The Tale of Two Cities: Miami, FL & Corpus Christi, TX

Introduction

SiteData.io's Locality Health Score (LHS) measures the relative socioeconomic health of a locality, and is a powerful indicator for the performance of consumer loans (and other instruments) issued to entities within that locality. Our ML/AI models calculate LHS by matching socioeconomic data with professionally scored consumer loan outcomes. Historical and current LHS values have been computed from 2010 to 2024 for approximately 60,000 cities, counties, and neighborhoods.

A city's LHS over time indicates whether its condition is stable, improving, or deteriorating. Therefore, alongside the current LHS score, the LHS trendline is a useful indicator for decision-making, acting as a "Canary in the Coal Mine." In this blog, we will utilize historical LHS to compare Miami, a city on the rise with an ascending LHS, to Corpus Christi, a more challenged city with a descending LHS.

Miami, Florida

Miami has a received a lot of favorable press lately. Some highlights from news headlines include:

• Miami-Dade County saw a 6.7% increase in jobs from 2018 to 2023, outpacing the national growth rate of 3.6%. 1
• The median home price in Miami increased by 64% over the past 5 years, with an average home price gain of $220,000. 2
• Miami's population grew by 1.3% in 2023, with an estimated population of 455,924, making it one of the top 10 cities in the US for population growth. 3

This positive news is reflected in Miami's ascending LHS over the past 10 years. Miami has staged a remarkable climb to the upper echelons of reliability. This is evident in various data charts we provide alongside the LHS chart, which includes nine of the dozens of indicators we use in modeling. We compare cities to their parent states and the US.

In the first chart, we see that Miami's educational level has soared from below that of Florida and the US to above them in just 10 years. Virtually every chart shows a relative improvement. Miami's per capita income is also notable for rising from lagging behind to above the Florida and US averages.

Bachelor's Degree or Higher (%) Labor Force Participation Rate (%) BLS Labor Force Participation Rate (%) Unemployment Rate (%) Median Household Income ($) Per Capita Income ($) Below Poverty (%) Rental Occupied Units (%) Median Home Value ($) Zillow Home Value: ZALL ($) Population Median Age

Corpus Christi, Texas

The newsfeed has highlighted Corpus Christi's struggles. Some items from news headlines include:

• Corpus Christi area expected to experience little to no growth in population and jobs through the year 2050. 4
• 5 Fastest Declining Cities in Texas. 5

Corpus Christi's challenges are evident not only through its lagging educational level, per capita income, and home values compared to Texas and the US, but also through its declining LHS, which has dropped to 0.27. While that is not great, it is still above the bottom tier.

Bachelor's Degree or Higher (%) Labor Force Participation Rate (%) BLS Labor Force Participation Rate (%) Unemployment Rate (%) Median Household Income ($) Per Capita Income ($) Below Poverty (%) Rental Occupied Units (%) Median Home Value ($) Zillow Home Value: ZALL ($) Population Median Age

Conclusion

The Locality Health Score (LHS) is a powerful feature for indicating the socioeconomic health of localities, such as cities, and measuring the ability of borrowers to repay consumer loans. It is also useful for other finance-related areas. In addition to LHS, and for modeling LHS, we maintain an extensive database of economic indicators for over 60,000 localities.

Here, we have presented two cities that have experienced fairly rapid changes in circumstances, as highlighted by the changes in their LHS scores over a few years. This is just one of the many insights that LHS can provide.