity Institute, Social and Decision Analytics Division was asked to scope and evaluate the feasibility of extending the International Downtown Association (IDA) Vitality Index into the year 2020, 1) calculate the metrics and the vitality index for years 2020 and 2021 for up to 50 downtown areas, and 2) acquire alternative data to calculate the indices.

IDA 2021 Tier classification categorizes downtowns into three categories: established, growing, and emerging. Established downtowns contain a significant portion of the city’s residents, jobs, and assessed value. Growing downtowns are characterized by rapidly expanding populations and job counts. Emerging downtowns exhibit swift growth in either residents or jobs (though not both) or display signs of positive development. These tiers do not indicate the age of a district. They categorize downtowns that have reached similar stages of development maturity. Furthermore, these tiers are formulated through a separate methodology and do not align directly with the Vitality Index scoring. The classification into tiers is determined by various metrics, including density, jobs per square mile, residents per square mile, assessed value per square mile, significance to the city, percentage of citywide jobs, percentage of citywide residents, long-term growth, percent growth in jobs (2002–2017), and percent growth in population (2000–2017).

The team worked with IDA and produced a report and a CSV data file of the updated metrics to support the continuation and expansion of the vitality index into future years and additional areas. Table (1) summarizes these results by category. In addition to the three categories provided by the IDA - established, growing, and emerging, we have an additional category called ”unclassified”. This category corresponds to downtowns with no Tiers classification provided by IDA. In the following section of results, the categorized downtowns have been denoted by a specific color, allowing for easy identification and navigation - emerging (purple), growing (pink), established (yellow), and unclassified (gray).

Wang A, Siwe L, Mehdi Q, Goswami T, Montalvo C, Shipp S. International Downtown Association Vitality Index Expanding the index into 2020 and beyond (DRAFT), Technical Report BI-2024-5. Proceedings of the Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia; 2023 December. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18130/w877-y075.