Neighborhood Investment Flows

In seeking to transform distressed neighborhoods, community improvement initiativeshave overlooked an important component of the local environment likely to inform both how neighborhoods function and whether initiatives succeededin achieving their objectives. Quantifying the full range of investment flows into and out of affected neighborhoods and statistically relatingthose flows to data on changes in otherneighborhood conditions is of considerable interest.

This report presents learning gathered during an incubator project supported by the What Works Collaborative to investigate the availability of investmentdata inseveral cities. We find that the extent and quality of local data needed for tracking investment flows has improveddramatically in manyplaces. While exhaustive quantification is probably not possible anywhere, a fairly complete picture is now available in somecities. Given the considerable interest in this topic from policy and practitioner audiences, we feel this argues for initiating a research study to quantifyinvestment flows in a small number of targeted cities and neighborhoods.