PolicyMap News

Between 2007 and 2008 -while the nation struggled with a faulting home sale market – 13 neighborhoods with active home sale markets across the country saw their home values more than DOUBLE.

For these neighborhoods, the year represented a rallying time when the declining values they experienced between 2006 and 2007 got back on track. For some, home sale prices are now equal to or above where they were in 2006 – for the rest, they are close. While fewer people bought homes in most of these neighborhoods in 2008, each area had active sales markets with over 50 sale transactions recorded in each year.

So, where are these places? Let’s take a look.

#1 Honolulu, Hawaii: Census Tract 23 – Up 352% since 2007

This section of Honolulu sits within zip code 96826 near the University of Hawaii at Monoa. The median home sale price in 2008 was $280,000 – significantly up from its 2007 low of $61,866 and back on track with its median price in 2006 of $245,000.

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The White House Office of Urban Affairs and the White House Domestic Policy Council today began “A National Conversation on the Future of Urban and Metropolitan America.” And, they started this morning in Philadelphia with a conversation about the intersection of fresh food, health, economic development, workforce development, and neighborhood revitalization.

The event included a tour of Jeff Brown’s Parkside Shop Rite Supermarket followed by a townhall to engage leaders about the success of the Fresh Food Financing Initiative and other efforts throughout the state to improve access to fresh foods.

Jeff Brown’s ShopRite sits in a largely African American neighborhood with a declining population where close to 75% of households earn less than $50,000 a year. The successful grocery store (see our map here) gives this neighborhood easy and affordable access to fresh foods and suburban-like grocery store amenities.

The White House hopes to highlight local innovations like this around the nation to amplify the work of the private and non-profit partners who contributed to the success of this program, and identify ways the federal government can create incentives for this type of collaboration and policy integration.

Learn more about Parkside – or any neighborhood around the nation – by visiting PolicyMap.
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TRF’s Neighborhood Income Distribution Analysis Now on PolicyMap

The Reinvestment Fund devised an analysis of income distribution that accounts for regional differences in median incomes for neighborhoods across the US. It’s located on the Maps page in the State & Local tab under TRF Policy Solutions Analyses. TRF’s analysis distinguished nine categories of income concentration types. The colors on the map indicate the typical income in a place, including low income (oranges), medium income (blues) and high income (purples), while the saturation of the color indicates the concentration of those income types. For example, the darkest orange on the map shows areas where virtually all residents are of low income, commonly known as areas with concentrated poverty.

TRF’s Neighborhood Income Distribution Analysis is based on two indicators: (a) a given census tract’s median family income, classified based on regionally-determined income brackets, and (b) a given census tract’s income concentration level. For (a), the income classification, TRF used three income bands by region for census tracts: families making less than 35% of median family income in a given region, families making between 35% and 60% of median family income in a given region, and families making more than 60% of median family income in a given region. For (b), the income concentration, TRF developed a score to quantify the census tract level concentration of families across five income bands. We did not include census tracts with fewer than 500 households in the analysis. These tracts are shown as grey areas on the map. Each census tract was cross-classified based on (a) and (b), resulting in the nine distinct income distribution concentration types. For more information about the methods used in this analysis and the characteristics of each income distribution type, please see our TRF Neighborhood Income Distribution Analysis PowerPoint presentation, below. Please also see the Neighborhood Income Distribution Analysis entry in our Data Directory for more descriptive information about the analysis.

PHILADELPHIA — This year, Margaret Shepherd is knocking on the front door of nearly every house in West Oak Lane. Her daily rounds are part of a large-scale effort to stem foreclosures in this blue-collar, largely African-American neighborhood.

“I’m getting so much exercise, it’s ridiculous,” Ms. Shepherd said on a recent afternoon.

West Oak Lane has the kind of yo-yo economic history that marks many urban areas. The 80-year-old neighborhood had been on an upswing thanks to the efforts of local community groups, rising real-estate prices and years of easy credit that poured money into local businesses.

But unemployment and foreclosures risk wiping out two decades of progress. Now the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corp., funded through a combination of real-estate revenue and grants, is looking to buy foreclosed homes to keep them occupied and values stable. Instead of waiting for owners to come to them, the group brought Ms. Shepherd in to go block by block in search of stressed homeowners.

Foreclosures and unemployment are wreaking havoc in communities rich and poor. But these problems can have more severe effects in transitional urban areas just starting to come back, spurring efforts to prevent a new slide.

Boston Community Capital, a nonprofit that finances real estate in lower-income communities across Massachusetts, is buying foreclosed homes from banks and selling them back to homeowners at lower prices and under new mortgage terms. “The goal here is trying to stabilize neighborhoods by trying to keep homes occupied and productive,” says Elyse Cherry, chief executive of Boston Community Capital.

There are an estimated 1,500 homes in some version of foreclosure in the West Oak Lane area, which has about 20,000 homes, according to the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit that invests in Philadelphia. The metro area’s unemployment rate jumped to 8.2% in May from 4.9% a year ago, a rise that has fallen harder on areas like West Oak Lane, where residents tend to be less educated and many workers depend on hourly and overtime wages to make ends meet. According to data compiled by PolicymMap, 60% of West Oak Lane households earn less than $60,000 a year.

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