Interested in learning more about using the ideas in The NEXT American Opportunity? Click here for resources to help you bring these ideas into the public policy discussion.
- The demand for allocations from the New Markets Tax Credit has far exceeded the supply of the credit; the dollar amount of credits requested is 12 times greater than the number of credits awarded.
Read more facts - The U.S. Small Business Administration’s Microloan Program provides loans to more than 160 nonprofit community-based lenders, including CDFIs, and has financed about 26,000 loans worth approximately $328 million to small entrepreneurs.
Read more facts - The SBA’s budget for the Microloan Program has fallen from $48.9 million in fiscal year 2001 to $33 million in fiscal year 2007
Read more facts - Since 1995, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI Fund) has invested more than $820 million in community development financial institutions working in underserved urban, rural, and Native American communities across the country.
Read more facts - Applications for funding from the CDFI Fund have been increasing rapidly, up 122.3 percent in 2008. The applicants requested an aggregate of over $205.5 million in assistance, which also increased from the previous round by nearly 150 percent.
Read more facts - The budget for community development block grants, which provide funding to localities for affordable housing, job creation, and economic development, has been reduced by $1.5 billion since 2001. At the same time, the United States has lost more than three million manufacturing jobs and nearly a million units of affordable housing.
Read more facts - Women-owned businesses account for 41 percent of all privately held firms, yet in 2006, the latest year for which data are available, they received only 3.4 percent of government contracts.
Read more facts - A study conducted by the Joint Center for Housing Studies in 2002 demonstrated that without the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), mortgage lending to low- and moderate-income borrowers and communities would have decreased by 336,000 loans from 1993 through 2000.
Read more facts - From 1996 through 2005, depository institutions regulated by the CRA made 10 million small business loans totaling $449 billion and outperformed non-CRA lenders in terms of home-purchase loans in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.
Read more facts - The U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided more than $70 billion in grants, loans, and loan guarantees since 2001 as part of its Rural Development program, yet more than three times as much money goes to metropolitan areas with populations of 50,000 or more ($30.3 billion) as to poor or shrinking rural counties ($8.6 billion).
Read more facts
