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Wealth Opportunities Realized Through Homeownership (WORTH): Baseline Report

May 15, 2023

This report is part of an evaluation of the Wealth Opportunities Realized through Homeownership (WORTH) initiative. Led by the Wells Fargo Foundation, WORTH supports efforts to close persistent disparities in homeownership in Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, San Diego, and rural and tribal areas. In each market, we examine housing supply and demand, homebuying activity, homeownership trends, and preservation conditions. We found that in almost every market, white households have higher homeownership rates than every other racial or ethnic group. Moreover, macroeconomic forces driving market conditions, like higher interest rates and moderating house prices, can significantly dampen or thwart market collaboratives' efforts to boost homeownership rates for people of color. Future evaluation will examine the implementation processes used in each market. The larger body of work contributes to understanding the crucial connection between homeownership and wealth-building and the multitude of barriers that households of color face in achieving homeownership. It also supports research-backed strategies for increasing homeownership for households of color and for reducing racial disparities.

Changing the Playbook: Immigrants and the COVID-19 Response in Two U.S. Communities

July 27, 2022

U.S. cities and towns have responded to COVID-19 in ways that are as diverse as the communities they aim to support. This report looks at how two very different locations—Worthington, MN, and the greater Houston area—incorporated immigrants into their relief efforts, through partnerships, strategic outreach, targeted assistance, and more. The report also highlights useful lessons for responses to future emergencies.

Continuing Efforts To Slow Violent Crime: Promising Innovations From 3 Democrat-Led Cities

July 27, 2022

Historically, the United States' approach to crime has been reactionary and overreliant on criminal legal sanctions, and it has failed to adequately address the social, health, and behavioral factors that drive crime. Still, as the country continues to grapple with a rise in gun violence, a new wave of "tough-on-crime" rhetoric has emerged, blaming progressive policies for the increase in violent crime. While violent crime rose across the country in 2020, progressive leaders in cities are investing resources into proven public health and community-based solutions to stop gun violence before it starts, and these cities are seeing early signs of success in stemming the tide.Rather than accept calls for tough-on-crime policies, leaders in Houston, Boston, and Newark, New Jersey, have taken a more holistic approach to prevent violence before it starts. These cities are three examples of jurisdictions that have implemented comprehensive public safety plans focused not only on stopping violent crime but also on prioritizing community-driven and public health-focused innovations that break the cycle of violence.

Houston Muslim Study

May 20, 2022

The purpose of the Houston Muslim Study is to provide an in-depth and policy-relevant study, through a non-security lens, about American Muslims at the local level in Houston, Texas. The study offers fresh insights and helps shape a discussion about American Muslims that is data-driven and moves beyond the generalizations, prejudices, and fear that too often surround public and policy discourses about Muslim communities in America.

Economic Democracy Case Studies

February 8, 2022

The Economic Democracy Project at Demos envisions liberation for Black and brown people. This requires us to address inequities in economic, political, and institutional power. The concept of economic democracy recognizes that everyone deserves a stake in the system and that the economy should exist to serve the people—the demos. In a moment in which a corporate ruling class exploits racial and class divisions to dodge accountability and accumulate power, preserving our democracy requires creating opportunities for the public to lead and shape economic outcomes.The Economic Democracy Project aims to highlight and develop strategies that Black and brown communities can use to build economic and political power. It has 3 priorities:Break up and regulate new corporate power, including Amazon, Google, and Facebook.Expand the meaning of public goods and ensure that services are equitably and publicly administered.Strengthen "co-governance" strategies so that people and public agencies can collectively make decisions about the economy.The case studies outlined here spotlight 4 community campaigns working across the U.S. to reclaim power over economic resources.

Evaluating Net-Zero Industrial Hubs in the United States: A Case Study of Houston

June 30, 2021

New legislation, corporate action, and public interest have created both an imperative and opportunities associated with rapid and profound CO2 reduction and removal. Net-zero industrial hubs present a pathway to focus investment, innovation, and public policy to create industries and infrastructure toward achieving that goal. Such a hub would require building facilities, plants, and linked infrastructure that would reduce and eventually eliminate greenhouse gas emissions through the application of advanced clean energy, emissions control technology, and possibly CO2 removal technology. This concept, while relatively new, has already gained interest from some nations and companies, most notably in the United Kingdom around net-zero hubs like the Teesside collective.This paper, part of the work from the Carbon Management Research Initiative of Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, examines Houston as a potential net-zero hub location. Houston, a major US refining and petrochemical center, possesses a high concentration of industrial sites and fossil-fueled power plants. Regional CO2 storage capacity, low-cost energy, infrastructure like the Port of Houston, and a large skilled labor pool also suggest a possible opportunity for investment, trade, and greenhouse gas reduction in this area. The paper also makes recommendations for policy makers should they seek to pursue a net-zero hub in the Houston area.

Alternative Dispatch Programs: A Strategy for Improving Emergency Responses and Reducing Police Violence

June 4, 2021

Approximately 240 million calls are made to 911 every year in the United States. Only a small fraction of these calls are for serious or violent crimes. Even in communities with high homicide rates such as Baltimore, Camden, New Haven, and New Orleans, fewer than 4 percent of 911 calls are related to violent crimes. Instead, the majority of these calls are related to incidents of disorderly conduct, noise complaints, suspicious people or cars, mental health issues, substance use, and homelessness.Programs that deploy public health professionals and crisis workers to situations involving mental health, substance use, and homelessness—referred to as alternative dispatch programs—offer an emerging solution that can save lives and provide critical services to those in need. Alternative dispatch programs utilize first responders who are specifically trained to resolve the emergencies that most commonly arise in communities with methods that address root problems and minimize the risk of force or deeper involvement with the justice system. These programs provide communities with a critical means for addressing crises, while also freeing police to focus on preventing and solving serious crimes.

Four Corners: Health Research Priorities Among TNB Communities

March 10, 2021

Transgender and nonbinary (TNB) people experience striking inequities in health and healthcare. In the United States, these inequities are amplified among TNB Black, Indigenous people of color (BIPOC) and TNB people with disabilities, highlighting the need for all TNB health equity initiatives to recognize racism, ableism, and other intersecting forms of oppression. Despite a recent increase in TNB health research, there is a lack of peer-reviewed literature that considers priority issues and accountable research practices from the perspectives of TNB people, and particularly TNB BIPOC and people with disabilities.In 2018, four federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) specializing in LGBTQ care across the United States: Howard Brown Health in Chicago, Whitman-Walker Institute in the District of Columbia, Los Angeles LGBT Center in Los Angeles, and Legacy Community Health in Houston, partnered to form the Four Corners: TNB Health Research Advisory Network. Four Corners is a 16-member network consisting of one researcher, one clinician, and two TNB community members from each FQHC, all of which reside in a geographically distinct region and serve a highly diverse TNB patient panel. Four Corners envisions a world where all TNB people have access to safe, relevant, and equitable healthcare and aims to advance health research by involving TNB community members, researchers, and clinicians as equal partners in the research process.In the summer of 2019, Four Corners conducted eight focus groups, two in each city of participating sites, in order to explore health and research priorities, participants' prior experiences with research, and preferences for research dissemination. Focus groups were facilitated by two TNB project staff and included 65 participants, all of whom were at least eighteen years of age and selfidentified as transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming. Participants were recruited via flyers posted at the four FQHCs and social media advertisements. Focus groups were audio recorded and transcribed.

Hearts and Minds in Houston: Implementing and Evaluating Cross-Trainings on the Value of Employment for Ending Homelessness

November 3, 2020

Many communities struggle to ensure that people experiencing homelessness have access to appropriate, effective employment services. Through their work with Heartland Alliance's National Center on Employment and Homelessness (NCEH), stakeholders in Houston, TX, identified cross-system training as a promising means to build buy-in and commitment from staff and leaders from both the workforce development and homeless services systems around prioritizing employment outcomes for people experiencing homelessness. NCEH partnered with Houston stakeholders to develop, deliver, and evaluate a training curriculum for personnel from multiple systems aimed at increasing their knowledge and positively changing their attitudes and beliefs about homelessness and employment. This paper discusses the impact of the cross-system trainings and gives recommendations to other communities seeking to build buy-in for similar cross-system coordination work. 

Black Funding Denied: Community Foundation Support for Black Communities

August 1, 2020

In light of the national uprising sparked by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (and building on other recent tragic movement moments going back to the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri), NCRP is analyzing grantmaking by community foundations across the country to find out exactly how much they are – or are not – investing in Black communities.We started by looking at the latest available grantmaking data (2016-2018) of 25 community foundations (CFs) – from Los Angeles to New Orleans to New York City to St. Paul. These foundations represent a cross section of some of the country's largest community foundations as well as foundations in communities where NCRP has Black-led nonprofit allies.

Predicting City Poverty Using Satellite Imagery

June 16, 2019

Reliable data about socio-economic conditions of individuals, such as health indexes, consumption expenditures and wealth assets, remain scarce for most countries. Traditional methods to collect such data include on site surveys that can be expensive and labour intensive. On the other hand, remote sensing data, such as high-resolution satellite imagery, are becoming largely available. To circumvent the lack of socio-economic data at high granularity, computer vision has already been applied successfully to raw satellite imagery sampled from resource poor countries.In this work we apply a similar approach to the metropolitan areas of five different cities in North and South America, starting from pre-trained convolutional models used for poverty mapping in developing regions. Applying a transfer learning process we estimate household income from visual satellite features. The urban environment we consider is characterized by different features with respect to the resource-poor training environment, such as the high heterogeneity in population density. By leveraging both official and crowd-sourced data at city scale, we show the feasibility of estimating the socio-economic conditions of different neighborhoods from satellite data.

Failing to Protect and Serve: Police Department Policies Towards Transgender People

May 7, 2019

American policing is in grave need of reform. Reports of racial and religious profiling, killings of unarmed civilians, and sexual abuse and other forms of misconduct by police across the nation are all too common. Over half (58%) of transgender people who interacted with law enforcement that knew they were transgender in the last year reported experiences of harassment, abuse or other mistreatment by the police according to the US Transgender Survey (USTS). Transgender people often feel, accurately, that they can do nothing about this mistreatment, knowing that they risk falling victim to additional mistreatment by those tasked with conducting and overseeing the complaint process.As we make groundbreaking advancements towards transgender equality, many members of our communities continue to be affected by disproportionate contact with, and often by bias and abuse within, policing and the criminal justice system. Transgender people face staggering levels of violence, homelessness, and poverty in the United States, with transgender people of color experiencing the greatest disparities. Thus, it is not surprising that, even though transgender people are more likely to be victims of violent crime than non-transgender people, over half (57%) of all USTS respondents feel uncomfortable calling the police for help when they need it.The purpose of this report is to promote stronger and more fair policies when it comes to police interactions with transgender people. This report focuses primarily on policies specifically governing police interactions with transgender people, including non-discrimination statements, recognition of non-binary identities in applicable policies, use of respectful communication, recording information in department forms, search procedures, transportation, placement in temporary lock-up facilities, access to medication, removal of appearance related items, training, and bathroom access. For each topic, model policies are provided that can and should be adopted by police departments in collaboration with transgender leaders in their communities.