Constructing a Community-Level Amenity Index

The study of amenity-driven regional change has proliferated in recent years, especially in the American West. While methods of quantifying amenity levels have progressed, they usually rely on traditional and inflexible methods of creating indices. This research note describes a method of manual indexing that allows a flexible and replicable way of assessing amenity levels for various geographic scales and research contexts. We apply this method to nine amenity-based communities in Colorado and direct researchers to resources for exploring alterations for other applications. Results show that the method permits ranking and grouping communities according to relative amenity levels.