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Foreclosure Response
Resources on preventing foreclosures & stabilizing communities

Overview: A brief introduction to the data and how they can be used.

On September 26, 2008, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) allocated $3.92 billion in Neighborhood Stabilization Program funding to States, and to Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) entitlement communities particularly hard hit by home foreclosures. These funds are to be used to establish financing mechanisms for the redevelopment of foreclosed-upon homes and to purchase residential properties, establish land banks, and demolish blighted structures.

States and local governments must submit an action plan for the use of these funds by December 1, 2008. The plans must describe how funds will be distributed to areas of greatest need within each jurisdiction, using three required factors (and any others grantees deem appropriate). Needy areas include those: (1) with the greatest percentage of home foreclosures; (2) the highest percentage of homes financed by a subprime mortgage related loan; and (3) identified by the grantee as likely to face a significant rise in the rate of home foreclosures.

Although grantees are required to target funds according to these criteria, there are no Federal or State government data available to estimate these factors. Nor is there a generally accepted methodology for stating the relative severity of need among jurisdictions within states. For this reason, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) researchers calculated foreclosure needs scores using high-quality nationally-available data, including
Erie Ellington Homes
Photo courtesy of ULI Development Case Studies
measures of subprime lending, foreclosures, and delinquency from McDash Analytics and vacancy from the U.S. Postal Service.

Two separate datasets are available:
Using these scores, State and local elected officials, government agency staff, and community leaders can quickly assess relative needs within States and localities and allocate funds accordingly. Further, policy analysts can adapt the LISC methods to local circumstances by assigning different weights to the individual factors provided or by adding additional needs criteria from outside data sources.

The CDBG Jurisdiction Data

Table 1 in the Excel workbook for CDBG jurisdictions lists the CDBG entitlement jurisdictions, the foreclosure needs score for each jurisdiction, and the individual indicators used to calculate the score. The score for any jurisdiction is relative to that of the neediest jurisdiction within the state, which is assigned a score of 100. Thus, if a jurisdiction receives a score of 50, it is estimated to be one-half as needy as the worst-off jurisdiction; it is in turn twice as needy as a jurisdiction with a score of 25.

The analysis required boundary definitions of the CDBG jurisdictions. At the time of the analysis, the 2005 list was the most recent file available to LISC. Therefore, this analysis omits a small number of jurisdictions that received CDBG funding in 2008 and includes a few that received funding in 2005 and not in 2008. Appendix A in the Excel workbook lists the affected areas.

States will also want to consider other areas of the state not covered by CDBG jurisdictions. While the needs score is not available for these areas in Table 1, Table 2 reports the share of different categories of problem loans in the CDBG areas versus other areas in a state to give a sense of the overall magnitude of need in the places not included within a CDBG jurisdiction. LISC plans to provide a foreclosure needs score for all ZIP codes, independent of CDBG jurisdiction. The ZIP Code level dataset also provides coverage of areas not encompassed by CDBG jurisdiction boundaries.

The ZIP Code Level Data

Table 1 in the ZIP Code level Excel workbooks provide the foreclosure needs score for ZIP Codes by state; this score allows states and localities to look at the relative need of all areas in a state and not just those in CDBG jurisdictions. The neediest ZIP Code in the state is assigned a score of 100 and all other ZIP Codes are assigned a score relative to the neediest ZIP Code.

LISC cannot provide loan and foreclosure counts at this level of geography because these estimates are based on proprietary data. Therefore, in addition to the foreclosure needs scores, the table contains summary scores for each of the subprime, foreclosure, and delinquent loan components. The scores indicate relative need of ZIP Codes on each component individually. For example, the subprime component score is only based on the number of subprime loans and percentage of all loans that are subprime. The neediest ZIP Code in terms of subprime loans in each state receives a score of 100 and a ZIP Code with a score of 50 is estimated to be about half as needy.

Note: Scores in the CDBG jurisdiction dataset cannot be compared with scores in the ZIP Code level dataset.

Direct links to these resources are provided below:

Neighborhood Stabilization Data - Detailed spreadsheets showing the relative need for neighborhood stabilization funding among CDBG Jurisdictions and ZIP Codes within each state.

CDBG Jurisdiction data

ZIP Code level data
This spreadsheet has four tabs:

- Table 1. LISC's Foreclosure Needs Scores for CDBG jurisdictions within each state, along with data on individual components that make up the score.

- Table 2. Data that help states estimate the share of need among communities that fall outside formal CDBG jurisdiction limits.

- Data Definitions. Descriptions of the data shown in each column of Tables 1 and 2.

- Appendix A. A list of the small number of changes in CDBG jurisdiction boundaries that have taken place since 2005. The data we have provided do not reflect these changes.

CDBG Methodology [PDF] - A detailed description of the methodology used to calculate the LISC Foreclosure Needs Scores.

Because of the large file size, ZIP Code level data has been divided into four separate files.

Alabama to Indiana • Iowa to Montana • Nebraska to Oregon • Pennsylvania to Wyoming

Each spreadsheet has two tabs:

- Table 1. LISC's Foreclosure Needs Scores for ZIP Codes within each state and individual component scores for subprime loans, foreclosures, and delinquent loans.

- Data Definitions. Descriptions of the data shown in each column of Table 1.

ZIP Code Methodology [PDF] - A detailed description of the methodology used to calculate the LISC Foreclosure Needs Scores.

**Users are advised NOT to compare foreclosure needs scores at the ZIP Code level with CDBG Jurisdiction needs scores, as each set of scores is based on an independent ranking system.