NTA Paper: 45 Years and Counting: What is the Fiscal and Economic Legacy of the CDBG Program

Abstract

This paper explores the fiscal impacts associated with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. The paper makes several novel contributions to the literature on CDBG, including refining the level of analysis (parcellevel, 500 feet from parcel receiving investment, and Census Block Group (CBG), explaining the spatial effects across units of analyses, refining analyses by individual CDBG activity type, and expanding outcome variables of interest (property value segmented by residential and commercial properties). Relying on more than 9 million observations from 685,526 unique parcels over 14 years (2004-2017) and 23,366 observations from 1,669 CBGs in that same time frame in Dallas County, TX we find that the CDBG program has largely positive impacts on property values at the parcel-level that diffuse throughout the CBG; however, aggregated expenditure types (property improvement, public services, and private services) are not fine grained enough to capture these impacts.