NCRC research offers national reports on critical topics like redlining and bank branch closures. In 2020, NCRC published a major report on Gentrification and Opportunity Zones, building upon previous work on gentrification and displacement. Both of these reports garnered national press coverage and are still continuously cited.

In addition, the coronavirus pandemic provided a new opportunity for NCRC to explore new ideas about how community investment relates to other important issues such as public health. This led to our first report on the relationship between redlining, public health and COVID-19 risk in partnership with the University of Richmond and the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

NCRC also continued to support members and stakeholders including Congress and other national partners with custom research to help further their work on a variety of issues. In 2020, the research team greatly expanded the access that members have to their services. A new, interactive Fair Lending Report can be customized easily for members based on their needs. We also increased our work advising members on their own research and analysis, becoming a leader in the research space on a number of issues.

A new area for NCRC was the publication of numerous research briefs, shorter reports about specific topics of interest. Placing NCRC as the authority on topics that our members care about, these research briefs covered a broad swath of topics. In 2020 alone, we wrote about the Small Business Administration Paycheck Protection Program, 2019 mortgage lending, Asian American mortgage lending (in partnership with National CAPACD), same-sex mortgage lending, bank branch closures, the CFPB consumer complaint database, and more. We published 22 research briefs in 2020.

Finally, NCRC invested in tools and skills to continually improve the services we offered to members. Since 2016, the federal government has pulled back from their efforts to make data broadly available to the public. In their place, we have expanded our capacity to host and process data, and we have amassed cloud databases that include almost 200 million mortgage loan records, 20 years of bank branch location and closure data, and 20 years of business lending data. Using various data software tools, we can work with almost any file format, from any source, and at any scale. This data matters. Members that fully understand the data of their communities can walk into a meeting with confidence and address the concerns of their constituencies on an even footing with banks, elected officials and other groups in part thanks to these efforts.

Our work results in greater impact for NCRC both nationally and in our member communities. NCRC research team members were sought after as speakers and interview subjects, appearing in dozens of panels as well as print, radio and video interviews, documentaries and webinars. They also were asked to review new reports both for peer reviewed journals and for national and local partner organizations, and were frequently called upon by federal agencies for informal consultations on how we use the data they produce and for feedback on how to improve that data.