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Journal Article
Introducing, Understanding, and Using the ICI 300 Peer Cities Identification Tool
Municipalities, especially those that are mid-sized or smaller, often face significant challenges in providing services and amenities to meet the needs of their diverse and changing populations. Solutions are usually context-specific and must factor in larger demographic and economic trends, in order to be effective. And, yet, in spite of contextual differences, cities frequently have meaningful similarities. However, identifying peer cities is often informed more by conversation than by data or evidence.
Journal Article
Suburban housing collaborative: a case for interjurisdictional collaboration
More than 280 municipalities surround the city of Chicago, with more than 120 in Cook County alone. The metropolitan region?s seven counties also include 123 townships, 307 school districts, 136 fire districts, 173 park districts, and 108 library districts. (GO TO 2040 2010) In recent years, some suburban communities have recorded foreclosure rates exceeding those of the most distressed inner city neighborhoods. In other towns, home values have fallen to 1990s levels. In still others, less than 10 percent of the local workforce can afford to live near where they work. Layered over all of ...
Journal Article
Financial Well-being: At the Convergence of People and Place – Reflections from a Chicago Conversation
This brief collection of writings is based on a convening, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, to have a local conversation about financial well-being. This gathering was motivated by ?What It?s Worth,? a joint publication of the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, collecting insights from thought leaders across the country on the topic of financial capacity for families and communities.
Newsletter
Dealing with the impact of manufacturing job losses in the Midwest
The Community Development and Policy Studies division (CDPS) of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago hosted the Industrial Cities Initiative Symposium (ICI) on February 28, 2012. More than 50 economists, development professionals, city representatives, and analysts from business, academia, and city government attended the symposium.
Journal Article
Small business access to capital: alternative resources bridging the gap
Nationwide in the U.S. over the past 15 years, small businesses generated 64 percent of the net new job growth. Small businesses with fewer than 500 employees, a definition used by the Small Business Administration (SBA), represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms, and employ more than half of private sector employees in the United States. Firms with fewer than 50 employees represent 95 percent of all employer firms. Since the recession that began in late 2007, large bank lending to small businesses has fallen by more than 50 percent.
Journal Article
Measuring Small Business Financial Health
Throughout the Great Recession and continuing into the recovery, small businesses have played an important role in creating jobs and stabilizing communities. Stories of small business owners overcoming obstacles to provide valuable services and employment are highlighted regularly by pundits, politicians and policymakers alike. However, little attention has focused on the question of what drives the financial health of these often young, often very small businesses.
Journal Article
Exploring the Correlations between Health and Community Socioeconomic Status in Chicago
Much research demonstrates that where you live ? and the socioeconomic conditions present in that place ? determine individual-level health outcomes.[1] The premise that individual stressors tend to aggregate themselves into communities with poor socioeconomic status (SES) leads to the conclusion that ?where you live determines how long you live.? As former Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke stated, ?Factors such as educational attainment, income, access to healthy food and the safety of a neighborhood tend to correlate with individual health outcomes in that neighborhood.?[2] These factors ...
Journal Article
Preliminary Findings from Focus Groups on Economic Inclusion in Smaller Cities
A growing body of work by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and partners points to challenges that "legacy cities" face in extending economic opportunity to all residents. This article reports findings from a series of focus groups conducted around the 7th District to better understand what city leaders are doing to advance positive labor market outcomes for residents.
Journal Article
Industrial cities initiative: working paper summary
"Rust Belt" is an epitaph for cities large and small throughout America's midwestern and northeastern regions. It encapsulates social and economic changes: "population loss, rising crime rates, loss of union jobs particularly in manufacturing, White flights to the suburbs, and a generally declining urban environment," in which massive, but abandoned factories rusted away and scarred the landscape of once vibrant cities.
Journal Article
Mapping the recovery: sentiment survey of small Business intermediaries in Chicago
The Community Development and Policy Studies (CDPS) division of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago distributed a poll to small business intermediaries in the fourth quarter of 2012 to ask about their perceptions of small business conditions in their neighborhoods. The purpose of this poll was to get a better understanding of the small business climate in diverse neighborhoods of the city of Chicago. It was designed to capture perspectives at the neighborhood level, perspectives that are not observable in aggregated data. The results show an array of opinions about the small business climate ...