Federal Reserve Bank
of San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank
of San Francisco

Community Development Innovation Review

The Community Development Innovation Review focuses on bridging the gap between theory and practice, from as many viewpoints as possible. The goal of this journal is to promote cross-sector dialogue around a range of emerging issues and related investments that advance economic resilience and mobility for low- and moderate-income communities.

  • Drawing a New Roadmap: The Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge

    Allison Brooks

    The Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge confronted key questions in the community development field, ranging from how to engage at-risk populations in critical decisions concerning their future safety to why municipalities should consider resilience and adaptation when planning infrastructure upgrades and where to get the money to be proactive, rather than reactive, about climate change.

  • America Adapts: The Value of Podcasting in Climate Communications

    Doug Parsons and Dan Ackerstein

    People are desperate to learn about the world around them. The central challenge for technical subjects like climate change is that much of that learning must happen in nontechnical ways. Even adaptation professionals are looking for avenues to understand adaptation outside of formal webinars and scientific reports. Podcasts offer a potentially impactful mechanism to disseminate substantive information to a broad array of audiences.

  • Healthy Aging: A Conceptual Model of Community-based Solutions in the Face of Climate Change and Global Demographic Changes

    Seciah Aquino, Josefina Flores Morales, Max Aung, Mary Keovisai, and Jennifer K. McGee-Avila

    Climate change and shifting demographic patterns require innovative ideas about how to build and adapt community infrastructure that helps older individuals thrive. Urban planners, and community investors will need to consider aging populations as they think about how the built environment can promote healthy local communities in the face of a changing climate that has acute and unique consequences for individuals aged 65 and over.

  • Embracing the Challenge of Climate Education and Engagement

    Caroline Lewis

    Given their exposure to climate-related events, the Greater Miami and Southeast Florida regions serve as a climate laboratory for ingenuity and problem solving. Working with climate scientists and scores of governmental, business, academic, and community leaders, the CLEO Institute creates multiple access points to engage diverse audiences in understanding the climate crisis and to embrace scalable solutions.

  • Pre- and Post-Disaster Investments in Housing and Community Development Under the CRA

    Laurie Schoeman

    The CRA has become a catalytic tool for encouraging banks and nonprofit lenders to pioneer strategies to increase private investment in underserved communities and to make low- and moderate-income communities whole in the face of disinvestment, economic downtown, and lack of access to opportunity. The CRA should be expanded to recognize that investments made in these communities can simultaneously serve to advance community resilience and the adaptive capacity of a broad set of community stakeholders and institutions.

  • Promoting Equitable Climate Adaptation through Community Engagement

    Kokei Otosi

    Design interventions of nearly any scale will inevitably intersect with social structures and other invisible forces at play. The success or failure of urban climate-adaptive design cannot be understood strictly on the basis of how such augmentation performs against climate conditions. Rather, design must fundamentally consider the human experience now and in the future.

  • The Critical Role for Young People and Schools in Resiliency Planning

    Deborah McKoy, Amanda Eppley, and Shirl Buss

    Demographers predict that people under the age of 18 will comprise 60 percent of the population of U.S. cities by 2030. Despite this trend, recognizing the critical role that young people and schools can play as stakeholders in community planning—especially with respect to climate resilience and adaptation—continues to be a major blind spot for policy makers.

  • Investing in the Virtuous Cycle

    Robert Freudenberg

    Outside the context of extreme storms like Sandy, heavier precipitation events, compromised water and air quality, warmer temperatures, and sea level rise are increasingly taking their toll on communities, aging infrastructure, and stressed natural systems. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment highlights, all of these adverse impacts disproportionately affect low-income communities, which comprise about one-third of the population of the New York City metropolitan area.

  • Climigration and the Private Sector

    A.R. Siders and Carri Hulet

    As the effects of climate change grow more severe, millions of people in the United States and around the world will relocate away from hazards. This climate-induced relocation, or “climigration,” will have significant consequences for the private sector.

  • Hunting for Money: U.S. Cities Need a System for Financing Climate Resilience and Adaptation

    John Cleveland, Jon Crowe, Lois DeBacker, Trine Munk, and Peter Plastrik

    The growing number of studies and emerging innovations in climate resilience and adaptation financing for cities is setting the stage for developing a comprehensive system—a set of standardized products and services, practices and tools—that is able to overcome key barriers and to take advantage of opportunities posed by climate change.