The understanding that sustainable communities are as dependent on the creation of good jobs as they are on the availability of decent, affordable housing is, I believe, a relatively new construct in our political discourse.

The goal of community development lending is to facilitate the ability of low and moderate income households to make use of financial markets and instruments for their own benefit. In other words, policy is about the well-being of people, not neighborhoods. Research that focuses on neighborhood-wide outcomes — even important outcomes like home ownership or property values — in some sense misses the mark.

The future of community affairs research is promising in my view, despite the pitfalls...The fact that popular policy discussions in this area are so prone to error also points out the social value of good solid research. 

We ought to be building datasets containing detailed and comprehensive records of financial transactions as well as income and spending for a panel of households over the course of many years. So if I were to try to identify the main challenges in community development research, one would be to find ways of improving our understanding of how changes in financial institutions, instruments and regulation have affected the behavior and welfare of individual households in the population of interest. This is not an easy task. One obvious reason for the greater focus on lenders and neighborhoods is data availability. But to the extent to which our research program is driven by policy questions, I would hope that our future research efforts are guided more by a focus on people.