2018 Community Investment Annual Report

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resident volunteers, and skilled trades representatives.The program will accept applications between January 14, 2019 and March 11, 2019. "LYB" connects residents to empower them to repair their homes and community spaces.This new effort was combined with the Office of Sustainability's new Green Corps Program,the South Bend Home Repair Pilot(formerly SBHIP)to frame a cohesive brand-South Bend Home Repair: Mend the Bend.Together,these programs represent over$1 million in city-funded home repair investments and more than doubling historic funding levels allocated to home repair. The Engagement& Economic team utilizes a data-driven perspective to develop programming promoting economic mobility.Our team examined data surrounding Mayoral priorities concerning rental stability, workforce development, homeownership, and access to capital in low-to-moderate income neighborhoods. In 2018,we proposed the following economic empowerment programming or evaluations. Innovative Financing Suite Pilot The Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller and the "FDIC" has collaborated with our team to promote numerous convenings and research support on inclusive economy,economic mobility and access to capital for community development purposes.Our Innovative Financing portfolio refers to a suite of initiatives aimed at increasing access to capital in South Bend based off the CDFI Friendly-City Model launched in Bloomington, IN.This strategy will include: (a)a platform for connecting LMI residents with capital opportunities, (b) a strategy for attracting additional capital to the region, and (c) a structure for monitoring the impact of programs. In 2018 we joined the regional BankOn alliance and launched a CDFI Working Group to develop a strategy intended to attract CDFI lending to the South Bend market. It is necessary to build on the work that this group and a hired consultant(Mark Pinsky, $40,000 allotment in 2019 budget)can do and pursue CDFI lending in an organized way that thoroughly vets all potential partners. By pursuing CDFI lending in a systematic way, rather than pursuing this lending on a deal-by-deal basis,the City can offer more attractive investments to CDFI partners and ensure that different personal and small business lending needs are met in minority and underserved neighborhoods. Our team will leverage its membership in the Northern Indiana "BankOn"Alliance and encourage members to support the work being done around CDFI lending and increasing access to traditional financial products.This group can serve an important role by instituting annual reporting that would call on member institutions to publicize uptake rate, and user base of CRA-compliant programs. Additional reporting would strengthen the Alliance, and allow it to push members to collaborate, and even offer new programs. Banks currently lack the incentive to go above minimal CRA-compliance requirements,which means they could improve their offerings targeted to un/underbanked populations. Annual reporting in conjunction with the new opportunities the City is promoting, will give banks an outlet and an incentive to increase their CRA-compliant offerings. Eviction Legal Defense Fund After the Eviction Lab at Princeton University released national eviction data sets,the City of South Bend had one of the top ten highest rates of eviction in the country. Locally, 19%of extremely low-income renters in South Bend spend more than 50%of their income on rent;this is 4.6%higher than national average The City committed to examining available data to identify high eviction Census tracts and analyzing relationships between different tract-level variables and eviction rates over between 2012- 2016,the largest continuous period when data was available.Variables investigated were Median Income, Percent Rent Burdened, Labor Force Unemployment Rate, Percent of Families Below Poverty Level,and Overall Population. Overall population was consistently found to possess little relationship with increased eviction rates. However, relationships between eviction rates and numerous analyzed variables were inconsistent. This inconsistency demonstrates a need for individual tract-level attention to fully understand the nature 14