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Briefing
Recent Trends in Residential Segregation in New England
Residential segregation in Boston has drawn considerable attention in recent years, but much less notice has been given to the issue with respect to the rest of New England. This regional brief focuses on residential segregation between all minority groups and non-Hispanic white residents in metro areas throughout the region. New England’s population is predominately non-Hispanic white; however, the region has diversified considerably since 1990, as most of the population growth has occurred among minority groups. Residential segregation by race/ethnicity declined over that same period in ...
Briefing
Declining access to health care in northern New England
Access to health care is a major concern across the northern New England states?Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont?where rising operating costs and population loss threaten the stability of hospitals and other medical facilities that serve their surrounding rural communities. New analysis of financial data shows that many rural hospitals are operating at losses that are predictive of financial distress or even closure. Consequently, the communities served by these hospitals may be at risk of losing the benefits they provide to public health and the local economy. Addressing the financial ...
Briefing
College Towns and COVID-19: The Impact on New England
The abrupt closing of college campuses this spring due to the spread of COVID-19 upended the lives of students and their families and disrupted the higher education sector. The impact of these closures and the questions of whether and how to reopen campuses this fall have been widely discussed. Less attention has been paid to the potential consequences for the local economies of the cities and towns that depend heavily on higher education. This issue is particularly important in New England, where in many communities, colleges and universities are among the largest employers and make an ...
Report
Reforming Connecticut’s Education Aid Formula to Achieve Equity and Adequacy across School Districts
Connecticut’s public K–12 education system relies heavily on local funding, resulting in substantial disparities between affluent districts and low-income districts with a large proportion of socioeconomically disadvantaged students whoare more costly to educate. Despite recent improvements, the existing state aid formula has been criticized for failing to provide sufficient funding to districts with the fewest resources and the highest education costs. To help improve state aiddistribution, this report estimates a “cost-capacity gap,” which measures the difference between a ...
Report
The growing shortage of affordable housing for the extremely low income in Massachusetts
This report identifies ways that the state?s policymakers and housing agencies and providers can more efficiently use limited resources to address the affordable housing needs of extremely low-income households. The first is to prioritize rental assistance in areas of the state where rents are low and the inventory of market-supplied housing is high. Doing so will take advantage of local market conditions that are favorable to rental-assistance subsidies while addressing these areas? high rates of rent burden. Tax-credit and other supply-oriented subsidies can be targeted more heavily to ...
Report
Exploring causes of and responses to the opioid epidemic in New England
The opioid epidemic remains rampant in New England, where, from 2015 through 2017, more than 10,000 people died from opioid overdoses. In 2017, each of the six states experienced an overdose-death rate that was greater than the national average. Beyond causing a high number of deaths, the opioid epidemic is costing New England productive workers. People with the most severe problems stemming from opioid-use disorder tend to be in the 25?44 age group, but no one is immune. The epidemic affects people of every type?all ages and all races, men and women, residents of rural areas and of urban ...
Report
Racial and Socioeconomic Test-Score Gaps in New England Metropolitan Areas: State School Aid and Poverty Segregation
Test-score data show that both low-income and racial-minority children score lower, on average, on states’ elementary-school accountability tests compared with higher-income children or white children. While different levels of scholastic achievement depend on a host of influences, such test-score gaps point toward unequal educational opportunity as a potentially important contributor. This report explores the relationship between racial and socioeconomic test-score gaps in New England metropolitan areas and two factors associated with unequal opportunity in education: state equalizing ...
Report
The supply of permanent supportive housing in Massachusetts: comparing availability to the chronic homeless population
Permanent supportive housing (PSH) has become an important resource for Massachusetts service providers working to address chronic homelessness in the state. Nationally, and in the Commonwealth, the number of PSH beds available for homeless individuals and families now exceeds the amount of emergency shelter beds and other, non-permanent, housing options. While PSH is acknowledged as an important tool, there has been little research into the inventory level needed to effectively house the state?s current chronic homeless population, and what, if any, local shortages exist. This report uses ...
Report
Forecasting the New England States’ Tax Revenues in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic
State governments across the United States face the prospect of sharply declining tax revenues due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They need reliable and up-to-date revenue forecasts to make financially sound policy decisions during this public health and economic crisis. This paper proposes an objective, transparent, simple, and efficient method to forecast state tax revenues in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The model is based on only two input factors: the state unemployment rate and an empirically determined time trend. The predictions from the model closely track the actual values of tax ...
Briefing
Rental Affordability and COVID-19 in Rural New England
Although a shortage of affordable rental housing is often framed as an urban-area issue, rural communities also suffer from this problem. On average, rural and urban renters spend similar shares of their income on rent and have comparable rates of housing-cost burden. Years of slow income growth and skyrocketing rents, particularly during the 2000–2010 period, have eroded slack in household budgets that may have gone toward other expenses or toward savings. The coronavirus pandemic likely has exacerbated affordability problems by putting many rural residents out of work. The share of jobs ...