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Discussion Paper
Can Community Development Improve Health? Emerging Opportunities for Collaboration between the Health and Community Development Sectors
The two sectors of community development and health have long worked in the same neighborhoods, but they have not always worked together. This is starting to change, due in part to a growing recognition among health experts of the social, economic, and environmental factors that drive health outcomes. These social determinants of health have become the basis for new collaborations between community development and health professionals. This paper introduces professionals in both sectors to this emerging area of practice through a series of case studies of innovators in the southeastern United ...
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 pro-local 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 to all ...
Discussion Paper
Developing Inclusive Communities: Challenges and Opportunities for Mixed-Income Housing
Over the past decade, housing costs have risen faster than incomes. The need for affordable rental housing has well outpaced the number of available units as well as funding allocations at the federal level. Local regulation and land use policies that increase the cost of subsidized, mixed-income housing construction and preservation have contributed to the affordability problem. {{p}} To meet the affordable housing needs in U.S. communities, innovation, creativity, and "out of the box" thinking may be required, particularly as it relates to reducing the rapidly increasing costs of ...
Discussion Paper
Benefits Cliffs and the Financial Incentives for Career Advancement: A Case Study of the Health Care Services Career Pathway
Benefits cliffs, which occur when earnings gains are offset by the loss of public benefits, have long been recognized to create financial disincentives for low-income individuals to earn more income. In this paper, the authors develop a new methodology to study benefits cliffs in the context of career advancement. The authors illustrate the change in net financial resources for an individual pursuing the health care services career pathway from certified nursing assistant (CNA) to licensed practical nurse (LPN) to registered nurse (RN). Accounting for increases in taxes and the loss of public ...
Discussion Paper
Declines in Low-Cost Rented Housing Units in Eight Large Southeastern Cities
From the last quarter of 2012 to the last quarter of 2015, median rents rose 23.4 percent in the South, according to the Census Bureau. Accordingly, an increasing number of households in the South are cost-burdened, which is defined as a household spending more than 30 percent of its income on housing. A growing number of households spend over 50 percent of their income on rent, making them severely cost-burdened. The percentage of such severely cost-burdened households with incomes below $35,000 reached 80 percent in 2014 in eight central cities in the Southeast (Atlanta, Birmingham, ...
Discussion Paper
Community response to the foreclosure crisis: thoughts on local interventions
In the wake of the ongoing national mortgage crisis, preventing or mitigating foreclosures and facilitating recovery from the damage they cause have become tremendous challenges for community developers, policymakers, and a wide variety of other actors in cities and metropolitan areas. ; The purpose of this paper is to lay out the range of responses to the foreclosure crisis in which local organizations have been engaged in recent years. It is not intended to be a catalogue of best practices. Rather, it uses examples of strategies and programs only for illustrative, explanatory purposes. ...
Discussion Paper
The financing experiences of nonemployer firms: evidence from the 2014 joint small business credit survey
Businesses without employees?or nonemployer firms?make up the majority of small businesses in the United States, but little is known about their financial lives, including their business financing needs and experiences. In this paper, we discuss findings from data on nonemployer firms in the 2014 Joint Small Business Credit Survey, a new annual survey by the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia. Our results indicate that nonemployers use financing less than employers do. They hold less debt and apply for financing at lower rates, even when controlling for ...
Discussion Paper
Restructuring the Eligibility Policies of the Child Care and Development Fund to Address Benefit Cliffs and Affordability: Florida as a Case Study
This paper explores how the current eligibility policies of the federal Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) create benefits cliffs that act as barriers to economic self-sufficiency. By examining Florida data and policies, the authors demonstrate how the program’s existing co-payment schedule affects the same hypothetical family living in two contrasting Florida counties: one with state median living costs and one with high living costs. The authors find that the CCDF income eligibility exit threshold is too low, particularly in high-cost counties. That occurs because the exit threshold ...
Discussion Paper
Intrametropolitan patterns of foreclosed homes: ZIP-code-level distributions of real-estate-owned (REO) properties during the U.S. mortgage crisis
During the mortgage crisis, community developers, policymakers, and others have become increasingly concerned about the extent to which lender-owned homes, often called real-estate-owned or ?REO? properties, have accumulated in their neighborhoods and communities. REO properties are usually vacant and, especially when geographically concentrated, can have destabilizing impacts on neighborhoods and communities. However, due to data challenges, little systematic research has been done on the intrametropolitan distributions of such properties, especially across different metropolitan regions. ...
Discussion Paper
The accumulation of foreclosed properties: trajectories of metropolitan REO inventories during the 2007–2008 mortgage crisis
A key concern among policymakers and community developers during the ongoing mortgage crisis has been the extent to which lender-owned homes, often called real-estate-owned or ?REO? properties, have been accumulating in different local housing markets. This paper describes the accumulation of REO properties in metropolitan areas across the United States from August 2006 to August 2008. I examine the differences in both changes and static levels of REO activity across metro areas and compare changes in REO levels to changes in home values over the same period. Special attention is paid to a ...