Place, Race & CDFI Lending: Examining Relationships among CDFI Fund Investment Areas, Majority-Minority Census Tracts, & CDFI Lending Activity
CDFI Friendly America
First published September 2024
CDFI Friendly America started with the hypothesis that, for many but not all CDFIs, serving economically distressed communities is essentially the same as serving BIPOC communities, due to the longstanding and well-established correlation between race/ethnicity, on the one hand, and income and wealth, on the other hand.
To better understand this correlation in the context of CDFI activity, CDFI Friendly America requested and Tract Advisors completed—an analysis of the relationship between economically distressed census tracts (i.e., low income, high poverty, and/or high unemployment) and majority-minority tracts—tracts where more than 50 percent of the population identifies as BIPOC.
For this analysis, Tract Advisors used CDFI Fund Investment Area (IA) census tracts to represent economic distress and majority-minority census tracts to represent racial and ethnic minority communities. This relationship is summarized at the city, county, metro area, state, and national levels. See the Data and Methodology section for details on data sources and calculation methods.
Download Resource