The latest perspectives, news, success stories and resources from around the organization.
At Reinvestment Fund, the essence of our work is to build social cohesion and restore community fabric. This past week, we witnessed ghastly events fueled by division and hate—experiences that are fundamentally antithetical to our values. These challenging events underscore that our friendships, alliances and shared support is more important now than ever before.
The Federal Reserve Board announced that Reinvestment Fund CEO, Don Hinkle-Brown, will serve as Vice Chair of its Community Advisory Council (CAC), beginning in 2019. Mr. Hinkle-Brown began his three-year term on the CAC in 2018.
Reinvestment Fund, an S&P rated Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), today announced the close of $75.7 million in general obligation bonds. Reinvestment Fund was one of the first CDFIs to access the capital markets in 2017 and this marks their second issuance.
Reinvestment Fund is pleased to welcome Dudley Benoit to its Board of Directors. Mr. Benoit, a long-time leader in the community development finance field, serves as Executive Vice President of Alliant Capital, Ltd., a top tax credit syndicator for the financing and development of affordable housing. Mr. Benoit has over 20 years of experience in the community development and real estate finance fields.
Despite gains over the past decade, limited access to healthy food continues to affect residents of both urban and rural communities across the United States—which is why Reinvestment Fund recently updated its Limited Supermarket Access (LSA) analysis. According to the 2018 update, 17.6 million people (5.6% of the population) live in LSA areas, a decrease of 3.1 million people (or 15%) from 2010.
Reinvestment Fund and The Philadelphia Foundation announced the launch of PhilaImpactFund, a new place-based impact investment opportunity targeted to the Greater Philadelphia region. The Fund is believed to be a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a community foundation, The Philadelphia Foundation, and an asset manager that also originates community development loans, Reinvestment Fund. Each organization has committed $5 million toward PhilaImpact Fund’s $30 million goal.
Reinvestment Fund’s Senior Policy Advisor, Patricia Smith, has been named President and CEO of The Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities, a robust network of more than 170 philanthropic foundations across the U.S. and Canada.
Since 2014, Reinvestment Fund has been working with cities and organizations around the country to accelerate the creation of new healthy food options in underserved communities. This partnership, called ReFresh (https://www.reinvestment.com/initiatives/refresh/), has led to the creation of new data tools and market reports designed to help communities target healthy food investments.
Mortgage application data, released under reporting requirements in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), are a fascinating source of information for cities and communities. These data help us understand where residents are applying for mortgages to purchase new homes or refinance their existing home.
Policymakers often struggle with the fact that policy options are seldom visualized on a map. Indeed policy decisions depend upon a multitude of variables that are rarely tied to geographical boundaries. Yet, it is often at the geographic level that policymakers want to see an impact. Thanks to the Market Value Analysis (MVA), it is possible to identify the housing market intervention policies that will be the most effective based on geographic characteristics.
In 2015, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) created a new requirement that jurisdictions conduct an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) planning process in support of the Fair Housing Act’s mandate to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Policy Solutions—along with Enterprise Community Partners, Abt Associates, and PolicyMap—was part of the technical assistance team that aided the City of Philadelphia with data and analysis to inform the local AFH. The MVA was a critical tool in this effort and I wanted to share just a few of the ways that the City incorporated the MVA into the AFH: https://goo.gl/lmkMnL
A reflection on St. Louis’ journey to embed neighborhood market types into our private sector community development practice and a summary of our journey to date, while unfinished, is at the following link: https://goo.gl/NWRFnn.
One commonly held view among housing practitioners and policymakers is that building homeownership is essential to building strong communities. Home equity has historically helped build wealth, and homeowners are stabilizing forces, who are more likely to invest in home maintenance. However, our experience building MVAs suggests that rental markets can also be sources of opportunity and strength, especially when they are near job centers, transportation hubs, or other amenities.
“Middle Neighborhoods” or middle markets are an important focus for many of the cities in which we have conducted MVAs. These areas fall somewhere on the MVA spectrum from relatively strong to showing only modest levels of distress. They are home to many city residents, oftentimes the majority of a city’s population, and they tend to be more racially integrated than other parts of cities. But they are generally not places where federal programs or philanthropic attention is focused.
Back in May, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia hosted a conference titled “Gentrification and Neighborhood Change.” Other sponsors of the event were the NYU Furman Center, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and HUD. There were several pieces of research presented on topics related to gentrification. (Conference website: http://bit.ly/2bqazKE)
In many of the cities where we work, the MVA is both a strategic tool to guide community investment and a framework to raise data-informed awareness about housing and community development needs and opportunities. The MVA we completed in Jacksonville, FL last year was an exemplary case of a foundation (Jessie Ball duPont Fund) and city officials using the creation of an MVA to engage local stakeholders in new ways and to lay the groundwork for a re-energized approach to housing and community development efforts.
The US Small Business Administration (SBA) is a federal agency created through the Small Business Act of 1953. In the Act, Congress stated:
“The essence of the American economic system of private enterprise is free competition. Only through full and free competition can free markets, free entry into business, and opportunities for the expression and growth of personal initiative and individual judgment be assured… It is the declared policy of the Congress that the Government should aid, counsel, assist, and protect insofar as is possible the interests of small-business concerns in order to preserve free competitive enterprise…”
We’re always looking for new ways to improve the MVA. Most recently, owing to issues observed during our field validation in Indianapolis and Philadelphia, we made an adjustment to the way we calculate median home values to account for the growing number of condos appearing in our data. This post gives some background behind our new methodology; we call it “condo adjusted sales prices.” This is not something we’ll do in every city, but where the market calls for it, we have a new tool in our box.
A study just released by the Pew Charitable Trusts (http://goo.gl/S2Mufe) uses Reinvestment Fund’s Displacement Risk Ratio (DRR) to analyze gentrification and other types of neighborhood change in Philadelphia since the year 2000. The report found that gentrification, when defined as a neighborhood’s shift from a mostly low-income population to a middle or high-income one, was relatively limited. It also found that the speed and scope of the process varied substantially from one gentrified neighborhood to another. The DRR (referred to as the ‘affordability index’ in the report), was essential to understanding those variations, and the implications for longtime residents
A study just released by the Pew Charitable Trusts (http://goo.gl/S2Mufe) uses Reinvestment Fund’s Displacement Risk Ratio (DRR) to analyze gentrification and other types of neighborhood change in Philadelphia since the year 2000. The report found that gentrification, when defined as a neighborhood’s shift from a mostly low-income population to a middle or high-income one, was relatively limited. It also found that the speed and scope of the process varied substantially from one gentrified neighborhood to another. The DRR (referred to as the ‘affordability index’ in the report), was essential to understanding those variations, and the implications for longtime residents
Mortgages are the lifeblood of the real estate market. Since 1975, Mortgage lenders have been required to collect data on the characteristics of mortgage borrowers and to disclose that information to the public. These data provide a wealth of information about who in your city is applying for purchase and refinance mortgages, who is being denied mortgages, and the names of the top lenders in your city.
Earlier this week I posted about our recent work mapping access to childcare. I asked our research staff to write a few lessons learned for folks interested in performing a similar analysis in their city:
There’s nothing simple about supply. In Philadelphia we discovered a large number (about 27% of the total supply of childcare) of “uncertified” providers flying under the state’s regulatory radar. To help map their contribution to childcare supply we had to rely on business records from third-party providers like the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) and InfoUSA. Business records are messy, but helped provide a deeper insight into each city’s market for early childhood education.
Although it’s not directly related to real estate, I thought the group might be interested in some new tools we just released to map and measure access to early childhood education. Improving access to high quality education is a critical part of making cities and neighborhoods more desirable places to live. Moreover, all states under the Child Care and Development Block Grant program must measure and address access to childcare shortages.
Making informed choices about neighborhood improvement strategies is an important agenda item for city governments and other stakeholders concerned with neighborhood improvement. Over the past eight months, I have been working with the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank and the American Assembly, to produce a book of readings from experts regarding neighborhood improvement strategies in America’s legacy cities.