2004 Poverty Research Small Grants
Funded grants
Assessing the Socioeconomic Impacts of the Federal Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities (EZ/EC) Program on Impoverished Urban Communities
Deirdre Oakley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Albany.
Description
Assisting high-poverty urban communities to build capacity, stimulate investment, create jobs, and become self-sufficient as part of a federal-state-local government and private sector partnership, has been a key objective of federal economic development policy over the last decade. In 1993, Congress enacted the Empowerment Zone and Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) Initiative (Public Law 103-66). This initiative offers geographically targeted funding to distressed communities. Under the initial round of funding announced in December 1994, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded 71 cities across the country Zone designations for a 10-year period. Since then, a number of cities have lost their designation or were folded into other renewal community programs. There remain 57 cities with the original EZ/EC designation.
The purpose of this study is to examine the socioeconomic impacts of the EZ/EC program for the initial Zone designated areas using 1990 and 2000 census data. Previous research on the EZ/EC program have not utilized census data nor been able to address three important questions: (1) How do economic trends in Zone areas compare to trends in non-Zone areas with similar socioeconomic characteristics in each Zone city over time? (2) How are economic trends in Zone areas influenced by local and regional changes in economic conditions? (3) Are there spillover effects of Zone activities on adjacent areas? The research proposed here is intended to address these previously unexplored issues and provide valuable programmatic data that will enable local, state and federal policy makers to assess the efficacy of geographically targeted programs to assist distressed communities and tailor future programs.
This study is unique in that it will utilize spatial analytic techniques in tandem with more traditional analytic methods to identify comparison areas and uncover significant spatial patterns related to socioeconomic outcomes. Utilizing this approach to identifying comparison areas is more fitting to the social and economic realities of urban settings than the standard approach of experimental and control comparisons. In other words, unlike previous research, the comparison areas are not predetermined but rather identified more systematically as statistically significant spatial clusters of high poverty.
This study will assess the socioeconomic gains made by those 57 urban EZ/EC neighborhoods (including the District of Columbia) that have retained their designation since 1994, in comparison to similar non-Zone neighborhoods within each metro area, as well as to the entire metro area and across metro areas. Zone designated and non-Zone neighborhoods will be assessed at baseline (1990) and follow up (2000) along a number of key domains including unemployment and poverty rates; education and occupational status; median household and per capita income; population size; residential mobility; vacancy rates, home-ownership and levels of segregation. This type of analysis is possible because of HUD’s Policy Development and Research (PD&R) recent initiative to make HUD data more widely accessible and useful to researchers. Through this initiative, geographically coded data attached to 1990 census tract designations are now publicly available for each EZ/EC site.
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