poverty

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund released a file and map summarizing core economic data for each census tract. Policymakers and practitioners should be aware of these changes for both what the data reveal about local economic trends and the impact the changes could have on future program eligibility. Importantly, tract-level economic distress is integral to CDFI certification and business eligibility for portions of Treasury’s State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI), as well as being a common reference for federal programs that prioritize distressed regions. The new data makes numerous changes from the 2018 update, including nearly 23,000 new census tract IDs and more than 11,000 tracts with a different economic distress status.

While few will be able to escape the resulting hardships of the current economic downturn, America’s most economically vulnerable communities — those where household finances were already unstable and work scarce — will be hit hardest by the recession currently underway. The Economic Innovation Group recently began a research initiative called the Neighborhood Poverty Project which tracks changes in the number and composition of metropolitan high-poverty neighborhoods from 1980 to 2018 with the primary goal of substantiating the idea that returning to the pre-crisis “normal” of national growth is not enough to lift America’s highest-poverty neighborhoods. The project finds that the number of neighborhoods in which 30 percent or more of the population lives in poverty doubled from 1980 to 2010.