Subject: Economic Development
Recently, over two sizable cups of locally-roasted coffee, a colleague and I mulled over a simple question: "How can we continue to make our city more livable?" True, this is a simple question with a complex set of answers. But…
There’s something you should know about me: I’m a professional amateur. For the past seven years I’ve been co-writing and performing in original works of musical theater with my wife’s theater company, Downtown Art. We’ve just opened our latest piece,…
For the same reason that many admire the Flatiron building in New York City, I had a special affinity for one of the original Jos. A. Schlitz taverns in Milwaukee. Some will review the enclosed photos and wonder how one…
All too often in cities around the country, a once-clear vision of a "catalytic development project" is easily blurred by protracted discussions about whose idea provides the silver bullet. At the same time, we want to keep the development pendulum…
Carol Wayman, federal policy director of the Corporation for Enterprise Development argues in the latest issue of Shelterforce that while community economic developers understand the need to leverage every dollar, the benefit Federal Home Loan Banks Federal Home Loan Banks’ lackluster economic development lending performance could be improved by following the model of their own Affordable Housing Program
Specifically, Wayman writes, the FHLBanks’ Affordable Housing Program (AHP), which requires each of the 12, independent, regional banks to set aside 10 percent of annual profits to invest in local affordable housing initiatives, can serve as a model for expanding the country’s economic development system:
“The results have been incredible positive, with more than $4.2 billion in grants administered since 1990, creating more than 700,000 units. The program has been the ‘crown jewel’ of the system as it brings strong housing development proposals together with appropriate financing. AHP is the largest source of private funds available for affordable housing in the nation.”
“In this time of overwhelming budget cuts, high levels of unemployment and global economic change, a long-term, significant funding source that brings together community development organizations, local governments, and the financial sector could play a crucial role to building a stronger, more inclusive economy.”
Wayman points to some of the economic development headway made by FHLBanks, but in order to get there, that is, to improve FHLBanks’ economic development investment, she champions the banks’ improved oversight of community lending plans, have local governments and organizations take part in the FHFA-required Community Support Review, and implement an economic development version of AHP:
“The best way to increase investment in community economic development is to mandate it, using the AHP model—setting aside a percentage of FHLBanks’ annual profits for investment in community economic development projects identified by member financial institutions…. An economic development version of AHP would feature the same type of annual competition for grants that has successfully increased the banks’ affordable housing investments. Submitting proposals together encourages local nonprofits, governments, and tribes to build reliable partnerships that can work together over a period of years. Bringing financial institutions to the table early in the process allows the partners to adapt and respond to lenders’ interests and concerns, enabling projects to attract greater financing later.”
Wayman includes a sidebar, Economic Development at FHLBanks, that offers up examples of good economic development financing from FHLBanks such as: a community space in Washington, DC’s Shaw neighborhood; a permanent, year-round farmers’ market for low-income farmers and entrepreneurs in Nevada; the redevelopment of vacant commercial property into mixed-use development in Worcester, Mass.; a series of loans given to small businesses in Wisconsin. But those examples are disappointingly low for a GSE that gets benefits from its semi-public status,
“The best way to increase investment in community economic development is to mandate it,” writes Wayman, “using the AHP model—setting aside a percentage of FHLBanks’ annual profits for investment in community economic development projects identified by member financial institutions.
Article: More Mission
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Rock_Creek, CC BY-NC-SA more
Early in 2010, the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program released a report indicating that half of the $1.4 trillion in short-term commercial real estate loans coming due in the next four years were underwater. Half. What’s…
Andre Leroux, executive director of the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance, believes that New England’s smaller cities hold the potential to absorb much development that could help save the region’s countryside from sprawl. But it will take some policy reforms to…
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The Spring 2009 issue of Shelterforce ran a brief about Van Jones’ being named White House special advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality: the “Green Jobs Czar,” to use a more…
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Rick Cohen, a long-time Shelterforce contributor and editor of The Nonprofit Quarterly‘s “Cohen Report” wrote last week on the importance of nonprofits tracking their own industry’s job growth as a result of additional funding from the American Reinvestment and Recovery…
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The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings announced today the launch of its MetroMonitor, a tool that measures the health of 100 of America’s largest metropolitan economies. The tools aims to look “beneath the hood of national economic statistics to portray…
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With city budgets shrinking rapidly, municipal governments are desperate to collect property tax revenue wherever they can find it. So they are moving to fast-track new, large development projects that can bring an infusion of new revenue, construction jobs and…
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From the City of Millville way down in South Jersey to Morristown up in the northern state suburbs, downtowns across New Jersey are approaching alarming levels of storefront vacancies. And why? Well, you can name any number of reasons, of…
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Monday brought the announcement of a record 70,000-plus jobs lost worldwide, from drug companies to automakers and everything in between. Meanwhile each year millions of Americans who still have jobs are having their wages stolen from them, an under-recognized epidemic…
The image in this post, which photographer Bill Lim has made available to us through the wonder of the Creative Commons, is of the beautiful Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial water sculpture in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens. As we…
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Perhaps this is a pointer to where America’s recovery will come from. Some of the less fashionable parts of the country may quietly get on with the business of growing. Places like Chattanooga. And like Buffalo, New York, which did not experience a great boom, but may also largely miss out on the bust—while growing jobs in the public sector and health care. And like many other areas that don’t make the headlines.
— Chattanooga vrrrm vrrrm, The Economist blog
Basic economics asserts that capital flows from high-wealth areas to low-wealth areas to take advantage of the increased return on investment these areas offer. The economic miracles of southeast Asia have illustrated this principle on a global scale; as we emerge from the panic of 2008, could America’s beleaguered post-industrial cities illustrate this principle on a national scale? more
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So this is weird: December 5 is Walt Disney’s birthday and I get these two separate Disney things in the e-mail from different people but not entirely unconnected — both relate to our precarious economy. The first to arrive was…
Anyone who has wasted hours each day commuting to work, sat in traffic for an hour as a freight train inched by, waited endlessly for a bus only to have four arrive at once, or paid a week’s wages for a short plane flight can vouch for the inconveniences, inefficiencies, and travesties of our country’s transportation infrastructure.
At a November 17 conference sponsored by Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council, elected officials, agency staffers and advocates from the U.S. and Canada described the daunting infrastructure challenges facing the heartland in terms of transportation and the related issues of water and housing.
The picture they painted was grim, but they emphasized the possibility of turning the dire situation into an opportunity for reshaping infrastructure priorities and investment. more
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With congressional leaders reaching an agreement Thursday afternoon on the president’s proposal to pump $700 billion into the country’s financial system, it’s not yet clear how corporations and foundations will change their policies in giving grants and gifts. However, if…
Even decades after de-industrialization and outsourcing decimated the once-solid, well-paid, empowered blue collar union workforce of the Midwest, jobs are still being lost by the hundreds or thousands as industries tighten their belts or close up shop altogether — from…
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With the Dems convening in Denver, the New York Times Magazine offered us David Leonhardt’s review of ‘Advanced Obamanomics’ on Sunday, August 24. In light of the Obama campaign re-launching his urban agenda today, it is timely to consider economics…
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National Housing Institute
