ASSESSING AND PROMOTING OPPORTUNITY IN JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. TARGET COMMUNITIES: Process Evaluation

Allison Freeman, Mark McDaniel, and Mat Despard MARCH 2018

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INTRODUCTION The UNC Center for Community Capital (CCC) partnered with JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPMC) for an in-depth investigation into the intersecting roles of housing and place in linking low- and moderate-income (LMI) families to opportunity in neighborhoods in San Francisco and New Orleans. For this assessment of opportunity – which was written up and released in Assessing and Promoting Opportunity in JPMorgan Chase & Co. Target Communities: Findings from New Orleans and San Francisco – CCC undertook a mixed-methods approach that could be replicated anywhere JPMC seeks to deepen the impact of its community investments. In conjunction with its opportunity assessment, CCC is providing JPMC with a process evaluation to help guide JPMC’s future work in assessing and promoting opportunity at the local level. The information offered here is intended to improve the efficiency and success of future opportunity assessment processes. This document is broken into two main sections: lessons learned from the qualitative assessment; and lessons learned from the quantitative assessment.

QUALITATIVE ASSESSMENT: LESSONS LEARNED The first lesson we learned when conducting our assessment of opportunity in New Orleans and San Francisco concerned background preparedness. An assessment of opportunity by lower-income people in a specific place involves understanding multi-layered and intricately intertwined issues – historical context, planning and development issues, political power, racial/ethnic inequities, local economic context, etc. Because an opportunity assessment is conducted quickly, within a complicated and highly particular setting, it is crucial to hit the ground with sufficient background information to begin to understand what issues and which actors are most important to consider. CCC undertook and recommends the following initial steps for future opportunity assessments:

1. CCC conducted a background review of newspaper articles concerning each city, each neighborhood of interest, and each housing development at the heart of our study.

2. During its review of relevant news, CCC identified journalists who worked on the topic of affordable housing in each site. CCC spoke with these journalists to get the lay of the land and to find out which actors were doing work on issues of interest. Some of these actors were contacted for interviews; others were contacted to provide us with the names of people we might interview.

3. CCC dug into planning and policy documents for an overview of what each city was doing on issues of interest.

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4. CCC dug into political documents (e.g. in California, we looked at the 2016 Proposition A Affordable Housing Bond pro and con arguments) in order to find groups who were active on issues of interest.

Following this background research, CCC recommends that those conducting opportunity assessments get on the ground quickly to build relationships. Building relationships with local actors is necessary in order to promote trust: without trust, researchers won’t get information from interviewees; without trust, interviewees will not recommend additional parties for researchers to speak with. CCC undertook and recommends the following steps for getting on the ground and building relationships:

1. Think broadly and consider who might feel slighted (e.g. program officers, city officials) if they are not included in the research process.

2. Be aware that reaching people may involve multiple steps and these may necessitate a good amount of lead time. For example, some interviewees (especially in political environments) might need permission from higher-ups before they can speak with researchers, and researchers might need to be vetted before they can continue their work.

3. Assistance from the funding agency can help facilitate access to some organizations and individuals, since the funder already has relationships in the community of interest. It is crucial for those undertaking opportunity assessments to develop good relationships with local program officers.

In undertaking its assessment of access to opportunity by LMI people, CCC was asked to focus its work on neighborhoods where public housing had been or was in the process of being converted into mixed-income housing. This focus required CCC to work with two local developers, BRIDGE Housing in San Francisco and Bayou District Foundation in New Orleans. There were benefits and disadvantages to this type of site-selection, and we offer here some lessons learned about site-selection:

1. Doing research in a particular housing development brings its own set of complications. It can ease the research process if a developer is welcoming to researchers. However, it can also complicate the research process if a developer is resistant and seeks to protect the site or residents from researchers.

2. Even in situations where a developer or management company is cooperative, management’s involvement in the research process can bias results: for example, a management company that helps recruit resident interviewees might select only the most satisfied residents; this can result in selection bias, which will skew research results.

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3. The type of developer involved in the conversion of public to mixed-income housing can impact an assessment of opportunity. For example, a private developer who is solely responsible for the conversion of a housing development, right down to coordinating on-site services, might be easy to work with. A publicly-led conversion process, with any number of political actors involved, can be more complicated to navigate; in this type of conversion, it can be difficult to obtain access to the site of interest, and interviewees tend to need permission to speak with outside researchers, all of which delay the interview process.

4. Conducting an assessment in a neighborhood where the mixed-income housing conversion process is ongoing presents unique challenges and opportunities. The organization leading the conversion may be especially sensitive to assessment findings that might illuminate community tensions or concerns about the process, yet these findings might help identify issues or ideas this organization could better address.

5. Because of the complications associated with conducting research on specific developments, CCC recommends that JPMC undertake future assessments of opportunity at a regional, rather than a site-specific, level.

In addition to the above, CCC recommends that future opportunity assessments include a community-based participatory research approach that would include the following additional steps for conducting an assessment:

1. Identify a lead organization in the community with the following characteristics:

a. Is leading local efforts to facilitate neighborhood change or revitalization.

b. Enables residents to have a voice in these change efforts. c. Has a reputation for fair dealing among multiple stakeholders. d. Is not hostile to the idea of working with researchers.

2. Determine this organization’s interest in conducting a housing and opportunity assessment:

a. Consider what research questions – if answered – could produce new insights that would help inform and improve community change efforts.

b. Assess organization’s willingness and ability to adapt their process to community concerns as revealed through the housing and opportunity assessment.

3. The lead organization and the research center would work together to: a. Articulate research questions. b. Determine how data will be collected to answer the research questions.

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c. Coordinate data collection efforts, which might include paid roles among neighborhood residents (e.g. conducting door-to-door surveys).

d. Analyze and make sense of the data in a way that produces new and actionable insights while avoiding any bias that reflects the lead organization’s self-interests (e.g. a preference for a certain type of community investment).

e. Bring residents and stakeholders together to discuss findings and identify next steps (similar to the convenings CCC has planned for Columbia Parc and Potrero Terrace and Annex).

One final suggestion for JPMC as it conducts future assessments of opportunity is that those undertaking the work complete their quantitative analysis before undertaking qualitative work. In the current assessment, both sides of the project were undertaken simultaneously. However, CCC’s quantitative work revealed trends and issues that researchers would have liked to ask resident and stakeholder interviewees about, such as the dramatic changes in resident demographics in Potrero Hill over the last several years. We suggest that future opportunity assessments stagger the two sides of the analysis, using the quantitative findings to inform the on-the-ground qualitative work.

QUANTITATIVE ASSESSMENT: LESSONS LEARNED CCC learned a number of lessons while conducting its quantitative assessment of opportunity at the local level. We offer these lessons here in order to help JPMC promote the efficiency and effectiveness of future opportunity assessments.

1. In order to conduct a rigorous assessment of opportunity at the local level, CCC partnered with a geographer and a demographer, who between them brought to the project in-depth experience conducting regional analyses. CCC recommends that future opportunity assessments include geographers, demographers, and others with in-depth experience examining access to resources at the local level.

2. The Area Opportunity Index (AOI) used for this analysis was comprised of a single indicator for each of the following domains: economic, education, housing, health, and social. Each of these single indicators were a good proxy for other outcomes: for example, the health domain indicator was the percentage of residents ages 18 to 64 who had health insurance coverage, which is a strong predictor of use of health care and health outcomes. There were benefits and disadvantages to taking this approach.

a. The key advantage of the AOI is that the data are publicly available from the U.S. Census Bureau at the census tract level (which is the best geographic unit representation of a “neighborhood”), so within a given

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community, one can see the variation in AOI scores across multiple neighborhoods.

b. The key disadvantage of the AOI is that the score does not necessarily reflect actual opportunity in a particular neighborhood, but may reflect the accumulation of past opportunities both among residents who have lived in the neighborhood for a long while and those who have moved into the neighborhood but who benefited from opportunities elsewhere.

c. Thus, the AOI is a very good benchmark indicator of opportunity-related well-being, but to better pinpoint opportunity in a given neighborhood, qualitative methods (e.g. resident and stakeholder interviews) and a Community Asset Profile (see below) are needed.

3. For an even richer assessment of the spatial distribution within communities of critical quantitative indicators of well-being that reflect present and past access to opportunity, CCC recommends that the next iteration of the Area Opportunity Index include:

a. Multiple indicators for each domain i. Economic stability: median income, poverty (status by various

household characteristics), unemployment, small business lending ii. Education: educational attainment, cohort dropout rate,

achievement gap (standardized test score difference for low-income students)

iii. Health: insured rate, food access, food insecurity, SNAP usage rate per household

iv. Housing: burden, vacancy, tenure, HMDA data (mortgage lending), property values, blighted properties, property tax liens

v. Social: concentration at extremes, concentrated poverty, migration, personal and property crime

vi. Various domain interactions (e.g. earnings for individuals with only a high school diploma; poverty rate by disability status)

b. Change over time: try to gather indicators over multiple time points/waves (e.g. home appreciation)

c. Community Asset Profile: Identification of neighborhood-level risk (-) and protective (+) factors, meaning resources, assets, and/or conditions that may facilitate (+) or hinder (-) opportunity, including:

i. Presence of community development corporations (CDCs), neighborhood association, block clubs, resident councils (+)

ii. Presence of community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and community development credit unions (+)

iii. Presence of major financial inclusion initiatives, such as a local BankOn coalition (+)

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iv. Presence of/proximity to federally qualified health center (FQHC) (+)

v. Presence of/proximity to safety net/economic nonprofits (e.g. LISC financial opportunity centers, National Foundation for Credit Counseling member agency, Volunteer Income Tax Assistance sites) (+)

vi. Reasonable distance to bank or credit union (+) vii. Alternative financial services (-)

viii. Greenspace, parks, trails (+) ix. Public transportation (+) x. Presence of or proximity to brownfields and other environmental

hazards tracked by HUD/EPA (-) xi. Local asset maps (if available; documenting things like

community gardens, clubs, block associations, faith communities) (+)

xii. Place-based investments (e.g. major affordable housing, community economic development investments via banks, CDFIs, other intermediaries)

xiii. Active community benefit agreements (CBAs) affecting residents xiv. Acres of community-owned land (e.g. land trusts, conservation

easements)

Identifying community-level risk and protective factors is especially important to gain a clear sense of the resources, initiatives, and momentum a neighborhood has that may impact opportunity and that might indicate specific opportunities for community investment.