DocumentsDate added
Sarah Duda and Tom Feltner
Analysis of Circuit Court of Cook County filings by one large payday lending showing the shift from short-term loans, cover by Payday Loan Reform Act consumer protections, to longer-term installment loans not covered by the act. The report also looks at the debt collection process.
A joint report by:
California Reinvestment Coalition, Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina, Empire Justice Center, Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, Ohio Fair Lending Coalition, and Woodstock Institute
Geoff Smith
Foreclosures spiked in the last quarter of 2007 nearly every community in the Chicago region, based on forecosure filings analyzed by Woodstock Institute. This report also found that foreclosure filings have increased in suburban areas that have not traditionally been associated with high foreclosure levels.
Tom Feltner
This report provides a method for estimating the loan
terms and conditions, default conditions, automobile characteristics, and
borrower demographics of title loans in Illinois
based on Cook County
court cases filed against borrowers in default during 2005. It identifies key
information on the title loan industry necessary to inform the public debate on
how to best apply nationally recognized small loan consumer protections to the Illinois
title loan industry.
Malcolm Bush
This paper takes advantage of an unusually detailed family and youth survey conducted by the Institute for the Study of Work and Society (IETS) in Rio de Janeiro in the low-income community of Caju close to downtown Rio. It describes the weak educational background of Caju youth and some of the reasons for that weakness. The results emphasize the precarious nature of low-income youth’s educational achievements and their attachment to the job market. They also demonstrate the wide variance in youth characteristics even in a single low-income neighborhood.
Malcolm Bush and Nathan Paufve
The report documents the decline in personal savings rates while explaining the recent saving incentive for lower-income people created by the federal Pension Protection Act of 2006. While the credit is a modest step in the right direction for providing lower-income people the level of incentives currently provided to middle- and upper-income people, the report recommends that it be made refundable to expand its benefits to all income qualified tax payers.
Jessica Brown and Sargon Nissan
The report includes ten case studies of community finance initiatives in the US and the EU. These highlight the different features of community finance organisations, their target group and their core activities in order to identify what aspects of their operation are integral to creating successful interventions in deprived communities. The objective of these case studies is to highlight particular aspects of their activities and operating environment that are instructive for CDF in the UK.
Woodstock Institute provided case studies of US CDFIs.
Marva Williams
This report summarizes an 18-month evaluation of the
affordable payday loan alternative products offered by six community development credit unions. In
addition to describing loan activity, the report identifies the financial and
operational factors that account for the program's success.
Geoff Smith, Malcolm Bush, and Nathan Paufve
This alert examines the service test evaluations of Chicago area large banks and thrifts to determine what information on services is collected and analyzed during the test procedures and looks at how regulators use these data to assess service test performance. The alert also discusses the limitations of the available data and makes recommendations for steps that might be taken to improve the effectiveness of the service test performance evaluation.
Geoff Smith
An analysis by Woodstock Institute of Chicago area foreclosures show that foreclosure filings in the region grew at an alarming rate in 2006 and have reached their highest point in recent memory.