Study: Torrance County among best places to raise kids in NM (Don't tell Redford)

A new study from Harvard University says an Albuquerque resident hoping for a better economic future for her children should leave for Torrance County. Now. Torrance County, population 15,611, where the major communities are Moriarty, Estancia and Mountainair. Torrance County, where agriculture is the dominant industry and, according to the Mid-Region Council of Governments, Sandia Tobacco and Tagawa Greenhouses are the major private employers. Torrance County, which with a poverty rate of 28.6 percent is significantly more impoverished than Bernalillo County, where the poverty rate is 18 percent. Torrance County, with a median household income of $31,161 a year, compared with Bernalillo County’s $48,801. That Torrance County. Economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren report that a child in a poor family who grows up in Torrance County will earn 7 percent more than the average American child growing up in a poor family by the time he is 26 years old. A similar child growing up in Bernalillo County will earn 8 percent less. Chetty and Hendren found that 87 percent of the 2,478 counties they studied offer a child better economic mobility than does Bernalillo County. Torrance County is better than 68 percent of the other counties. The sooner you move to Torrance County, the better. Chetty and Hendren found that “every extra year a child spends in a better environment, as measured by the outcomes of children already living in that area,” improves his economic future. The reason, they say, is that a child’s economic mobility – the ability to move up the ladder from a disadvantaged beginning – improves if he grows up in a place that, compared with the average community, has less racial and income segregation, lower levels of income inequality, better schools, less violent crime and more two-parent households...more

Please don't show this study to Robert Redford, as he is much too busy addressing the elite in Santa Fe and proposing policies that hurt people in Torrance County.  Luckily, fewer people are dancing to the dark and cloudy tunes spun by the Sundance Kid.