The Columbus Foundation has long invested in community research to help enhance community knowledge across a range of important issues, such as mental healthcare, digital equity and inclusion, youth services, aging populations, and homelessness. This research serves to educate the community, inform regional priorities, identify local assets and pain points, and help local nonprofits determine where to focus their programming.
The Benchmarking Central Ohio reports provide a tracking and assessment tool that shows how the Columbus region is doing across indicators over time and how the region compares to other metropolitan areas in the United States. The 2024 study compares the Columbus metropolitan region to 22 other metropolitan areas, including peer communities of similar size and geography and high-performing communities.
Key Findings of Benchmarking Central Ohio 2024
- Housing affordability: Unlike some regions, the interventions and investments we make in central Ohio can still make a measurable difference.
- Public health: The Columbus metropolitan region has some of the poorest health outcomes among other regions measured in the report, calling into question the underlying factors affecting population health.
- Population growth: Central Ohio’s growth has remained steady, if not at the same pace as many peer regions, a reality we should neither take for granted nor fail to utilize to generate opportunities for people, families, businesses, and communities. Meanwhile, immigrants and refugees continue to be a driving force behind our population stability and growth.
- Workforce: With the second highest share of people in prime working age, and one of the lowest unemployment rates, central Ohio has one of the most engaged workforces among regional peers.
- Poverty: Despite recent declines in poverty, central Ohio’s poverty rate remains higher than most peer regions, while the Black poverty rate is still two times as high as the rate for the entire region.
- Transportation: Our region’s auto-centric transportation infrastructure, while currently producing shorter commute times for some, places limits on our mobility options, and is thus ripe for improvements to transit, pedestrian, and bicycle infrastructure.
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Volunteerism: Central Ohio residents are more generous with their time and effort to serve their community than in most other peer regions.
Population Vitality
This section comprises indicators of population growth, diversity, age, and households within each metropolitan area.
Highlights
- Columbus is growing, but it's not alone, and it isn't the fastest-growing metro measured in this report.
- Central Ohio is one of only two regions in which more than half the foreign-born population has arrived since 2010. Immigrants and refugees remain a driving force of central Ohio’s population stability and growth.
- Columbus’s population is much younger than other Midwest cities. Its median age is lower than any of its comparison cities in the Midwest and its proportion of population at retirement age is also lower than each of these cities.
- Columbus has the highest rate of same-sex households per 1,000 households of any peer midwest city. Its rate is also higher than the median rate for comparison cities and has grown over the past five years.
Economic Strength
This section comprises indicators of industry prevalence, innovation, business growth, business size and ownership, productivity, employment, and workforce that describe the strength of metropolitan area economies.
Highlights
- Columbus has benefited from a strong labor market and low cost of living. Columbus’s 2022 unemployment was half a percentage point lower than the median among the cohort and its 2023 median income was $2,000 higher after adjusting for cost of living.
- Columbus has lower rates of very small businesses and new very small businesses than other communities in the cohort. Columbus also relies less on the technology industry than other cohort communities.
Personal Prosperity
This section includes indicators of income, economic equity, homeownership, and housing affordability that shed light on the economic security of residents of the metropolitan areas.
Highlights
- Columbus residents benefit from a comparatively low cost of living. A lower percentage of renters are burdened by rent than any other cohort community besides Pittsburgh. The average amount of income spent by Columbus residents on housing and transportation is also relatively low.
- Prosperity is still far out of reach for many Columbus residents, however. Among the cohort, Columbus ranked high on poverty measures, with the second highest percentage of working-age population working and still in poverty, fifth in overall poverty, and eighth in percentage of population below 200% of the federal poverty level.
Lifelong Learning
This section comprises indicators of literacy, school engagement, educational attainment, and access to research and learning that describe the educational resources of metropolitan areas.
Highlights
- The Columbus region has one of the highest percentages of three- and four-year-olds enrolled in prekindergarten programs, enough to place it in the top tier among its peers for prekindergarten enrollment.
- Our comparisons also suggest high rates of adult education for Columbus. Columbus came second in the cohort in library visits per capita and sixth in doctoral degrees per 100,000 population.
Community Well-Being
This section comprises indicators of health, safety, civic life, transportation, environmental quality, and cultural opportunities that describe the well-being of metropolitan areas.
Highlights
- Columbus has a volunteer rate that is higher than other cohort communities. It came fourth in the percentage of residents who volunteer and was only four percentage points behind the cohort leader, Kansas City.
- Columbus residents face health challenges. Among cohort members, Columbus ranks in the top five in obesity, diabetes, overdose deaths, and infant mortality.