Chart 7 below is from a Powerpoint show presented by CURA at a recent community meeting. CURA uses this data to make the claim that NRP housing funds heavily benefited White, affluent homeowners. However, our review of the data and further analysis shows that CURA's conclusions are not supported by the actual evidence.

There are several problems with this chart, besides the fact that, by CURA’s own admission, the labeling is incorrect (this is not a CPP program, but rather data from the Center for Energy and the Environment).

One significant problem is that the data displayed in Chart 7 represents only a single housing vendor, Center for Energy and the Environment (CEE) and only covers the years 2013 to 2019. However, in earlier years, there were many other vendors who managed neighborhood NRP loan and grant programs. Further, more than 90% of NRP funds were, in fact, expended by 2013 (see Chart 8, below).

The CEE data is not the only data set available. Fortunately, data from Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) is also available, and covers the years 1993 to 2003, the heart of the NRP years as you can see from Chart 8, above, and contains more data.

The NHS data shows that 55% of NHS home loans and grants went to Black or African American households. Chart 9 shows how the NHS data breaks down.

The NHS-only data set clearly presents a very different picture from the CEE-only data set presented by CURA. If you were selective in looking at data, you might come to a very different conclusion from CURA, and conclude that African-American households were in fact the major beneficiaries of NRP home loan programs.

Further, the NHS data represents a total of 808 completed loans, compared to a total of 607 completed loans for CEE. Chart 10 shows the outcome if you combine the CEE data with the NHS data.

An even more statistically significant difference became apparent when we compared actual contract expenditures for CEE contracts during the years 2013 to 2019 to NHS contract expenditures during the years 1993 to 2003. The total value of CEE loans during those years was $2,359,138.34. The total value of NHS loans during the period 1993 to 2003 was much greater: $13,895,693.

The data used for Chart 11 comes primarily from CEE demographic data from 2013 to 2019, and from NHS demographic data for the period 1993 to 2003. We also relied on contract data from the City’s PlanNet database.

Since NHS also collected data on household income, we can test whether their loans went to households above or below the median income.

The NHS data also shows that almost 60% of NHS loans went to households at 80% or less of metro median income.