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Working Paper
Housing Market Interventions and Residential Mobility in the San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area is an extreme case of a constrained housing market, with job growth outpacing new housing production and resulting in supply shortages and price spikes that date back at least 30 years. The Bay Area’s structural shortage of housing that is affordable at all income levels affects the regional economy by increasing commuting and housing costs, which creates barriers to full economic participation, especially for lower income workers. An array of solutions have been considered, including subsidized housing production, affordable housing preservation, and tenant ...
Journal Article
Fintech, Racial Equity, and an Inclusive Financial System
This issue of the Community Development Innovation Review examines the promise and pitfalls of financial technology, or fintech, for fostering racial equity and greater financial inclusion. Edited in partnership with the SF Fed’s Fintech Team and Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program, this issue brings together a broad set of voices from people working in various roles—including in technology, community development, economic inclusion, regulation, and investment—to contextualize gaps in the financial system and consider ways to address them. The authors examine dimensions of ...
Journal Article
At What Cost? Student Loan Debt in the Bay Area
For most Americans, an investment in higher education is a key driver of economic security and mobility. However, rapidly rising costs of attendance, combined with stagnant wages and inadequate support systems for vulnerable borrowers have resulted in outcomes that are at odds with our collective vision of higher education as a crucial foundation for achieving the American Dream. This report highlights the local contours of this issue in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area region, particularly for low-income communities and communities of color, using Federal Reserve Bank of New York ...
Journal Article
Child Care, COVID-19, and our Economic Future
Child care is important for cultivating the future workforce, and it also ensures that working parents of today can participate in the economy, helping to achieve the Federal Reserve’s mandate for full employment. While child care in the U.S. is a piece of critical infrastructure, it is often invisible and undervalued. Straddling the lines between parenting, education, and small business, child care does not get the full attention and resources of any particular domain, and its contribution to the economy has been overlooked.Longstanding and widespread constraints in the child care sector ...
Journal Article
What are Banks Doing to Address the Impacts of COVID-19 on LMI Communities? Early Approaches to Addressing the Crisis
Lessons from history show that those who are most disadvantaged before a disaster are likely to be most vulnerable during a disaster as well as on the road to recovery. As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, we are witnessing heavy impacts on low- and moderate-income communities as small businesses shutter, workers are laid off, and more and more households find themselves in unexpected financial circumstances. Low-income individuals and households are more vulnerable to illness and potential economic disruption for a variety of reasons, including lower availability of paid sick leave ...
Journal Article
Housing Stability and Family Health: An Issue Brief
Soaring housing costs are the topic of many recent discussions in the San Francisco Bay Area, but receiving less attention are the implications of high cost housing on the health and well-being of families who are expecting or who have young children. This research brief presents a snapshot of housing instability for families with children in the Bay Area. It synthesizes a growing body of literature to reveal how housing instability during pregnancy and early childhood has particularly negative long-term consequences, while also highlighting promising ways to support housing stability. ...
Journal Article
Impacts of COVID-19 on Nonprofits in the Western United States
Nonprofit organizations play an important role in the response to COVID-19, but the crisis is straining their ability to serve communities. This report summarizes data from a Federal Reserve survey to assess the impact of the pandemic on nonprofit respondents and the communities they serve in the Western United States.
Working Paper
Neighborhood Change and Residential Instability in Oakland
Affordable housing is critical to ensuring healthy and resilient communities and broad access to economic opportunity. In this report, we examine neighborhood change and residential instability in the City of Oakland over the past two decades. We employ multiple data sources, including individual-level data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax data. We analyze historical and contemporary data to understand patterns of residential instability, and we identify which residents and areas are most likely to experience heightened challenges in the context of the ...
Journal Article
On the Sidelines of the Hot Economy
While the current economy is often characterized as ?hot,? marked by low unemployment, stable prices, and sustained economic growth, many residents are not enjoying the prosperity reflected in the aggregate measures of economic well-being. This report focuses on those who have not reaped the benefits of recent sustained growth in the economy. The report highlights groups who have faced barriers to economic participation and documents interrelated rising costs?particularly for housing, transportation, and childcare?that contribute to keeping people on the sidelines of the economy.