Workforce development, long thought to be the purview of community colleges and other vocational programs increasingly extends into early childhood education and elementary school. In fact, many practitioners today believe that workforce development and early childhood education go hand in hand, with many of the skills that bode well for career success developed early in life1. Given tha... Read More
Bank branches are an integral component of the financial infrastructure of a community. In low-and moderate-income communities, the presence of a bank branch might be one of only a few mainstream financial resources available to residents. Therefore, the impact of the closing of a bank branch must be carefully considered. This brief essay explores the regulatory requirements of cl... Read More
Community Development and Policy Studies (CDPS) continues to be engaged in the System-wide Healthy Communities Initiative which explores the shared interests and goals of the community development and public health fields, with particular focus on the social determinants of health. Most recently, CDPS has focused on rural communities with a Healthy Communities event in Wisconsin at the end... Read More
Beginning in 2015, CDPS undertook an ambitious information gathering process as a first step in developing a five-year strategic plan. When the Fed's Board of Governors first created the community development function in 1981 shortly after passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), its core mission was to help facilitate the flow of credit and financial services to places and people... Read More
Note: Dr. William Elliott is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion at The University of Kansas. He recently participated the “Post-Secondary Education Option” panel at the “Exploring Prominent Issues in Financial Resiliency and Mobility in Low- and Moderate-Income (LMI) Communities” conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Ka... Read More
Hyper-local data, whether aggregated by municipal agencies or independent researchers, is providing policymakers and ordinary citizens with the information to answer countless questions affecting the lives of Chicago residents. For example, parcel-level data assembled from a variety of sources is helping researchers to address how and whether infrastructure investments affect home prices ... Read More
Bank lending in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods in the Chicago area has remained well below levels that preceded the Great Recession in 2008. Mortgage loans originating in LMI neighborhoods fell from a high of 33 percent of originations in Cook County in 2006 to a low of 17 percent in 2010 (chart 1), followed by a gradual upward trend to roughly 20 percent in the most recent ... Read More
Earlier this month, the Kansas City Federal Reserve hosted a community development conference: “Exploring Prominent Issues in Financial Resiliency and Mobility in Low- and Moderate-Income (LMI) Communities.” The conference took a fresh look at a variety of issues that affect the financial wellbeing of LMI communities, including health care, housing, jobs, education and consumer finance. ... Read More
Community Development departments in the Federal Reserve System work to understand and address barriers to economic mobility, and engage banks, government, and nonprofit intermediaries to channel financial and other resources to places in need of physical, economic, and other forms of community redevelopment. The Federal Reserve System began in 2009 to examine more closely the linkages be... Read More
Last fall, Detroit provided an illustrative backdrop for a summit on economic advancement in distressed communities, sponsored by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, the Upjohn Institute, Sage Publications and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The May 2016 Special Issue of Economic Development Quarterly makes available both the new research presented at the event, as well as ... Read More