Search Results
Journal Article
Transportation Is a Necessary Component of Housing Equity
Those working in redevelopment have undoubtedly heard about transit-oriented development (TOD). In TOD, transit lines are the backbone of individual projects or entire centers built around a station area. TOD can reduce automobile dependency and make a community more amenable to walking and biking. More recently, equitable TOD (ETOD) has been advocated in response to the gentrification pressures that modern TODs often introduce, displacing the very people most reliant on transit out of the station area. Transportation equity is a relatively new concept to the affordable housing community. The ...
Journal Article
The Roadmap to Financial Resilience is About the Journey
Twelve months is more than a year particularly in Chicago. Twelve months is winter ? often with a relentlessly capital W, spring, summer, and fall. It's lazy summer days to school days to skyrocketing heating bills. It?s the seasonality of work intertwined with the seasonality of life, not just in terms of changes in temperature, but in terms of expenses that ebb and flow over the course of time. For all these reasons, discussions about capacity ? whether employment or financial ? must be in the context of an entire year, because we believe that timeline to be the best proxy for the practice ...
Journal Article
District Digest: Who's in Need?
Both governments and community-based organizations administer means-tested programs that serve populations in financial need. Some programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Housing Choice Vouchers, provide immediate access to necessary resources. Others, such as Pell Grants, provide resources so beneficiaries can access opportunities that will improve their long-term earning potential.
Journal Article
The Future of Fair Housing: Interview with Philip Tegeler
The Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) is leading efforts to advance federal policy on fair housing and is working ?to promote innovative, research-based advocacy strategies to address structural inequality and disrupt the systems that disadvantage low-income people of color.?1 Philip Tegeler, the president and executive director of PRRAC, contributed his insights on the current state of fair housing 50 years after the landmark Fair Housing Act during a recent Philadelphia Fed Research Symposium. Cascade sat down with Tegeler to learn more.
Journal Article
Gentrification: Research and Practitioner Perspectives
In urban areas across the United States, the demand for housing in center-city, amenity-rich neighborhoods is increasing, driven by young, college-educated, predominantly white residents. Those with higher incomes are able to outbid low-income residents, which may lead to voluntary and involuntary displacement of these households. In low-income, center-city neighborhoods, this is particularly troubling, as these neighborhoods offer greater access to public transportation, social services, employment centers, and social networks. Displacement could force vulnerable households into less ...
Journal Article
Spotlight on Research: Innovative Ways to Build Savings and Wealth of Low-Income Families
The recent great recession took its financial toll on many families. Some who lost a portion of their wealth continue to struggle to find a foothold in the economy, while others have managed to regain their lost wealth. Some of the other sources of the financial instability that beset families have been attributed to the challenges associated with being a single-parent family, the volatility and fragility of income shocks, and the shredding of some safety nets. Ray Boshara, director of the Center for Household Financial Stability and assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. ...
Journal Article
Market Failure and Community Economic Development in the US
This article explores the "political economy of community development" in the United States, with historical context on market failures. The authors, for the purposes of this article, also explore lending patterns in the Seventh Federal Reserve District.
Discussion Paper
Locally Owned: Do Local Business Ownership and Size Matter for Local Economic Well-being?
The concept of “economic gardening”—supporting locally owned businesses over nonlocally owned businesses and small businesses over large ones—has gained traction as a means of economic development since the 1980s. However, there is no definitive evidence for or against this prolocal business view. Therefore, I am using a rich U.S. county-level data set to obtain a statistical characterization of the relationship between local-based entrepreneurship and county economic performance for the period 2000–2009. I investigate the importance of the size of locally based businesses relative ...
Journal Article
CDFIs: What’s in a Name?
The Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund in the U.S. Department of the Treasury has certified more than 1,000 organizations as CDFIs in accordance with the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Act of 1994.1 This year, the CDFI Fund will determine which of these CDFIs it will recertify. Although this work is extremely timely, it is also time-consuming.
Report
Inequality Within Countries is Falling: Underreporting Robust Estimates of World Poverty, Inequality, and the Global Distribution of Income
Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey income, which is closely related to the elasticity of underreporting with respect to income. We find this elasticity to be substantial but roughly constant over time, implying a large but relatively constant correction to survey-derived inequality estimates. Underreporting of income by the bottom 50 ...