• The main trend of the last few years is evident, as fewer people took out a mortgage to buy a home. In 2007, 3.5 million households bought a home and took out a mortgage; in 2009, only 2.4 million did.
• The number of homeowners refinancing, however, has increased. Over 1 million more households refinanced in 2009 than 2007 – 5.3 million versus 4.2 million households.
• Most strikingly, the number of government originated loans rose by 297% in the last two years. Over 50% of all home purchase loans in 2009 were insured by the government.
• We saw a sharp decline in the number of homebuyers using two loans to buy a home (piggyback loans). While an astounding 350,000 home purchases were financed using two mortgages in 2007, only about 14,000 home purchases included piggyback loans in 2009.

The nature of these trends varies significantly in communities across the nation. For example, while refinancing looks to have taken off in parts of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, not much of this activity has taken place along the West Coast or in the South, particularly Florida. This could be a result of homeowners owing more than their house is worth, making refinancing impossible. In other parts of the country, the majority of homebuyers are using a government-insured product to make a home purchase. This seems logical, given that subprime mortgage alternatives dried up in the crash of the housing market.

To get a clearer picture of these variances across the country, check out the interactive maps below or go to PolicyMap and explore data in the “Lending Activity” tab.

When reading these maps, note that orange areas represent places where a specific lending type has declined, while purple areas represent places where it has increased. And, the darker the purple, the greater the increase.

Want to share these maps with others? Just embed the code below each embedded map on your own blog or webpage!

Now available on PolicyMap under the Education tab:

• 2009 data on student proficiency, including the percent of 4th graders, 8th graders, and high school students scoring “at or above proficient” in reading and math.
• Number and percent of students in each school district that are English language learners and special education students.
• New data on school district funding, including: school district operating budget, total spending per pupil, and federal spending on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the National School Lunch Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

Log onto PolicyMap now to explore the wealth of new free education data available under the Education tab.

1. Number of people who received green cards who were born in a given country (51 green card recipients in Nebraska were born in Colombia).
2. Of all people born in a given country who received green cards, the percent residing in each state (.18% of all Colombian-born green card recipients in United States live in Nebraska).
3. Percent of all green cards issued in the state that went to people born in a given country (1.28% of all green card recipients in Nebraska were born in Colombia).

While working on this data, my colleague Arthur and I found a few interesting things about the data which are not immediately apparent on PolicyMap:

• In a departure from years past, natives of South Korea and North Korea are being reported separately. On PolicyMap, only South Koreans are included, but to be consistent with the previous language, they are designated as Koreans.
• The countries listed are those in which the immigrant was born, NOT their country of citizenship. So an individual who was born in Cuba but immigrated to Ecuador and is now a permanent resident of the United States would be categorized as from Cuba.
• If the name of the country has changed, two individuals born in the same place at different times might be categorized as being born in different countries. The most notable example is that immigrants categorized as from Russia were all born since 1991. Anyone older than this was born in the Soviet Union. The same issue applies for people born in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and other former Soviet republics.

Worth mentioning is that anyone born before the Bolsheviks took power in 1922 was also officially born in Russia. As there were relatively fewer green card recipients born in the Soviet Union, they are not included in PolicyMap’s immigration data.

• In 2009, 181 individuals born in the United States, and therefore automatically U.S. citizens by the 14th Amendment, received green cards. Also receiving green cards were natives of the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa.

Do you want to learn more about this dataset or other features on PolicyMap? Join our free weekly trainings (Click Here) or send your questions to pmap@policymap.com.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was passed by Congress in 1977 to encourage banks to extend credit to low and moderate income Americans. The Act was a response to redlining, a common practice involving systematically denying credit or increasing the costs of banking services to communities based on income, race or other discrimination. In practice, CRA requires that each bank’s lending records be evaluated periodically. This evaluation record is taken into account when the institution applies for deposit facilities, including mergers and acquisitions. All depository institutions must collect the necessary data and submit reports annually.

In order to measure whether banks are providing credit to the whole of their communities, CRA looks for loans in low and moderate income areas, as well as areas experiencing economic duress, or that are underserved by banking institutions. PolicyMap now has these locations mapped, according to CRA specifications.

Low and moderate income Census Tracts are based on a comparison of tract median family income to area median family income. If the median family income of the tract is less that 50% of area median family income, then the tract is considered Low. If the tract median family income is greater than or equal to 50% and less than 80% then the tract is Moderate. If the Tract median family income is greater than or equal to 80% and less than 120% then the tract level is Middle.

Middle income tracts are not considered in CRA evaluation unless the tract is classified as distressed or underserved. Distressed middle income tracts are those with: (1) Unemployment rate at least 1.5 times the national average or (2) Poverty rate of 20% or greater or (3) Population loss of 10% or more between the 1990 and 2000 census, or a net migration loss of 5% or more between 1995 and 2000. Underserved middle-income tract are those designated by the Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture with an “urban influence code” of 7, 10, 11 or 12. Lists of these tracts are released annually and available on the CRA website at: http://www.ffiec.gov/cra/examinations.htm.

Go to PolicyMap now and see what tracts are considered in the CRA evaluation! The data are available under Money & Income > CRA Eligibility.

However, the top female census tracts also have some of the country’s prominent women’s colleges.

Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Hampshire, MA

Smith College, Northampton, Hampshire County, MA

Those census tracts were in Chemung County, NY, and Clarendon County, SC, respectively. As you can see, these tracts are the sites of prisons, presumably holding only men. If you look closer at the Elmyra Correctional Facility, you can see that Google Maps blurs the image, presumably to hinder someone researching an escape attempt:

This was how we figured out why these census tracts were predominantly male. Now, you too can refer to the aerial images to gain further insight into areas you’re looking at. Here are a few more images of top 10 percent male census tracts:

Kern County, CA	Victorville, San Bernardino County, CA

These indicators are available on the map in two formats. The first is the familiar red/blue map that most people are accustomed to seeing in popular media, where red represents areas won by Republicans, and blue represents areas won by Democrats, and darker shades representing larger margins of victory.

For more in-depth data, however, click on either of the party-specific indicators below margin-of-victory.

With these indicators, you get full PolicyMap functionality, including the ability to toggle between number, percent, and change in percent, the ability to edit ranges, and precise statistics for each geography (with margin-of-victory, you only get a range).

County/State/Percent of votes for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential general election

 
Small farms are also a marker of economic vitality. Recent research studies have reported that small farms are more sustainable, more productive and more efficient in contributing to the economic development of a place than their larger counterparts(?). CRA data also provides information about small farm lending, further identifying counties experiencing an increase in economic development by an increase in small farms. Below is a map of small farm lending in the Michigan State counties.

For more information and discussion of small businesses and their contribution and importance to a community’s economic development, watch this video clip of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and TRF President and CEO, Jeremy Nowak discussing the importance of small businesses and lending structures.

Small Business Portion (15:27 – 20:16) – Click Here to Watch

The latest unemployment data for October is also now available on our first free widget. Just embed the code below to bring an interactive unemployment map to your website. If you downloaded the code last month, the widget automatically updates to the newest month of data.

Your visitors can zoom in, pan around and click on any area of the map to see the underlying unemployment statistics for any county in the nation. They can also toggle between months and years to see values for previous periods of time going all the way back to 2000. The darker shades on the map are counties with higher rates or numbers of unemployed persons. Below is how the widget will look and interact.

To bring this dynamic mapping experience to your site, just embed the HTML code below onto your website.

<iframe src="http://www.policymap.com/widget.jsp?userid=892&wid=4&height=500&i=9841103&btd=4&nomenus=true" width="100%" height="635px" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" vspace="0" hspace="0" name="PolicyMap"></iframe>

As always, call us at 1-866-923-MAPS (6277) or email with any questions. We’d love to hear from you!