For those of you challenged in the art of reading comprehension, let me pull out this quote for you (bolding added by me):
Quote:
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"Or simply put, children who grow up in walkable communities fare better economically, controlling for a wide range of economic factors as well as the related characteristics of those neighborhoods."
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I've have an anecdote-based opinion that "city kids" are more social and better talkers than non-city-kids. My concept of "city kid" is roughly analogous to being raised in a walkable area, even though in the referenced study they tried to control for whether it was urbanity or walkability that mattered. And the two biggest determinants for income, other than education, are math skills and "soft skills," which include being able to talk to people easily and be generally social. Math gets you into engineering, finance, and, to a lesser extent, medicine, and soft skills get you into leadership and sales. Notice that every category I listed is a high-earner category. If you want relative assurance that your career will pay you well, go in to finance, management, engineering, sales, or medicine. And the lawyers who earn the most are the ones who can bring in business - and bringing in business requires social skills.
I will agree that there are challenges using WalkScore stats to measure walkability, but proximity to amenities, the primary feeder into WalkScores, is a decent proxy for walkability, even if it's not a perfect corollary. I doubt there is a perfect corollary, but WalkScore and proximity are decent.