Ellis Carr

What do communities need to thrive? The answer seems obvious: jobs that pay living wages, affordable housing, reliable transportation, and access to quality food, education and health care. So why are those things so hard to come by in some communities? Because cornerstone community projects — the schools, grocery stores, health care centers, housing, and community centers that neighborhoods rely on — don’t deliver the high returns and quick turnarounds of many traditional development projects.

As leaders of four of the nation’s largest nonprofit community development financial institutions (CDFIs) with the mission of investing in low-income communities and entrepreneurs, we ask Congress to protect the desperately needed flow of investment capital to America’s struggling cities and towns.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s report The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2015, nearly eight million people in California were living in poverty in 2015. The report indicated that the state’s poverty rate was 20.6 percent—well above the national rate of 15.1 percent—and surpassed the rates of every other state in the nation. Those numbers are deeply troubling.