Spokane gets good resilience rating

Spokane and Coeur d’Alene each score above average on a new “resilience” rating that tries to describe a metro area’s capacity to recover from natural disasters or a major economic shock such as losing its largest employer.

Out of 361 U.S. metropolitan regions, Spokane scored 85th; Coeur d’Alene scored 144th.

The resilience capacity index, or RCI, was developed by researchers at the University of Buffalo. The RCI’s main author is Kate Foster, the director of the Buffalo Regional Institute. She said the concept of resilience has become trendy, having started with psychologists and engineers describing the way a person or system bounces back from disruptions.

The Buffalo Regional Institute set out to predict which metropolitan regions have the infrastructure to do the same, she said.

It found Rochester, Minn., is the most-resilient metro area. The worst is College Station, Texas.

“Spokane has an interesting profile and scores highly in two economic areas,” Foster said: diversity of the economy and business environment. The first reflects how many different industries account for most jobs in the area; the second measures the level of small-business activity.

Economic factors made up one-third of a metro’s RCI, Foster said. Another third comes from social-demographic factors, such as per-capita income and poverty levels; the last third is based on “community connectivity,” which collects a range of factors including home ownership, voter involvement and civic engagement.

Other Northwest cities in the RCI were: Seattle, 25th; Idaho Falls, 44th; Kennewick, 71st; Billings, 75th; Bend, 84th; Portland, 104th; Boise, 115th; and Bremerton, 123rd.

Foster said the numbers invite comparisons between cities, but the intent is be “an assessment tool, not a crystal ball.”

“The goal is to help people in any of the cities to say, ‘Here’s where we’re strong and where we have good capacity. But here are other areas where we’re not as strong, and we might consider those areas when we set community priorities.’ ”

Most of the economic numbers used in the first resilience index derived from Census data dating to 2009.

In that category, “economic capacity,” Spokane scored 20th-best out of all 361 metros, Foster noted.

Foster defended the attempt to group a loose set of factors under the community category.

“The literature is strong on the importance of connectivity variables when dealing with resilience,” she said. That third category tries to capture those harder-to-track indicators such as the ability of people to find a support network or to find ways to become more engaged in the community.

People and communities as a whole do better in dealing with disruption or economic downturns if they have strong networks and a large number of civic groups or organizations to rely on for regaining solid footing, she said.

“In that case, a resident of that city can say, ‘I may be poor, but I have a strong network. I know where to turn,’ ” Foster said.