The Correlates of Small-Town Upkeep

Abstract

Although small towns in America differ significantly in terms of how well they are maintained, there has been little scholarly work on what community factors relate to upkeep. In this research, we search for the correlates of town maintenance using data from a unique study of 99 small Iowa towns. The data include visual assessments of the towns, citizen responses to random sample attitudinal surveys, and U.S. census information. When these data are analyzed, the results show that better kept towns are associated with (a) higher median family incomes, (b) larger populations, (c) higher percentages of elderly, (d) fewer commuters, (e) stronger psychological attachment to the community, and (f) more community improvement activity. The implications of these findings are discussed.

The Correlates of Community Attractiveness

“…During the visit, the researcher completed a lengthy objective survey on the upkeep of the businesses, residences, schools, parks, and churches. If our subjective community-level attractiveness ratings correlate modestly with the Rice and Miller (1999) objective community-level upkeep scores, this would be evidence that the ratings are, indeed, measuring attractiveness. After all, well-kept property is generally considered more attractive than poorly kept property.…”

“…We can, however, conduct a test to help give us confidence that our attractiveness ratings are similar to the ratings that most other people would give the towns. The test makes use of the community upkeep data collected by Rice and Miller (1999). As noted earlier, these scholars rated 99 small Iowa towns in terms of their upkeep.…”

“…Upkeep and attractiveness are certainly far from identical concepts, but they should be related. If the community attractiveness ratings and upkeep scores are uncorrelated, this would suggest that we are not measuring attractiveness, and if the scores are almost identical, this would suggest that we may be Rice and Miller (1999) generated community-wide upkeep scores for 88 of the 99 towns, and when these scores were related to our attractiveness scores for the same towns, the correlation coefficient was .50. This is the moderate association we were looking for to give us confidence that our attractiveness ratings are actually measuring attractiveness.…”

“…It is the latter puzzle that interests us. To date, the most relevant research in this area is a study by Rice and Miller (1999) that looks at how community-level factors correlated with town upkeep in 99 small Iowa communities. By community-level factors, Rice and Miller mean variables aggregated to the community-level, such as the median household income of the community and the percentage of residents who are homeowners.…”

Neighborhood Care and Neighborhood Bonds: An Unequal Relationship

“…However, we also found empirical evidence against the hypothesis of positive relation between place attachment and neighborhood care. Although a high level of community attachment has been found in wellcared towns of Iowa (United States), high levels of attachment have also been found in deteriorating neighborhoods (Rice & Miller, 1999). For example, Brown and Perkins (1992), Brown et al (2003Brown et al ( , 2004b, and Lewicka (2005Lewicka ( , 2011 have shown that poorly conserved neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status tend to have high levels of attachment.…”