What are our notable inequalities?

Program comes to the Steel City to measure them and spur change

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

What are the most significant inequities in Pittsburgh? And are we making progress on eradicating them?

A project called Equality Indicators, which began at City University of New York, aims to answer these questions in the Steel City.

A Rockefeller Foundation grant is funding the project’s spread to five U.S. cities: Tulsa, Okla.; Dallas; Oakland, Calif.; St. Louis; and Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh team, which includes the city’s chief resilience officer, analysts at RAND Corp. and researchers at CUNY, will meet for the first time Tuesday.

When Michael Jacobson started Equality Indicators at CUNY, his team took to the streets with surveys asking New Yorkers about the most significant inequalities. Respondents wrote back with answers such as criminal justice and housing.

Missing from their responses? Health care.

Data show that access to health care is highly unequal in New York City and in many other parts of the country. Still, very few New Yorkers listed it on the surveys. Mr. Jacobson, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology, can only speculate as to why. Do individuals believe that health is a matter of luck and not the state’s responsibility?

The episode showed Mr. Jacobson the flaws in our perception and the importance of concrete measurements.

“In order to make changes, you really need to know what’s happening,” said Victoria Lawson who serves as the project director at CUNY.

In New York, the project focused on inequality in six broad thematic areas — economy, education, health, housing, justice and services. The team must now address what themes are most significant

in Pittsburgh and what data is available to measure them.

Linnea May of RAND Corp. said that being able to customize the program was a major draw, because “Pittsburgh is not New York City.” She will work with other RAND team members as one of the “data-crunchers,” gathering the most important data from an overabundance of information to contextualize and analyze it.

The project compares the most- and least-advantaged group for each “indicator,” or specific measure of inequality. The difference between the two groups corresponds to a numerical score between 1 and 100, with 100 representing complete equality. The average of four indicators yields a score for a broader topic area; the average of four topic areas yields a score for an even broader theme. Averaging all of the themes together produces an overall equality score for the city.

Mr. Jacobson said this work pares down information about wide-ranging issues into “accessible, useful, understandable” scores.

“The key will be its usefulness in decision making,” Ms. May said.

Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s chief resilience officer, will use this data to adapt the city’s resilience strategy.

The city already has an extensive architecture of resilience programs in place, including the interconnected programs of 100 Resilient Cities, P4 and OnePGH. P4 established Pittsburgh’s values — people, place, planet and performance — and OnePGH built a resilience strategy based in action around those ideals. 100 Resilient Cities provides funding to Pittsburgh’s resilience efforts, oversees these projects and ties Pittsburgh’s narrative to the efforts of other cities around the globe.

“We want to benchmark progress over time,” Mr. Ervin said. “This gives us a next step.”

While the program will be customized to Pittsburgh, Mr. Ervin believes that learning from the other participating cities will be an invaluable part of the process. He has already spoken with colleagues in New York who advised him on how equality Indicators could help with efforts such as a community outreach.

Mr. Ervin isn’t looking for easy success. He hopes to make progress in what he called bite-size pieces at each step from gathering the data to analyzing changes over time. His ultimate goal is to use this program to create a modern version of the Pittsburgh Survey, a 19071908 sociological study funded by the New Yorkbased Russell Sage Foundation that detailed urban conditions and is considered a highlight of Progressive Era reform.

“This isn’t going to change in a night. This isn’t going to change in a year,” said Ms. Lawson, who holds a Ph.D. in forensic psychology. She knows how hard it is to address deeply entrenched inequalities.

But the program gives her hope: “Focusing on the most vulnerable — I think that’s really important.”