The Joplin city council will hold a special work session tonight to review the 2021 Comprehensive Housing Market Analysis. KRPS’s Fred Fletcher-Fierro has more.

The 82-page report available on the city’s website at joplinmo.org goes into great detail about both the current housing trends in Joplin, but also what the future of housing could look like. The report was prepared by Urban Partners of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and breaks down residents of Joplin into five categories based on what the company calls LifeMode Groups. Resident clusters include, ‘Salt of the Earth’, ‘Midlife Constants’ and ‘Old and Newcomers’.

The research works to understand information such as the average age and sex of residents, their median household incoming and net worth, and the interests of the city’s population and how that could affect their housing decisions. The report also compares Joplin to similarly sized communities such as Valparaiso, Indiana, Bryan, Texas, and Schenectady, New York, and provides recommendations with how those cities worked with developers and home builders to revitalize their downtown to make it more liveable. The work session tonight at Joplin City Council starts at 5:45. For 89 9 KRPS, I’m Fred Fletcher-Fierro