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This article provides preliminary evidence on the job impacts of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. The author uses a difference-in-differences (DiD) study design to leverage a one-time shock to the formula allocation process, which permanently reshuffled grant generosity, creating quasi-experimental variation. Job counts increased greatly in localities that received a large positive boost to their allocations but were unchanged in localities where allocations fell. For localities that benefited from the shock, cost-per-job estimates of the CDBG appear promising.

This study investigates why U.S. states vary in their spending of federal funds under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, the primary federal program grant to support low-income families with children. Grounded in fiscal federalism and state welfare politics, the study examines how political and institutional settings shape states’ spending decisions, using panel data from all 50 states from fiscal year 2004 to 2016 and a two-way fixed effects model. The results indicate that policy and political factors significantly impact states’ spending decisions, whereas most socioeconomic indicators do not. In particular, states with a TANF job-search requirement allocate a larger share of TANF funds to child care than those without such requirements. However, this positive effect becomes negative when female legislative representation exceeds a certain threshold. These findings demonstrate that policy design and political representation interact to shape the implementation of federal grants at the state level. The study suggests that state allocation decisions under federal block grants are closely tied to institutional design and political context, with broader implications for welfare governance under federalism.

This article describes the creation of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program and its evolution over the years through the lens of three of the nation’s leading nonprofit community development organizations. The authors describe their respective organizations’ roles in the CDBG program and share their vision for its future.

For a half-century, the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program has been one of the largest federal programs supporting local economic and community development, although few rigorous evaluations of its impacts have been conducted. This study measures CDBG’s local housing market effects using annual data collected over roughly the past 20 years in Jersey City, Los Angeles County, and Washington, D.C., which are analyzed with the adjusted interrupted time series quasi-experimental impact evaluation model. Considerable, non-random selection determines which places receive CDBG-funded investments. Nevertheless, this study finds plausibly causal evidence that these investments produced substantial, persistent changes in the housing price trajectories in low-income neighborhoods. Home prices within 2,000 feet of these investments in Los Angeles County, Jersey City, and Washington, D.C., rose, on average, 5, 16, and 19 percent more than the counterfactual, respectively, although those impacts generally eroded slowly over time. At all sites, effects were measurable up to 2,000 feet in distance but differed in the degree to which they decayed across space. Cross-site differences emerged with respect to when the effects commenced after the CDBG expenditure and how long the effects persisted. Those differences likely reflect cross-site variations in the composition, intensity, and context of CDBG expenditures.

The 1937 Act provided authority to \"vest in local public housing agencies the maximum amount of responsibility in the administration of their programs\" and authorized the Secretary of HUD to make loans and annual contributions to public housing agencies to assist in the development and acquisition of low-rent housing projects and in maintaining the low-rent character of such projects (U.S. Congress, 1937). [...]of these efforts, commencing with the 1977 amendments to the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, Congress has made various revisions over the years regarding how it funds Tribal programs. The changes also mandated nondiscrimination requirements that were appropriately tailored to Tribes. Because funding to Tribes would subsequently be provided separately from funding provided to states and units of local government, Indian Preference requirements also applied to ICDBG grants. Consistent with what was then a new federal policy, first codified in Section 7(b) of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, Tribes were required to give a preference to Indians, Indian organizations, and Indian-owned economic enterprises when providing training opportunities, employment, and contracts funded under ICDBG. [...]the ICDBG program as it exists today was born.

Community development in the wake of natural disasters is a challenging undertaking. For the past 2 decades, the distribution and implementation of Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) grants have varied widely, creating useful experimentation to explore the effects of different community development strategies. This article presents an original, hand-collected dataset documenting the requirements in CDBG-DR grants that could shape rental recovery outcomes. Case-study counties were selected from this dataset to track rental market outcomes before and after the natural disasters. The authors found that multifamily rents grew more slowly, and multifamily permits increased more in ZIP Codes that received CDBG-DR funding than in comparable disaster-impacted ZIP Codes that did not receive CDBG-DR funding. These findings suggest that the program’s rental requirements are likely associated with improved outcomes for renters, who are uniquely vulnerable to disasters and deserve further attention from researchers and policymakers looking to mitigate the negative effects.

This article builds on the critique presented by Miller and Richardson (2023) of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program formula, which has remained unchanged since 1977 despite its reliance on outdated metrics, such as pre-1940 housing and growth lag. The formula’s inefficiency in targeting communities needing development funds has been well documented, yet political hurdles and zero-sum funding allocation have stalled modernization efforts. In addressing such criticisms, this article explores alternative formulas, proposing a “replacement formula” that emphasizes poverty and dated infrastructure with adjustments for fiscal capacity alongside a more conservative “repair formula” that modifies the existing dual formula structure to address its most critical flaws. This article also proposes a phased implementation of a new formula that may resolve the political challenges of reform, offering a path toward a more equitable and effective distribution of CDBG funds.

The Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) was established in 2008 to address the fallout of the foreclosure crisis and ensuing Great Recession. Like a number of other special appropriations in recent decades, NSP was designed to rely on the administrative chassis of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. This article discusses the origin and implementation of NSP and explores lessons about why and how policymakers use the CDBG platform to address specific needs.

The US National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) was described as “the first national portrait of the availability of early care and education” when it was first collected in 2012. The second nationally representative wave of the NSECE recently became available for 2019. This study uses these repeated cross-sectional surveys to report and compare primary childcare arrangements for infants, toddlers and preschool-aged children across two time periods. Our analyses include all sampled low-income households with children aged zero to five with an additional focus on Hispanic households—a population over-represented in the NSECE but considered greatly under-represented in federally subsidized early care and education programs. Reauthorization of the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant Act in 2014 led a number of states to make changes to promote access by low-income families to federal childcare subsidies. This study attempts to exploit the differential changes in policy adoption over time across states to examine whether there is a correspondence between three major policy changes (increases in the redetermination period, reductions in required household copayments, and efforts to improve access to subsidies for households speaking languages other than English) with changes in primary care arrangements over time. While the lack of pre-trend data prevents the identification of causal policy impacts, there is evidence that policy changes associated with the 2014 reauthorization were associated in some cases with reductions in the use of relative care and increases in the use of center-based care, especially for infants in Hispanic households residing in states that lowered the copayment between 2012 and 2019. Moreover, improvements in accessibility for non-English speaking households corresponded with reductions in the use of relative care for Hispanic toddlers during this period. Identifying causal impacts of policies rather than associations would require more than two repeated waves of data, something that might be possible once the NSECE 2024 becomes available.

Local administrative professionals typically are accountable to multiple stakeholders, including other governmental units, special interests in the business and nonprofit sectors, and citizens. How are these accountability relationships ordered? What is the position of citizens in that hierarchy, particularly the influence of citizen participation? Focusing on patterns of hearing participation and citizen impact on budgeting decisions for the Community Development Block Grant program, this statistical analysis employs ordered pro bit regression. The authors find that communities in which grant administrators feel most accountable to citizens for grant performance have higher degrees of citizen participation in hearings and higher levels of perceived citizen impact on budgetary processes. This relationship holds even in the presence of simultaneity between bureaucratic accountability to citizens and citizen participation. The findings point to the importance of instilling a public service ethic among government employees that places a high value on engaging as well as listening to citizens.