(Inactive) Center for Economic Information*

*The Center for Economic Information (CEI) at University of Missouri-Kansas City is currently re-assessing its data intermediary services. They continue to develop data and conduct analysis to improve the Kansas City community.

History of the Center for Economic Information

The Center was established in 1994 as a research unit in the Department of Economics of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.  Its stated mission at that time was to use advancing information technology in support of both academic research and economic decision-makers in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Our initial commission was as a core unit of the Missouri State Census Data Center (MSCDC), funded by the State of Missouri in collaboration with the State Data Center Program of the Census Bureau. For a short, anecdotal version of CEI's origins, read A Brief History of CEI, as recounted by Dr. Eugene Wagner.

In 1997, UMKC was awarded a HUD COPC (Community Outreach Partnership Center) Grant, which included a role for CEI in neighborhood asset-mapping. This evolved into a pilot project for what eventually was to become the 2000 Neighborhood Housing Conditions Survey (NHCS), a fifteen-point property conditions evaluation which was applied to 85,000 parcels, constituting 100% of residential property and vacant lots in 120 urban neighborhoods of KCMo. Around this time, the survey was also commissioned for the urban core areas of Kansas City, Kansas, and Independence and Sugar Creek in Missouri. While it has not yet been fully replicated in KCMo, the survey continues to be applied under annual contracts with the city in selected neighborhoods, for support of strategic planning and program evaluation.

Internet publication of the parcel-level 2000 NHCS data (as a first-generation IMS prototype) provided the foundation for CityScope, which has evolved into CEI's public access neighborhood indicators data platform. Other data currently available includes tract, block group, and block level data from the 1990 and 2000 Decennial Census, monthly reported crime statistics from KCMo and KCKs Police Departments at block and neighborhood summary levels, and annual residential lending data collected in compliance with the Community Reinvestment and Home Mortgage Disclosure Acts (CRA and HMDA). The site currently records over 2000 registered users, and is scheduled for a major content and functionality upgrade in Summer 2010, including indicators derived from an extensive inventory of municipal administrative data.

In 2005, CEI began to pursue more direct engagement with urban neighborhoods. This engagement eventually led, in 2008, to formalization of a policy that had always been implicit in our operations philosophy: the Neighborhood Development Services Program (NDSP). Financed through leverage of ongoing grant and contract revenues, and drawing on the resources of our established indicator data program, the NDSP represents CEI's formal commitment to provide data-driven strategic planning support services to Kansas City urban neighborhoods, on demand and pro bono, to the limits of our capacity. Further leverage of staff capacity has been achieved through training and supervision of graduate and undergraduate student assistants in response to NDSP requests.

In Spring 2009, our commitment to working with urban neighborhoods led to a contract with the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC), funded through the City of KCMo, to provide data collection, analysis, and program evaluation services for the Green Impact Zone of Missouri (GIZMO), a project initiated by the office of 5th Missouri District Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, to concentrate ARRA stimulus funding in an urban community with demonstrable impact.