State of the Field: Orthodox Presbyterian Church

The directory, and what joined

The directory export carries 338 rows and arrived geocoded to 2020 tracts. 334 landed on a scored tract. The four that did not are in Puerto Rico, which the church-fit index does not cover.

The 334 occupy 331 distinct tracts. Three tracts hold two congregations; none holds more. This is the least clustered roster in the series, which section 3 explains.

Where the churches are

Forty-four states hold a congregation, the widest spread of the three reformed rosters relative to size. No state holds more than an eighth of the denomination.

The largest county holds nine churches. The OPC is thinly spread across a wide map, and the presbytery table in section 14 is where that spread turns into differences that matter.

Access

The OPC stands on the best-served ground of any roster in the series. Its share of tracts in the two worst access tiers is 8.2 percent against a national 20.3, less than half. The Arid tier alone is 7.9 percent against 18.9. Church density is modest, 8.5 per tract, the lowest of the four rosters, and the OPC is the only one whose modal tract holds between two and ten other churches rather than more.

Settlement type, built form and viability

Fourteen points more suburban than the country and a quarter as rural: four rural tracts in the whole denomination. Sparse-urban presence is at the national rate, which sets the OPC apart from the ARP.

Viability is the highest of the four rosters after the PCA, and the OPC has the most neighborhood tissue and the least fragmented fabric of any of them. It stands in well-connected, well-served places.

Need pressure and the eight domains

Seven of eight domains sit below the nation, five of them by six points or more. Family stability, health, economic opportunity and the environment domain all sit seven to nine points under. The one exception is housing stability, three points above, which the field signals in section 9 corroborate from another direction: the OPC's neighborhoods are comfortable on most measures and strained on housing.

Shalom, level and change

Five points above the nation on wellbeing, six on living and hope, and falling at less than half the national rate. The OPC's ground is the best-off in the series on this layer and it is holding better than the country's.

The three clocks

The long-baseline clock puts the OPC exactly on the nation. The four-vintage clock does not: the access score under OPC tracts has risen at 0.075 a year, fifteen times the national rate, for half a point across the four vintages. That is the largest access drift on any roster in the series, and it runs in the direction of less access. On ground that starts at 46.1 it is a drift from very well served toward well served, and it is consistent with suburbs whose population outgrows their church count. The two clocks disagree because they measure different things: GIM v3 reads Shalom over twelve windows, the trajectory reads the access score over four. Both are reported; neither is overruled.

Households: thirty segments

Weighted by full composition and by household count. Lift is the OPC share divided by the national share.

Six of the thirty segments have no OPC presence at all: Car-Oriented Working Gateway Families, Multifamily First-Timers, Affluent Transit-City Creatives, Logistics-Corridor Homeowners, Transit-Dependent Gateway Households and Bus-Dependent Renters. Together those six are 8.9 percent of American households. Every gateway type is under half the national share or absent. At the top, Affluent Mature Owner Couples at 1.87x and Affluent Owner Family Suburbs at 1.63x are the two strongest lifts, and the OPC is the only roster in the series over-indexed on both.

Chronic-health burden is flagged on 4.5 percent of OPC tracts against 12.8 nationally, a third of the rate and the lowest in the series. Renter cost pressure is the one modifier of hardship that runs above the nation, and it agrees with housing stability being the one alignment domain above 50.

Field signals

Scored on 198 of the 331 tracts, 59.8 percent. Every share below is of those 198.

The coolest signal profile in the series: hot tracts at under half the national rate, watch tracts at 84 percent. The one flag that runs hot is housing pressure, at 71.2 percent against 53.7. Three separate layers now say the same thing about OPC ground, that it is comfortable on every measure but the cost of living in it.

Twenty-four neighborhood patterns

Share of tracts where the pattern is unhealthy. Ten risk-named patterns are swapped before counting and marked.

The largest departure on any pattern for any roster: mosaic of subcultures is unhealthy in 71.3 percent of OPC tracts against 61.5 nationally, ten points worse. The OPC's neighborhoods are more uniform than the country's. The public fabric otherwise runs healthier than the nation, with community fragmentation eight points better, neighborhood tissue six, small public squares six and civic anchors five. Well-kept, well-connected and homogeneous.

Situation tags

Resolved on 318 of 331 tracts, 96.1 percent.

Daytime isolation is raised on OPC tracts at a third of the national rate, majority-minority at 37 percent of it, and both are the lowest in the series. Housing fragility is the one hardship tag above the nation, at 1.16. That is the fourth layer to point at housing.

The nearest churchless high-need tract

The opening frontier

Two congregations. The section stops there. The two figures that carry are the rate, 0.6 percent, the lowest of the four rosters, and the mirror ratio of 3.5 to 1, the highest. Section 4 already said why: the OPC's modal posture is Strengthen, viable ground that is already reached, and the frontier is by definition not that.