Low- to moderate-income lending in context: Progress report on the neighborhood impacts of homeownership policy

This article presents an interpretive progress report on the neighborhood-level effects of homeownership policy. The expansion of targeted lending initiatives has created unprecedented opportunities for ownership among low- to moderate-income (LMI) families, racial and ethnic minorities, and other populations once excluded from the nation's mainstream housing finance system. The article uses a two-stage strategy to provide a more accurate progress report on efforts to expand LMI homeownership. First, it uses home-purchase data for the 40 largest metropolitan regions to identify a set of "best-case" neighborhoods that experienced the greatest quantitative increase in LMI lending during the middle 1990s. Second, it assesses the nature of these places qualitatively. The approach allows one to evaluate the degree to which increased LMI lending provides genuine opportunities for affordable homeownership-or unleashes other processes that conflict with the goals of affordability and sustainable neighborhood development.