South Dakota Sees Urban/Rural Divide in Child Opportunity Score

On returning from a Thanksgiving holiday in New York City, gubernatorial policy analyst Kennedy Noem mused vaguely on “family, delicious food, new opportunities, and (now especially) South Dakota’s wide open spaces and low population.”

New research from Brandeis University finds that the New York City metropolitan area ranks middlingly in providing children good food, healthy family life, and other indicators of opportunity. On a scale of 1 to 100, New York City scores a 51 on Brandeis’s Child Opportunity Score. The national COS is 55.

New York City is a bit of an outlier among northern cities. Scores in the lower half of the COS range tend to be found in the lower half of the United States map:

Three of the five best metros for children are Madison, Wisconsin; Des Moines, Iowa; and Minneapolis, Minnesota, each of which beat the pants off the Big Apple by scoring in the 80s:

The Brandeis researchers derive these scores from a formulization of this concept of a good place to grow up:

Picture a neighborhood where children have access to a high-quality preschool center. When they get older, they can attend their neighborhood schools where student achievement in reading and math is high and where good high school and graduation and college enrollment rates signal to youth that education is valued and attainable. This neighborhood has parks and green spaces, access to healthy food, and low environmental pollution. Finally, the neighborhood has high employment, a low poverty rate, and short commute times for parents. These conditions mean that more economic resources and more time are available to families to raise children [Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, Clemens Noelke, and Nancy McArdle, “The Geography of Child Opportunity: Why Neighborhoods Matter for Equity,” Brandeis University: Diversity Data Kids.org, January 2020].

New York City ends up with a 51 not because the whole city is just so-so for providing kids with opportunities but because of wide disparities in opportunity from neighborhood to neighborhood. In NYC, 25% of children live in “very low” opportunity neighborhoods while 26% live in “very high” opportunity neighborhoods. In Minneapolis, only 6% of children live in “very low” opportunity neighborhoods while 49% live in “very high” opportunity neighborhoods.

Brandeis’s cool maps and lists focus on the 100 largest metropolitan areas in America, meaning we don’t get any up-front comparisons of Child Opportunity Scores here on the Buffalo Commons with the big cities. But Brandeis has data for every neighborhood in the country, including South Dakota. South Dakota’s 222 neighborhoods, home to just about 211,000 children in 2015, had an average Child Opportunity Score of 59, closer to New York City than to Minneapolis.

South Dakota’s twelve largest metro areas—Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Aberdeen, Brookings, Huron, Mitchell, Pierre, Spearfish, Vermillion, Watertown, Yankton, and that portion of Sioux City, Iowa, that tumesces across the Big Sioux—house 73% of South Dakota’s kids. Neighborhoods in those big towns average a Child Opportunity Score of 64. The 27% of kids living in the more rural rest of the state average a Child Opportunity Score of 50.

South Dakota’s urban/rural gap on Child Opportunity Scores is lowest on the Social and Economic Domain scores (67 urban, 57 rural), larger on the education domain (50 urban, 35 rural), and largest on the health and environment domain (71 urban, 44 rural).

Both New York City and South Dakota see wide disparities from neighborhood to neighborhood in opportunities for children. On average, many South Dakota neighborhoods offer healthier opportunities for children than New York City… but on balance, we only find those better averages in South Dakota’s bigger towns, not in the most rural areas. Kennedy Noem will want to analyze that data when she’s formulating policy for economic development, education, and child welfare.