New Markets are Urban Markets

This post should have gone up several days ago, fortunately the finding is evergreen.

Last week Treasury announced it's New Markets tax credit. The program provides $1.5 billion this year for community development and is funded through ARRA.

While the headline was the amount of money going out, the point that few noticed is how much of this community development is headed to urban areas.

Source: CDFI releases, author's calculations

The figure gives the share of the total disbursements. The data comes from individual allocations, which state the share of their funds going to each type of location. The clear tendency is to spend in urban areas. In fact of the 32 organizations that received funds only three intend to use more than 40 percent of their funds in urban areas. Of course this is only one part of ARRA.