View Research by Author - Audrey Droesch

Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/AudreyDroesch

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires most lending institutions to report on home mortgage loan applications, including the application outcome, loan- and applicant-related information, and property location. Annual data collected through HMDA provide a unique set of files with information at the neighborhood level. This guide describes the HMDA original source data and the HMDA indicators available on DataPlace. The guide also illustrates how HMDA indicators can be used to shed light on such issues as neighborhood investment trends, changes in the racial and economic composition of home buyers, disparities in home loan access, and subprime lending.

This brief focuses on the neighborhoods available to voucher recipients in Chicago. It examines the location of units with rents below Fair Market Rents, neighborhood quality where voucher holders are located, and the quality of neighborhoods with the most affordable housing. Our findings indicate that mobility efforts that do not include larger policies to curb discrimination, including stricter enforcement of fair housing policies and enforcement of local ordinances that make refusing to rent to vouchers holders illegal, are doomed to fail.

This paper describes a new project funded by the Brookings Institution Urban Market Initiative. In this project, the Urban Institute and NNIP partners in five cities will use parcel-level data as a basis for developing "decision support tools" to better guide the evolution of local land markets. The project will entail analysis to better understand real estate market potentials for different types of neighborhoods in these cities and the mixes of public actions generally appropriate to each type. The partners will also go further to develop computer-based tools that take advantage of the data to better design and implement specific courses of action in that context.

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