Indepth analysis of persistant problems in the field of community development. Woodstock's research reports contribute to the body of knowledge used by policymakers and community development practitioners.
Dan Immergluck, Grand Valley State University
Geoff Smith, Woodstock Institute
Examines the impact of foreclosures of single-family mortgages – both conventional and government guaranteed – on levels of violent and property crime at the neighborhood level.
This report shows that foreclosures have a significant negative effect
on neighborhood property values. Although foreclosures have long been
considered a problem associated with FHA loan programs, recent research
has shown that the explosion in foreclosures that began in the 1990s
was primarily driven by the growth of high-risk, conventional subprime
lending.
This analysis concludes that current programs reach a small fraction of the population of lower income people. While the variety of training programs currently offered could be improved in a number of ways, the greater challenge is to figure out how to reach significantly more people with more substantive training.
This report analyzes home refinance lending in the Chicago area and documents the extreme segmentation of mortgage markets by race and neighborhood. In the last few years, mortgage lending abuses - often called predatory lending - have become an increasingly critical issue for those working to promote community reinvestment and development.
This report examines the extent to which neighborhoods within the Chicago area have obtained significant levels of income and racial diversity in home buying and maintained such diversity over the 1990s. To do so, we compared compositions of buyers in neighborhoods across the metro area in 1993 and 1994 (combined) to those in 1999 and 2000 (combined).
