ORLANDO, Fla. — Editor’s note: This story is available as a result of a content partnership between WFTV and the Orlando Business Journal. Problems like educational achievement gaps, racial wealth gaps and lack of access to affordable housing aren’t abstract issues. These matters affect real people, and those people live in real places. When issues are divorced from the places where they happen, the result is investments spread thinly or haphazardly overlapped in ways that consistently fail to generate lasting positive change. The Neighborhood Opportunity Index covers more than 1,700 neighborhood “block groups’’ in seven counties of Central Florida. Block groups are the smallest unit of measurement for U.S. Census data. Each block group was assessed on indicators related to income, employment, crime, housing, education and health. High opportunity in a neighborhood means that there is low crime, low unemployment, good health, good access to attainable housing and strong household income. In a low opportunity neighborhood, the rates of crime, unemployment and poverty are high, while educational attainment and health indicators are low.
