What makes a community a desirable place to live?

In 2008, the Knight Soul of the Community Project was created, by a partnership of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup. I had not heard about their research until recently, but it relates closely to what I think about cityscapes, and how I feel about connections people have to their spaces, their communities, and the histories of those places. The more I learn about cities, the more interesting and complex I find them. The more I study people and their connections to place, time, and space around them, the more fascinated I am by how the places we value influence our entire mindset, one individual having vastly different experience than another, near or far from each other.

I find conclusions like the one explained below to be confirmation of this fascinating dynamic: that something not quite specific is determining where people see themselves living, and what defines their community, to them and to others observing them. Not that we needed a study to prove this one, but "the perceptions of the local economy do not have a very strong relationship to resident attachment." I am excited to hear this finding, as it gets closer to the factors that truly bring people to certain communities -- often it is that harder-to-nail-down concept, soul. 

I've included the entire results post here, as there is no one part that is uninteresting to me.

What makes a community a desirable place to live? What draws people to stake their future in it? Are communities with more attached residents better off?

Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation launched the Knight Soul of the Community project in 2008 with these questions in mind. After interviewing close to 43,000 people in 26 communities over three years, the study has found that three main qualities attach people to place: social offerings, such as entertainment venues and places to meet, openness (how welcoming a place is) and the area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces).

We’ve seen now why attachment is an important metric for communities, since it links to key outcomes like local economic growth (GDP). So, the next obvious question is: what drives attachment? After three years of research, the results have been very consistent, and possibly surprising.

First, what attaches residents to their communities doesn’t change much from place to place. While we might expect that the drivers of attachment would be different in Miami, Fla., from those in Macon, Ga., in fact, the main drivers of attachment show little difference across communities. In addition, the same drivers have risen to the top in every year of the study.

Second, these main drivers may be surprising. While the economy is obviously the subject of much attention, the study has found that perceptions of the local economy do not have a very strong relationship to resident attachment. Instead, attachment is most closely related to how accepting a community is of diversity, its wealth of social offerings, and its aesthetics. This is not to say that jobs and housing aren’t important. Residents must be able to meet their basic needs in a community in order to stay. However, when it comes to forming an emotional connection with the community, there are other community factors which often are not considered when thinking about economic development. These community factors seem to matter more when it comes to attaching residents to their community.

And finally, while we do see differences in attachment among different demographic groups, demographics generally are not the strongest drivers of attachment. In almost every community, we found that a resident’s perceptions of the community are more strongly linked to their level of community attachment than to that person’s age, ethnicity, work status, etc.