Search Results
Newsletter
Credit card delinquency and Covid-19: Neighborhood trends in the Seventh District
The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in great economic and financial disruption. To better understand how financial hardships have varied across communities, we investigate credit card delinquencies across the states of the Federal Reserve’s Seventh District: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While we find a slight increase of less than 1 percentage point in delinquency rates across the District overall following the onset of the pandemic, we find more pronounced increases of about 2 percentage points in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods and about 3 percentage ...
Newsletter
Residential mobility and neighborhood characteristics in Chicago
Chicago neighborhoods vary widely in economic opportunity and well-being, and trends in population change reflect these disparities. According to census data, the city added about 50,000 residents between 2010 and 2020, but patterns differed considerably by neighborhood type. Some census tracts bore the largest burden of population loss, continuing a multi-decade period of decline, while several others saw rapid growth exceeding 10% per year.
Journal Article
Preliminary Findings from Focus Groups on Economic Inclusion in Smaller Cities
A growing body of work by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and partners points to challenges that "legacy cities" face in extending economic opportunity to all residents. This article reports findings from a series of focus groups conducted around the 7th District to better understand what city leaders are doing to advance positive labor market outcomes for residents.
Journal Article
Small Business Performance in Industries in LMI Neighborhoods After the Great Recession: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles
Small businesses are essential to the economic infrastructure of both lower-income and higher-income neighborhoods. In this report, we compare small business performance in lower-income vs higher-income areas. Findings offer some directions for growing small businesses in LMI and ethnic/minority neighborhoods
Journal Article
Opportunity Zones: Understanding the Background and Potential Impact in Northeastern Illinois
This article offers a primer on: Opportunity Zones, highlighting the designation process for census tracts in northeastern Illinois; Qualified Opportunity Funds (QOF) ? the vehicle that will facilitate investment in designated areas; and finally, how QOFs will help facilitate the goals of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning?s ON TO 2050 Plan.
Journal Article
A few examples of Chicago tackling youth joblessness
Many young people nationwide are undereducated, jobless, and living in poverty with no job prospects; in urban areas particularly, they face a continuing cycle of unemployment, in addition to substandard and often dangerous neighborhood conditions. Using greater Chicagoland (including the city and Cook County) as a case study, this article will highlight how capital and resources from the private sector, namely loans, investments, and services from regulated financial institutions (e.g., banks) could foster greater economic and community development, especially for underserved and at-risk ...
Journal Article
The Geography of Subprime Credit
Improving the financial lives of the people living in neighborhoods with large concentrations of lowcredit-scored households1 requires an understanding of the socioeconomic and financial challenges of those places. In this study, we identify such neighborhoods and analyze their socioeconomic and financial attributes, focusing on Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin (the five states served by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago). We find geographic patterns in the locations of subprime-scored households, in particular that these households are more highly concentrated in urban ...
Journal Article
The Changing Composition of Bank Branches in Seventh Federal Reserve District States
Across the United States, the banking office landscape has shifted substantially since the financial crisis in 2008, reflecting both long-standing trends of small bank closures, as well as more recent patterns of bank branch declines. These trends are playing out in the states of the Seventh District as well, where the number of banking offices has declined in each state, and increasingly, community banks are losing their share of branches in certain markets. Low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods in a few of the District?s most populous counties are nearly devoid of community banks.
Journal Article
Employment Challenges for the Formerly Incarcerated
The U.S. economy is on a historic run of job creation, with 76 straight months of job growth as of June 2016. Many firms are looking for new pools of talent as traditional pools are increasingly absorbed by rising employment. Wages are beginning to rise more rapidly than they have for several years, with ADP?s Workforce Vitality Report for Q1 2016 estimating annual wage growth for full-time job holders of 4.7 percent. The strengthening labor market provides an opportunity for both employers and policymakers to reconsider the status of subgroups that face distinct barriers to the job market. ...
Journal Article
Introducing, Understanding, and Using the ICI 300 Peer Cities Identification Tool
Municipalities, especially those that are mid-sized or smaller, often face significant challenges in providing services and amenities to meet the needs of their diverse and changing populations. Solutions are usually context-specific and must factor in larger demographic and economic trends, in order to be effective. And, yet, in spite of contextual differences, cities frequently have meaningful similarities. However, identifying peer cities is often informed more by conversation than by data or evidence.