We were very pleased with David O'Reilly's coverage of our pilot "Economic Halo" research project highlighting the significant positive impact congregations have on Philadelphia's economy ("What's a church worth?" Tuesday).
To clarify one point, however, regarding an apparent negative value for the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany: This is due to our use of "rough" census tract data in comparing housing values around a congregation with housing values in neighboring census tracts. We note in the report that this methodology does not allow us to draw firm conclusions for this factor, and will be modified in future studies. Put differently, the negative score is the result of a counting error.
