CTCAC/HCD Resource Opportunity Areas 2022

In 2017, the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee (CTCAC) and the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) created the California Fair Housing Task Force (Task Force). The Task Force was asked to assist CTCAC and HCD in creating evidence-based approaches to increasing access to opportunity for families with children living in housing subsidized by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program.

This feature set contains Resource Opportunity Areas (ROAs) that are the results of the Task Force's analysis for the two regions used for the San Francisco Bay Region; one is for the cities and towns (urban) and the other is for the rural areas. The reason for treating urban and rural areas as separate reasons is that using absolute thresholds for place-based opportunity could introduce comparisons between very different areas of the total region that make little sense from a policy perspective — in effect, holding a farming community to the same standard as a dense, urbanized neighborhood.

ROA analysis for urban areas is based on census tract data. Since tracts in rural areas of are approximately 37 times larger in land area than tracts in non-rural areas, tract-level data in rural areas may mask over variation in opportunity and resources within these tracts. Assessing opportunity at the census block group level in rural areas reduces this difference by 90 percent (each rural tract contains three block groups), and thus allows for finer-grained analysis.

In addition, more consistent standards can be useful for identifying areas of concern from a fair housing perspective — such as high-poverty and racially segregated areas. Assessing these factors based on intraregional comparison could mischaracterize areas in more affluent areas with relatively even and equitable development opportunity patterns as high-poverty, and could generate misleading results in areas with higher shares of objectively poor neighborhoods by holding them to a lower, intraregional standard.

To avoid either outcome, the Task Force used a hybrid approach for the CTCAC/HCD ROA analysis — accounting for regional differences in assessing opportunity for most places, while applying more rigid standards for high-poverty, racially segregated areas in all regions. In particular:

Filtering for High-Poverty, Racially Segregated Areas

The CTCAC/HCD ROA filters areas that meet consistent standards for both poverty (30% of the population below the federal poverty line) and racial segregation (over-representation of people of color relative to the county) into a “High Segregation & Poverty” category. The share of each region that falls into the High Segregation & Poverty category varies from region to region.

Calculating Index Scores for Non-Filtered Areas

The CTCAC/HCD ROAs process calculates regionally derived opportunity index scores for non-filtered tracts and rural block groups using twenty-one indicators (see Data Quality section of metadata for more information). These index scores make it possible to sort each non-filtered tract or rural block group into opportunity categories according to their rank within the urban or rural areas.

To allow CTCAC and HCD to incentivize equitable development patterns in each region to the same degree, the CTCAC/HCD analysis 20 percent of tracts or rural block groups in each urban or rural area, respectively, with the highest relative index scores to the "Highest Resource” designation and the next 20 percent to the “High Resource” designation.

The region's urban area thus ends up with 40 percent of its total tracts with reliable data as Highest or High Resource (or 40 percent of block groups in the rural area). The remaining non-filtered tracts or rural block groups are then evenly divided into “Low Resource” and “Moderate Resource” categories.

Excluding Tracts or Block Groups

The analysis also excludes certain census areas from being categorized. To improve the accuracy of the mapping, tracts and rural bl

Querying over HTTP

Splitgraph serves as an HTTP API that lets you run SQL queries directly on this data to power Web applications. For example:

curl https://data.splitgraph.com/sql/query/ddn \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d@-<<EOF
{"sql": "
    SELECT *
    FROM \"bayareametro-gov/ctcachcd-resource-opportunity-areas-2022-vr7h-smni\".\"ctcachcd_resource_opportunity_areas_2022\"
    LIMIT 100 
"}
EOF

See the Splitgraph documentation for more information.