St. Louis Fed Releases Updated Tool to Track Community Investment

ST. LOUIS – The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has launched an enhanced version of its Community Investment Explorer tool that enables users to track key community investment funding sources locally and nationally.

The Community Investment Explorer (CIE) allows users to examine nine funding sources involving more than 3 million transactions totaling over $2.2 trillion over a five-year period, mainly between 2018 to 2022. CIE shows the trend and distribution of capital for an entire region and for low- to moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods of a region. Users can choose from a variety of measures while comparing capital flows across metros, micros and rural portions of states.

“Nonprofits, government officials, reporters, developers and many others can use the Community Investment Explorer to track the level of investment in their communities and benchmark them over time and against other geographic locations. We’re excited that rural stakeholders will now be able to track investment in their communities. I believe it will be highly useful to a wide range of users,” Michael Eggleston, developer of CIE and community development strategist at the St. Louis Fed, said.

CIE includes data on Community Development Block Grants, Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI), Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) small business loans, Home Investment Partnership funds, the Small Business Administration’s 7A and 504 loans, and historic, low-income housing and New Markets tax credits.

“We built additional features into this iteration of the tool that the previous versions didn’t have. The new functionality allows for sorting the data by rural versus micro areas versus large cities, analyzing investment trends over time, and incorporating multiple measures to compare across geographies,” Eggleston said.

Examples of queries that users can use CIE for include:

• Small business development centers can tailor financing strategies to their clients based on SBA 7A and 504 lending patterns.
• Affordable housing developers can combine data from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit investments with affordable housing demand to determine where demand is strong but investment is limited.
• Financial institutions can utilize the CIE to understanding gaps from tax credit investment programs in LMI census tracts within their CRA assessment area.
• CDFIs can utilize the CIE to better understand their market share relative to peer CDFIs, while also identifying financing gaps within their target market area.
• Researchers can explore relationships between community outcomes and a community’s ability to source capital.

“We’ve taken great care to build a clean and comprehensive dataset, which we make publicly available, so that researchers can explore relevant and important questions on topics pertaining to community and economic development finance down to the neighborhood level,” Eggleston said. “The data provides practitioners and researchers multiple ways to compare capital flows across geographies, helping identify investment trends, gaps and opportunities.”

To try the tool, visit Community Investment Explorer.