- Community development is moving beyond growth-based indicators toward multidimensional measures of well-being, but the proliferation of indices raises new questions about which outcomes align with community values.
- Applied to climate resilience, this framing reveals that prosperity and climate resilience indicators are only weakly related — and vary across space.
- Different regions face fundamentally different development sequencing problems.
Introduction
For decades, community economic development has been evaluated through a relatively narrow set of growth-based indicators—employment, income, GDP, and population change. While useful, these measures embed implicit assumptions about what “success” looks like and risk obscuring the broader set of outcomes that determine whether a place is genuinely thriving. For example, a small community with a rich agricultural history may not want to become more urban and may instead place higher values on social cohesion, self-determination, and open spaces. In response, scholars and practitioners have built a rapidly growing ecosystem of multidimensional quality-of-life and prosperity indices that aim to capture community well-being more holistically.1
These indices increasingly shape how communities are compared, funded, and supported. Yet because each emerges from a different policy and research tradition—public health, disaster management, regional development, rural sociology—they often disagree about which dimensions matter most and how to weight them. Rather than assuming a single ladder of “more” or “less” prosperous communities, this growing body of work asks a different set of questions:
- Are there multiple forms of prosperity, and what gets missed when we rely on one-size-fits-all metrics?
- Does viewing well-being through the lens of community-valued outcomes change how we develop or interpret indices?
- Can communities be thriving in different ways even when they appear “behind” on conventional rankings?
Ongoing work at Colorado State University is examining this terrain across three complementary domains. A health resilience pathways project uses longitudinal county data to identify how communities arrive at similar health outcomes through different historical trajectories—revealing that static, cross-sectional rankings can mask important persistence and path dependence. A parallel effort develops a Quality of Food System Business Environment (QFSBE) index, mapping how regulatory,
See, for example, the Rural Livability Project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which uses mixed-method approaches to better understand what makes rural places thrive. https://www.rurallivability.org/
infrastructural, and market conditions shape local food economies and communities’ value retention. The third domain, the focus of this report, examines community resilience to natural hazards.
The natural hazards case is a particularly useful proof of concept because climate risk is now a firstorder economic concern. As floods, fires, heat, and storms intensify, the question of whether a community’s apparent prosperity is durable—whether it can withstand and recover from shocks— becomes inseparable from the question of whether it is prosperous at all.
Case Study: Resilience and Prosperity at the Community Level
At a conceptual level, prosperity and resilience capture distinct but related dimensions of community well-being. Prosperity reflects baseline conditions, such as income, education, housing stability, and employment. Resilience reflects adaptive capacity—the ability of a community to withstand, respond to, and recover from shocks such as natural disasters. Critically, resilience determines the speed and completeness of recovery to ex ante prosperity levels following a hazard event that acts as a negative shock to the community. This conceptual relationship is visualized in Figure 1 below.
This analysis examines the relationship between two respected measures, the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) index and the Prosperity Pathways Index. The BRIC index is produced by the University of South Carolina Hazards, Vulnerability, and Resilience Institute, and it considers six categories of community disaster resilience: social, economic, community capital, institutional, infrastructural, and environmental.2 The Prosperity Pathways Index defines prosperity using four core indicators: education, housing, unemployment, and poverty.3
Across U.S. census tracts, the two measures are positively but only weakly correlated (r ≈ 0.31). For context, the CDC Social Vulnerability Index—a related 16-variable measure of how social and economic conditions shape hazard response capacity—is more strongly and negatively correlated with prosperity, at approximately –0.47.4 The weakness of the BRIC–prosperity correlation is substantively the more interesting finding: the common practitioner intuition that improving baseline well-being will automatically build resilience (or vice versa) is not supported in the data.
Geographically, as demonstrated in Figure 2, areas rated high in prosperity but low in resilience are concentrated in the western United States, while areas with high resilience and moderate prosperity cluster in the Midwest and Northeast. Prosperous western communities may face wildfire, drought, and water constraints, while some Midwestern communities may have lower prosperity but stronger social capital and lower hazard exposure. These patterns imply that community development practitioners focused on prosperity improvements should not assume they are also building resilience. The two objectives require deliberate, separate prioritization.
2Cutter, S.L., et al. Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC). Hazards, Vulnerability and Resilience Institute, University of South Carolina.
3Schmidt, D., Conroy, T., & Deller, S. (2025). Prosperity Pathways: A dynamic typology of community well-being.
Tradeoffs between the goals are real but not inevitable. In Vermont, for example, housing development initiatives aimed at addressing affordability have at times conflicted with flood risk realities, as expansion programs have not consistently incorporated flood-resilient design.5 Yet policies can be designed to advance both goals—for instance, by incentivizing resilient infrastructure within affordable housing programs. Understanding the nature of the tradeoff is what makes joint optimization possible.
A Typology for Setting Local Priorities
Because communities operate under resource constraints, the question for practitioners is not whether to value prosperity or resilience but how to sequence investments given local conditions. A practical way to do this is to combine each community’s resilience score with its hazard exposure, yielding four typologies (Figure 3).
4CDC/ATSDR Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 5VTDigger (2026). “Update: CHIP to build flood-ready housing in Vermont.” https://vtdigger.org/ Figure 3. Community typologies by resilience score and hazard exposure.
Resilience-imperative communities—low resilience, high exposure—face the strongest case for nearterm resilience investment, since repeated disaster events threaten to erode the prosperity base itself. Prosperity-as-priority communities can reasonably emphasize well-being investments in the near term while extending resilience-building over a longer horizon. The remaining quadrants suggest different sequencing strategies that fit local conditions.
These typologies are not prescriptive rankings; they are a framework for tailoring development strategies to the typology, hazard profile, and values of a place. They offer an on-ramp for community conversations about development that move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach—which is precisely the broader contribution that multidimensional well-being measures are designed to enable. Because results are so place-specific, this is also a natural fit for Extension-style delivery, where local context is essential to translating measures into action. For Extension professionals, these tools provide a framework for helping communities identify locally valued outcomes and align development strategies with local priorities.
Conclusion
The proliferation of prosperity and quality-of-life indices reflects a real and overdue shift away from prescriptive rankings and toward a broader understanding of community well-being. The multiplicity of indices is not a problem to be resolved by collapsing them into a single number; it is a feature that allows different communities to be assessed against the outcomes they value and the challenges they face. The climate resilience case study illustrates this concretely: prosperity and resilience are both real, both measurable, and only weakly related. Treating them as substitutes—or assuming one delivers the other—obscures the choices communities must make. The central lesson is not that one index is better than another, but that communities may follow different pathways to success depending on their priorities and circumstances. As climate risks, demographic change, and economic restructuring reshape local economies, the future of community development will depend less on identifying a single definition of success and more on understanding the multiple ways communities can thrive. Measuring well-being across multiple dimensions is therefore essential for effective place-based policies that reflect local priorities and conditions.