Transcript
ALYSSA LEE: As we've talked about the Urban Markets Initiative several times today, the focus is really on understanding why information and how information drives change in urban markets. We're concerned about residents of urban markets, how residents can access capital -- how residents can access capital to get a job, to get a small business, to get an education, to actually buy a home. These are the critical issues that really underlie our basic concern around credit.
Someone asked me the other day, you know, you work in urban markets, what is the big deal around credit with you -- you know, you do this stuff on retail services and I understand how that relates to you trying to provide basic services in the communities, but what's the deal with credit? Well, it is the one score that is accessed hundreds of time a day to price how much your life is going to cost in a market. It is not necessarily a perspective that we all have had historically around credit scoring, but it should be the perspective that we all have in the future, that the credit score is a critical element of who we are and who we can be.
Congress has done a lot in terms of helping us understand the ability -- to access what that information tells us about ourselves, to help us understand how we can develop good credit. But there are a lot of issues around the cost of capital and not having access to capital that we find particularly important.
Research here, done at Brookings by Matt Fellowes, helps us to understand, when you talk about this population that Michael Turner has identified, this 35 million to 54 million population. We can put a picture on this. What we're talking about is the size of the total population of the state of California on one hand to the Midwest. We're including Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and Kansas. This is the size of this issue in terms of the number of people that it affects, and the number of people that it affects does overlap at some level with populations that tend to be underserved not only by credit by also by the baking industry and have traditionally limited sources of income.
Studies that we've done here at Brookings tell us that because of lack of access to capital lower-income households pay higher-than-average mortgages, 4.2 million lower-income households pay higher than the average rate that should applied for mortgages; 4.2 million households, not necessarily the same, also pay higher-than-average auto loan prices.
Our perspective here is that while we are very critically concerned with those that are low in moderate income, we are also highly aware that this issue is not just an issue about poor people, an issue about one minority group. This is an issue that cuts across race, ethnic, and cultural lines.
Click on the links below to access videos of each speaker and to watch the Q&A.
Watch the Introduction
Watch Clark Abrahams' Presentation
Watch Alyssa Lee's Presentation
Watch Chet Wiermanski's Presentation
Watch Michael Turner's Presentation
Watch Windy Oliver's Presentation
Watch the Q&A
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