Why I Published the Veteran Livability Index

If you ask the average federal dashboard how veterans are doing, it answers at the state line. Veteran unemployment by state. Veteran population by state. State medians, state averages, state aggregates. The veteran in a rural county does not see the same labor market, the same housing cost, or the same VA access as the veteran in the state capital — and yet the standard reporting averages both into a single number. That single number then becomes the basis for a press release, a policy brief, an employer talking point, or a relocation decision.

Aggregation at the state line is not malice. It is what the federal data series support. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish a county-level veteran unemployment series because the survey sample size cannot bear the resolution. The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes Regional Price Parities by state and metro area, not by county. These are honest constraints, and a careful analyst respects them.

What was missing was a tool that took every federal source that does publish at the county grain — primarily Census ACS — and put the county view on a map a veteran could actually use. Not a research artifact. Not a methodological showpiece. A decision aid. That is the gap the Veteran Livability Index now fills on this site.

What the tool is

The VLI is an interactive county-level map of all 3,222 U.S. counties. Six metric overlays: a livability composite, the BLS state-level vet unemployment rate, the BEA cost-of-living index, the real (purchasing-power) value of the 2026 VA disability compensation rate, median home value, and the veteran share of the adult population. A drill-down moves from the national choropleth to a state's counties, then to a single county profile. A built-in calculator translates the national VA disability schedule into a local figure using the state-level Regional Price Parity.

The tool is not an officially sanctioned federal index. The composite livability score is a transparent z-score blend of five components, fully disclosed inside the methodology panel and in the audit workbook. Anyone replicating the build can reproduce the score from the published source data. That disclosure is the point. A heuristic decision aid that names its assumptions is more useful, and more honest, than a black-box ranking.

How this got published

I should be direct about credit. The underlying tool ships as the CVAI-VLI 2026.5 bundle — the data assembly, the SVG geometry, the composite score, and the interactive layer were built upstream and released to the public domain. My work on this is the editorial wrap: deciding the tool belonged on the Foundation's surface, framing it for veterans rather than for analysts, writing the wrapper page in this site's voice, integrating it cleanly with the rest of the analytics portfolio, and publishing it with the audit workbook so the methodology is verifiable.

I am the publisher of record on this surface, not the original engineer. That distinction matters because the work that is mine — the editorial framing, the integration discipline, the publishing posture — is the work I want to be judged on. The work that is not mine deserves its own attribution, which the methodology panel inside the tool provides.

What the tool does well

The first thing it does well is move the resolution of the conversation. A veteran weighing two counties for relocation no longer needs to assemble seven federal sources by hand. A veterans-services office building a county profile no longer has to translate state averages into local approximations. The local picture is one click deep.

The second thing it does well is the VA disability calculator. The federal compensation rate is national. Its purchasing power is not. The calculator returns the local real value after Regional Price Parity adjustment, which is the number that actually matters when modeling a fixed-income move. It is a small feature with outsized practical use.

The third is the publishing posture. No signup. No tracking. No analytics on the standalone version. The full audit workbook downloads as a single Excel file. The data is federal public domain. Anyone can verify, fork, or extend it.

What the tool cannot do

Two structural limitations are worth stating plainly.

The first is proxy inheritance. Two of the six overlays — veteran unemployment and cost of living — are state values applied to all counties in the state, because the federal series does not publish at the county grain. Every inheritance is labeled in the tool, and the wrapper page names the limitation upfront. But it means the most marketable claim — "county resolution" — is fully true for the four ACS-sourced metrics and only nominally true for the other two. A veteran comparing two rural counties in the same state will see identical RPP and unemployment numbers. That is the honest read.

The second is vintage drift. The current data is 2023 ACS, 2025 BLS, 2026 VA schedule, shipped May 2026. Census ACS releases new five-year estimates every December. A tool that does not refresh on schedule ages quietly and starts to mislead. Refreshing the underlying data is straightforward; staying on the calendar is the actual discipline.

What I want from you

The tool is built to be used and critiqued, not admired. If you find a number that looks wrong, an inheritance flag that needs better wording, a use case the layout does not support, or a county profile that misrepresents the place you actually live in — tell me. The next vintage will be better for it. Foundations and decision tools earn their credibility by being correctable in public.

The tool is at patrickneilbradley.com/veteran-livability-index.html. The full audit workbook is linked from the page. Feedback goes to patrick@patrickneilbradley.com or through the contact form.