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Journal Article
Training for Jobs in the Emerging Energy-Efficiency Industry
The nonprofit Energy Coordinating Agency (ECA) of Philadelphia, Inc. has trained about 2,000 low- and moderate-income adults and teenagers during the past 18 months for jobs in the energy-efficiency field and is simultaneously taking steps to help develop this emerging industry.
Journal Article
Financial Well-being: At the Convergence of People and Place – Reflections from a Chicago Conversation
This brief collection of writings is based on a convening, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, to have a local conversation about financial well-being. This gathering was motivated by ?What It?s Worth,? a joint publication of the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, collecting insights from thought leaders across the country on the topic of financial capacity for families and communities.
Journal Article
Tax-time Savings: An Antidote to Financial Insecurity
The value proposition of ?What It?s Worth? is the opportunity, working collaboratively between the public, nonprofit and private sectors, to address the growing economic insecurity and financial stability plaguing a growing number of Americans. The results of countless polls and surveys evidence the financial uncertainty facing the least advantaged in our economy. The aftermath of the Great Recession and the loss of assets for many, combined with reduced job security, downward pressure on wages, and higher out-of-pocket health expenses are some of the drivers behind this insecurity.
Journal Article
Nonprofit Focuses on Employment Training and Business and Community Development
Impact Services Corporation, located in Philadelphia?s Kensington neighborhood, is one of the largest nonprofit providers of employment and training services in Pennsylvania. However, Impact is unusual among nonprofits in this field because it works closely with area businesses and creates jobs through community development projects and Impact-owned businesses
Journal Article
PHFA Takes Pro-Active Steps in Loan Servicing to Keep Borrowers in Their Homes
The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency (PHFA) was created 40 years ago by the state legislature to expand affordable housing options for the state?s residents. It does so through a number of programs that include funding the construction of multifamily rental units, providing affordable home mortgages, supporting housing counseling at no cost to prospective homeowners, and engaging in foreclosure prevention efforts. This article focuses on the PHFA?s servicing of its home purchase mortgages to Pennsylvania residents and the pro-active steps taken by the agency to help keep borrowers in their ...
Working Paper
The Effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansions on Financial Wellbeing
We examine the effect of the Medicaid expansions under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on consumer, financial outcomes using data from a major credit reporting agency for a large, national sample of adults. We employ the synthetic control method to compare individuals living in states that expanded Medicaid to those that did not. We find that the Medicaid expansions significantly reduced the number of unpaid bills and the amount of debt sent to third-party collection agencies among those residing in zip codes with the highest share of low-income, uninsured ...
Journal Article
The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia's Commercial Corridors
In her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jane Jacobs argued that the "basic requisite" for maintaining safe cities was "a substantial quantity of stores and other public spaces sprinkled along the sidewalks of a district.... Stores, bars and restaurants, as the chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety." In this article, the case of Philadelphia is used to explore the extent to which such neighborhood commercial corridors live up to their promise of maintaining public order and city civility, what factors ...
Journal Article
The Roadmap to Financial Resilience is About the Journey
Twelve months is more than a year particularly in Chicago. Twelve months is winter ? often with a relentlessly capital W, spring, summer, and fall. It's lazy summer days to school days to skyrocketing heating bills. It?s the seasonality of work intertwined with the seasonality of life, not just in terms of changes in temperature, but in terms of expenses that ebb and flow over the course of time. For all these reasons, discussions about capacity ? whether employment or financial ? must be in the context of an entire year, because we believe that timeline to be the best proxy for the practice ...
Discussion Paper
Small-Dollar Mortgages for Single-Family Residential Properties
There is a significant lack of financing available for low-cost homes, which many first-time homebuyers and low- and middle-income families rely on to move from renting to homeownership. This brief examines the availability of small-dollar mortgages (up to $70,000) for home purchases, refinances, and improvements, presenting a wealth of information on borrower and loan characteristics, production channels, and the geographic distribution of low-cost homes. We find that there is limited mortgage availability for the small loans needed to support the significant number of low-cost property ...
Journal Article
Determinants of Housing Values and Variations in Home Prices Across Neighborhoods in Cook County
From 2007 to 2009, the U.S. underwent one of the worst recessions in its history, a recession triggered by an unprecedented, international financial crisis that resulted from institutional portfolio concentration in securities backed by home mortgages, and the collapse of that securities market. The period saw a wave of defaults and foreclosures that spared almost no communities in metropolitan areas throughout the country (Bajaj and Story, 2008). Loan defaults and foreclosures, which had tended to be concentrated in lower-income and minority neighborhoods, spread to new and diverse ...