Equinox Center

Regional Dashboard

Population: We used population numbers from the State of California Department of Finance’s E-1 report to calculate per capita numbers in this report, unless otherwise noted.

Clean Jobs: CONNECT data includes only high-tech environmental companies and jobs. We acknowledge that the data provides a limited picture of clean jobs in the region because it does not include other low-tech or affiliated environmental jobs, including installers, construction, sales reps or other jobs that could be considered clean economy jobs as well.

Employment: Employment and working age population numbers only include civilian employees. Civilians aged 16 to 64 are considered “persons of working age”.

Energy - Renewable:
- Data is of SDG&E’s March, 2012 reports to the PUC. Although SDG&E typically files reports two times per year, once in March and once in August, August 2012 reports were unavailable at time of Dashboard printing.
- Totals for kilowatts of solar installed per 100 residents do not include New Solar Homes Partnership (NSHP) installs or SDG&E “Smart Community” owned systems.

Housing Affordability:
- The “Percent of Households That Can Afford to Buy a Median Priced Home Chart” uses an average of Q1 and Q2 2012 figures as full year figures were not available before the Dashboard went to publication.
- For the “Designated Affordable Housing Units by Jurisdiction” chart, we calculated the population that could actually qualify for affordable housing instead of using a simple per capita figure. SANDAG data was used to find the median household income (adjusted for inflation) for each jurisdiction and then we summed the number of households whose incomes (also adjusted for inflation) fell at or below this value. In cases where the median household income fell within a range whose minimum value was below the median household income but maximum value was above the median household income, the entire number of households within that range was counted. Unfortunately, without knowing the exact income of each household, there is no way to overcome this problem.

Land Use - Parks Access: We used a more complete land use data set for our Parks Access map this year, and SANDAG 2012 annual income estimates (based on an average of 2006-2010 income estimates) instead of American Community Survey data as SANDAG estimates will be updated on a more regular basis going forward. Unfortunately this means we were unable to compare previous year’s data with this year’s.

Land Use - Residential Development: There is a large jump this year in the acreage used for residential development, largely due to an adjustment SANDAG made in its data to reflect Census 2010 housing unit counts. The Census revealed there were about 10,000 more housing units than SANDAG’s counts.
Water Consumption: The Municipal and Industrial (M&I) water use data does not include recycled or certified agricultural water usage. Some district customers use non-certified water for agriculture which may increase a district’s M&I usage. On this indicator, per capita population numbers were calculated by the water districts. In some cases, water districts have not yet updated their population numbers to reflect the most recent census data, which could make consumption numbers appear higher or lower than they actually were for the current year.

Water Quality: The beach closures and advisories data includes all closures and advisories for all coastal San Diego County jurisdictions, except for rain advisories that affected all beaches equally. Events that occurred at the border of multiple jurisdictions were only counted once. In a very few cases, data we received from the County did not include the distance of beaches closed, so we assumed the closure covered 0.057 beach miles, as directed by San Diego County Department of Environmental Health.

Actions for policy makers, conscientious residents and businesses were derived from Equinox Center research, using academic sources, case studies or interviews with regional or national experts.