Weak Market Cities: Research for the Brookings Institution’s “America’s Core Cities” Project

May 01, 2005

Funding: The Brookings Institution

Summary: Summary: Preparation of a report for the Brookings Institution’s “The Campaign for America’s Core Cities: Research and Policy Development” project. The paper  defined “weak market cities”; developed methodologies for identifying and ranking cities along a number of indicators of performance; created a statistically-based typology for weak market cities; and explained differences among core cities in terms of their condition in 2000 and performance between 1990 and 2000.

The second phase of the project broadened the scope of the original study to further characterize the differences between "weak market" and "non-weak market" cities, developed models to uncover which characteristics have a causal relationship with key aspects of economic and residential health, and then expanded analysis to examine  additional cities within this framework.