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On November 15, 2021, President Biden signed the historic Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) into law. The IIJA supports $1.2 trillion in programming, including $550B in new spending.
This guide was produced to support local action that is ambitious enough to meet the scale of IIJA. It is intended to advance the conversation to focus on actionable insights for local leaders.
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The economic recovery especially for families and communities of color will need more than just relief from a year of a pandemic; the recovery calls for community equity.
The lack of homeownership and wealth creation for Black families highlights the historical and systemic barriers that have prevented equitable access to homeownership for Black communities.
We advocate for targeted policies and investments that promote homeownership and build community equity as a means to reduce the racial wealth divide and outline actionable steps for policymakers, financial institutions, and community organizations to support sustainable homeownership and community development initiatives that can foster long-term wealth building in historically marginalized communities.
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The election of New York City’s 110th mayor this November could coincide with one of the most economically transformative periods of federal investment since the New Deal or the Great Society. By an accident of history, Eric Adams could become mayor at a time when he’ll have considerable potential to profoundly shape the future of New York.
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In April 2021, the Nowak Metro Finance Lab and Accelerator for America released the Federal Investment Guide to the American Rescue Plan (ARPA). The guide broke down The Biden Administration’s COVID relief package from a “bottom-up” perspective: summarizing over 84 individual programs, flowing from 19 federal agencies and through seven different distribution channels.
Our hope is that local leaders can put ARPA funds toward driving equity and inclusion in the recovery.
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Are states deploying SSBCI funds effectively?
Our report draws on examples from Pennsylvania, Kansas, Montana, Georgia, West Virginia, Colorado, and Alaska to illustrate their strategies and success in fostering small business growth and economic development.
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With support from the Irvine Foundation, this report proposes changes in historically underutilized business (HUB) procurement policy to close the nation’s racial wealth gap. With at least one large infrastructure measure at the federal level in the offing, the HUB Project provides specific, actionable recommendations to change our country’s paradigm to ensure that a generational investment in infrastructure is also a generational investment in small and minority owned businesses.
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As of July 15th, most states have received their first half of the total flexible funding offered by the American Rescue Plan (ARPA).
The allocation of funds across various sectors including health, housing, and education. To effectively utilize the funds over the long term and maximize economic and social benefits, local leaders must plan strategically.
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For cities and metros, 2020 was a time of unprecedented crisis, and 2021 is a time of unprecedented Federal investment. Building back from this crisis will require doing things differently.
Drexel's Nowak Metro Finance Lab is working with Accelerator for America, the US Conference of Mayors, and partners across the country to organize for a transformative recovery.
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On March 11, 2021, President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) into law. The legislation represents a historic intervention and a fitting response to the devastating impact of the global COVID-19 crisis.
In the report, we provide a guide to federal funding in the ARP. We place a special emphasis on formula funds received by local anchors, competitive grants, and funds distributed to public authorities that city leadership can leverage to boost their recovery.
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The National Inclusive Metro Recovery Playbook provides mayors, business and civic leaders, and other local officials with a strategic plan for fostering the growth of minority- and women-owned businesses during the post-COVID economic recovery. These guidelines help shape local strategies and prioritize development efforts.
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To identify disparities in business density and representation in Latino-owned businesses, the report analyzes Latino-owned businesses in San Diego, El Paso, and Tucson pre- and post-COVID-19.
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To support small businesses recovering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government must leverage existing programs like the State Small Business Credit Initiative and advocate for legislative measures such as the RELIEF for Main Street Act.
In this report, we identify five steps that form a roadmap towards a more inclusive, dynamic, and productive small-business sector.
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Four months into the COVID-19 crisis, the outlook for the country’s small businesses is as murky as ever.
The country’s small business problems existed long before COVID hit. America has not been forming new business or increasing economic dynamism at a sufficient rate since the Great Recession - these issues have only been pronounced by the coronavirus crisis.
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The absence of wealth creation in the Black community is at the root of lingering social inequalities. Racism is the "disease," while insidious, intergenerational poverty and societal and health inequities are the symptoms.
Any cure must ensure that wealth arising from equity investments in communities of color is at least shared with, and not extracted via sophisticated financial instruments that continue to prey on, these ever-vulnerable communities.
This, we believe, is the essence of equitable community development.
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As local and state governments move into reopening phases following a lengthy COVID lockdown period, the small business casualties are being seen in Main Streets and commercial corridors across the country. Of particular concern is the fate of Black-owned businesses amid this fallout, who are more susceptible to the economic impacts generated by the public health crisis.
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As the COVID-19 crisis continues to wreak havoc on communities and small businesses across the country, local and national actors have realized the enormity of the economic challenge at hand.
Last week we profiled five emerging typologies of relief funds. We seek to expand on our typologies and show local leaders the nuts and bolts that go into operationalizing these funds, while providing practical resources for them to set up their own funds. We profile three first mover funds: The Birmingham Strong Fund; The Erie County Revenue and Gaming Authority’s Bridge Loan Fund; and The Indy Chamber’s Rapid Response Fund.
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In the intervening fourteen days the scale of the COVID-19 crisis has become better understood and the federal government has responded with $350 billion for small businesses in the CARES act.
Local small business relief funds can be categorized into five distinct types based on the driving institution behind each fund: city government funds, public entity funds, philanthropic funds, financial institution funds, and business chamber funds.
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The story of Erie presented here is a microcosm of the challenges many cities are facing across the nation. It shows how a community writ large – and a group of remarkable, passionate entrepreneurs, and city builders – have been able to restore a sense of civic pride and purpose and put a city back on track, and how that years-long effort is at risk of reversal in a matter of weeks.
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Golaski Labs is the first project in Accelerator for America’s and Drexel University’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab OZ DealBook series, which takes deep dives into the nuts and bolts of the first— as well as the most illustrative and interesting— Opportunity Zone deals.
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More than a year since Opportunity Zones were formally designated, Opportunity Fund capital has been flowing increasingly faster into real estate, while investment in businesses trickles in.
Realizing the Transformative Potential of Opportunity Zone Business Investing: A Guide for Practitioners highlights the gap emerging in OZ investment between high-volume real estate deals and less common operating business investment and offers solutions to help the existing legislation achieve its intended goals of creating quality local jobs, greater community wealth and stronger local economies.
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The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 contained a bipartisan amendment with a new economic development incentive to spur private investment in 8,762 low-income census tracts designated by states as Opportunity Zones.
The report pairs its key findings with essential actions required by local communities to successfully attract the desired opportunity zone investments, requiring stakeholders to lower the rigid barriers of distrust that so often plague community development.
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This report documents the paradigm shift from siloed community development toward emerging, innovative models of building community wealth by investing in people instead of buildings and countering the parasitic economy which keeps communities blighted and segregated.
It is the goal of the paper to advance the rapid adaptation on multidisciplinary models used by the innovative organizations profiled, and for anchors, institutions and investors to get on board with holistic investment strategies supportive of community wealth creation.
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In late 2018, fundraising announcements became commonplace and investors began diverting gains into qualified vehicles, and now construction is beginning on qualified projects.
As much as we may be tempted to treat Opportunity Zones and the projects within them as a uniform asset class, in actuality the tool presents a diverse range of possibilities.
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Opportunity Zones (OZs), a tax incentive created through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, were not specifically designed to tackle America’s many infrastructure challenges. To help cities realize the full potential of this unique tax incentive, this brief lays out nine steps that cities can take to use OZs to improve their infrastructure assets.
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The recent Opportunity Zone Investor Summit co-hosted by Accelerator for America ("A4A") and presented by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth at Stanford University signals a perfect moment to provide an early report on our conversations with finance experts and on the ideas articulated by Investor Summit Panelists from all across the country.
Over 400 more experts, including Mayors or delegations from 35 cities, attended the March 18, 2019 Investor Summit to share learnings and pitch projects to investors. We conducted these interviews and convened the Summit in hopes that we could use these experts’ collective wisdom to ascertain how to use the Opportunity Zone tax incentive.
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This policy brief advocates for a more balanced approach that reflects the market variance and complexity within and across cities, organized around Seven Principles to guide city analysis and strategy for leveraging newly established Opportunity Zones.
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