Economic and Demographic Changes for Bloomington, Indiana
Small businesses account for roughly 50 percent of Bloomington’s employers, and with large-scale manufacturing, construction, and retail declining, that number is likely to grow. Small businesses employ more than 35,000 workers in Bloomington. Nationwide, 44 percent of small businesses reported difficulties securing financing for expansion; that number is almost certainly greater in a small city like Bloomington. More than half of Bloomingtonians are income-dependent on the health of a small business; therefore, the health of the city depends on the collective welfare of small business.
Monroe County has the highest average housing cost in Indiana, based on the percentage of residents’ income dedicated to housing. From 2011-13, there were 14 affordable and available units for every 100 extremely low-income (under 60% of annual household median income) renter. All 166,000+ people in the Bloomington Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) depend on some combination of small business, housing, and social services for vulnerable populations.
In the chart below "PUMS" stands for Public Use Microdata Sample. PUMS files are a set of untabulated records about individual people or housing units.
Information in the above visualizations was collected as a part of the American Community Survey and visualized by Data.io.