Local governments, urban development practitioners, investors and entrepreneurs across the country often lack the information needed to make informed decisions, or to encourage others to make investments, regarding economic development in emerging markets. In addition, practitioners lack access to the type of data that drives private sector decision making processes. Every year, public and private organizations invest millions of dollars in efforts (such as building, rehabilitation and preservation of affordable homes) to revitalize communities and improve individual’s living conditions. Unfortunately, few experts have looked at the measurable impacts that these investments have had on neighborhoods, families and individuals. While some skeptics suggest that, for instance, affordable housing is a drain on civic life and on property values, practitioners and housing experts assert otherwise, but must often rely only on anecdotal evidence. Moreover, those few projects that have examined the impact of investments focused primarily on real estate values, ignoring other changes that may have occurred, such as improvements to the business climate or reduced crime.
Over the last 10 years, Social Compact has leveraged its relationships with private sector partners to both learn which indicators most influence developers, businesses and lenders and gain access to key proprietary datasets used by leaders in the field such as First American CoreLogic, Citi, and the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC), expanding the organization’s expertise in cleaning, standardizing and analyzing a wide range of public and private datasets. This rigorous data mining, given access to similarly unique data, can benefit other economic development fields such as affordable housing and microlending.
Social Compact is exploring impact analysis work in partnership with organizations like Enterprise Community Partners and Accion to assess the effects of public and private investments on individuals and communities. Knowing that changes in real estate values alone cannot tell the whole story, Social Compact proposes to examine a variety of proprietary indicators using various case scenarios as control mechanisms. The analysis specifically examines change over time – from the period prior to the investments to the current period.
This impact analysis would include a range of alternative indicators on topics such as business health, residents’ access to fresh, healthy foods and financial service provision, educational attainment, and trends in crime. Additionally, the analysis could include a survey component to obtain complementary data on the impact that investment projects have had on the families and individuals residing in the communities where the investments have been made.
The analysis aims to:
