Colleen Heflin, Kathleen Miller; Project supported by the Kresge Foundation

The delivery of human services in America is undergoing a fundamental restructuring. The Great Recession has created a historically high level of need for social services that has strained the existing infrastructure. At the same time, state and federal budget deficits have resulted in deep cuts to basic programs. As a consequence of this tension in both the supply and demand for human services, technological innovation has transformed the ways in which the public applies for and receives social services.  Given these changes, it is of critical importance to generate tools that can help direct financial resources to targeted areas of human service need.

Fortunately, the need for tools coincides with the first time release of American Community Survey five year average county-level data by the U.S. Census Bureau in December 2010.  Prior to this, data was only available for counties with populations above certain population thresholds[1].  Currently, however, data are available for each county in the United States, allowing for a comprehensive examination of human services need across the country.

This brief begins by describing the conceptual framework for existing place-based typologies and our rationale for creating a new typology built upon a human service needs profile. We then detail our data and methods for our typology, including a discussion of the relative trade-offs in using different geographic units of analysis. We show the results of our typology both for the nation as a whole and by metropolitan county status.  We document how human service needs differ significantly, in both the degree of need as well as the types of needs, in metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties.   Finally, we illustrate how this framework can be used to target human service needs in geographic regions of the country.