The State Small Business Credit Initiative is a complex but significant source of funding and technical assistance for many businesses still recovering from the pandemic, just starting out, or seeking to grow.
Policy Summit 2025: Building Strong and Sustainable Communities is approaching. We invite you to join us in Cleveland on June 26 and 27, 2025, for this community development event dedicated to best practices, policies, and programs affecting lower-income communities across the United States. This biennial summit ensures that local voices are part of the national dialogue about solutions to promote economic mobility and resilience.
“Daycare is the first steppingstone to having a job”
Learn how communities, from parents to organizations to those in the childcare industry, are dealing with childcare challenges and creating opportunities for caregivers to work.
Availability of affordable housing continues to decrease
In the most recent Community Issues Survey (CIS), 74 percent of respondents said that the availability of affordable housing had continued to decrease over the past six months. This is the highest share since the first CIS in March 2018. Review updates to the low- and moderate-income (LMI) indices and other key findings from the most recent survey.
The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book is a national summary of economic conditions. It includes sections from various Reserve Banks devoted to the conditions of lower-income individuals and communities. A recent entry includes the following insights from Fourth District community contacts:
One contact observed that higher costs for basic needs had driven more households to borrow money from family or friends to make ends meet.
Several contacts noted that rising rents limited affordable housing options for LMI households.
While most pandemic relief funds have expired, other large-scale programs present new funding opportunities for nonprofits and local governments that serve disadvantaged people and places. How are organizations navigating this complex environment?
“Everything revolves around where we live”: affordable homeownership in Ohio
Earlier this year, we explored the state of affordable homeownership through video, photography, and stories from a real estate agent, two recent homebuyers in Ohio, the leaders of housing-related nonprofits, and researchers. Housing experts and researchers discuss why affordable homeownership matters, how the affordable homeownership market has changed in recent years and why, what is being done to help increase access to affordable housing, and where we might go from here.
The size of the gap between rent paid by new tenants and rent paid by existing tenants remains large, suggesting that consumer price index rent inflation will remain above its prepandemic norm, researchers found.
Managing cash flow ranks as a top financial challenge for small businesses
Findings from the 2023 Small Business Credit Survey show that approximately 80 percent of small businesses experience payments-related challenges, the most common being fees associated with payments processing.
Small business leaders reveal conditions and challenges
A small business report from the Federal Reserve suggests that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to fade and that small business conditions have seen modest improvement. Still, small businesses continue to face headwinds.
How new small businesses differ from those at later stages of the business lifecycle
How do the financial conditions and credit needs of young firms compare to those of older ones? How do they compare among employer and nonemployer firms?Analyzing the differences between firms at different phases of their lifecycles can shed light on how to best support their growth, bolstering the broader economy.
More than 60 percent of Ohio’s driver’s license suspensions do not stem from bad driving; instead, they arise because the driver owes an unpaid debt. Debt-related suspensions (DRS) could prevent people from getting to work, where they could make the money needed to repay the debt. In this report, we investigate whether DRS have implications for Ohio’s labor force.
An updated tool from the Philadelphia and Cleveland Feds sheds light on career paths for nearly 600 occupations across 500-plus US locations by enabling users to visualize how skills needed for lower-paying jobs can transfer to similar jobs with higher pay.
High turnover in childcare sector holds back broader workforce
Turnover among childcare workers was 65 percent higher than for the typical job in 2022, while attrition among preschool and kindergarten teachers was on par with that of the typical occupation.
President Hammack plans to visit all corners of the Fourth District in her ongoing Around the District tour so she can meet with and learn from business, civic, and community leaders in the region served by the Cleveland Fed. Having a deep understanding of the District will be crucial to Hammack’s ability to represent the region at the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s monetary policy body, in Washington DC.
