Online Event Archive Recorded July 15, 2026
As federal budget cuts challenge affordable housing and community development efforts, this session explores how nonprofits can use data, partnerships and regional banks to move projects forward.
Featuring insights from NCRC’s Jason Richardson, author Oscar Perry Abello and Citizens Savings Bank & Trust’s Corey Hammonds, the discussion examines lending trends, community development finance and strategies for building stronger relationships with local financial institutions. Moderated by Monchiere’ Holmes-Jones of MOJO Marketing and the Jefferson Street Historical Society.
Speakers
Oscar Perry Abello, Journalist, Next City
Corey Hammonds, Chief Operation/Credit Officer, Citizens Savings Bank & Trust
Monchiere’ Holmes-Jones, Founder, MOJO Marketing and Founder & Board Chair, Jefferson Street Historical Society
Jason Richardson, Senior Director of Research, NCRC
Transcript:
NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.
Holmes-Jones 00:00
Hi everyone. My name is Monchiere’ Holmes-Jones. I am the CEO and Chief Impact Officer here at Mojo Impact Collective and a member of NCRC. I’ll be your moderator today for this great webinar titled “The Data Behind the Lending Landscape: Why Engaging Regional Financial Institutions Matters.”
Before we proceed any further, I want to take the time to go through our NCRC’s Code of Conduct. So, we’ll get that on the screen for you all. A little housekeeping. Please note: We welcome people from any and all diverse backgrounds as possible. We respect our events and any interactions within our community to be respectful and harassment-free at all times. Regarding any AI chatbots, NCRC does not permit AI chatbots to record our webinar today or any of our webinars. So, please note: we will be fielding questions at the end of the three presentations. So, if you’re interested in asking questions, please note you have the Q and A box right there at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Click the box, type your question. When you do, please identify which speaker you like to answer your question. That’ll be helpful to guide us through, and then we’ll answer accordingly.
For those unfamiliar with NCRC, we’re a network of 700 plus organizations from across the country. We work with our members to close the racial and socio-economic wealth and opportunity divides. If you’re watching this webinar from Nashville, we will be convening a community development training [there] in late September. We’ll have more details at the end of this event, so stay tuned. The purpose of our webinar today is to help our folks understand that context and the data behind our current lending landscape, and we’ll use Nashville as a great case study.
We’ll hear first from Jason Richardson, director of NCRC’s research team. Richardson will provide an analysis of Nashville’s mortgage lending and community investment data. Following Jason will be Next City journalist Oscar Perry Abello, who will discuss the findings from this year’s reporting at Next City and from his book The Banks We Deserve. Our final speaker will be Corey Hammonds, Chief Operating and Credit Officer at Citizen Savings and Bank and Trust in Nashville, one of the oldest Black banks in America. Hammonds will provide advice for those interested in developing a relationship with a bank and launching a community development project in your local area. Without further ado, here’s Jason Richardson. Jason, the floor is yours.
Richardson 02:40
Thank you, Monchiere’. Thank you very much again. I’m Jason Richardson, Senior Director of Research at NCRC, and I’ve got a lot of slides here. We’re going to actually hustle through some of them, so don’t worry. You’re going to be able to get a copy of these slides later on, but I want to make sure that we have enough time for the other speakers and Q&A. So, these are just slides where we’re kind of tooting my own horn about my team at NCRC and the support that we provide for NCRC members. Take a look at that later on when you have a chance. And, if you have any questions, feel free to email me. If you’re an NCRC member, you can always contact me for assistance with data analysis or just understanding the data you’ve got for your organization better.
Today though we’re going to be talking about Nashville. We’re going to be talking about the Nashville metro area, including 13 counties, and we’re going to talk about redlining. We’re going to talk about the echoes in that have continued to impact communities like Nashville since redlining was officially established in the 1930s. Right now, I want to go to the website that you see on your screen here. This is part of a report that we completed some time ago, but it is a great way to understand how redlining in the past affects lending today. What we’ve done here is pull together 40 years of mortgage lending data from 1981 through 2021. We’re going to compare that with the redlining that occurred in the past, and then you’re going to see patterns emerge over time as Nashville has grown.
So, I’m going to share my screen now. So, when you go to the website that I put on the screen, you’re going to see this map. Today, we’re going to zoom in on Nashville. Come in slowly here, and we’re going to zoom in a little close. What you see here then [are] the red areas that are outlined in red are neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s by the Homeowners Loan Corporation. Now, we’ve published extensively on redlining, and this is not really a redlining presentation, so I’m just going to cover this briefly. But, essentially at the time, the government decided that they were not going to purchase loans that were made in certain areas of cities. There were a lot of reasons that areas were redlined, with the presence of African Americans being a key part of that distinction. Here you see those historical redlined areas. And, we’ve overlaid it with 1981 data. So the purple areas are majority-minority census tracts. The darker purple indicate 80% or more minority population and minority means anything other than non-Hispanic white.
So, in Nashville, that’s primarily going to be African American populations. The circles you see here in the blue and gray; those are mortgage lending activity. So, this shows the distribution of mortgage loans across the city in 1981, and you can see some patterns. Parts of the redlined communities do have some lending, but many of them you don’t see a whole lot of lending going on. But, what’s interesting here is as we set this in motion, you’re going to see these patterns change. This is 1981. You can go to the lower right-hand side here, open up the legend so you understand what the the map is showing you, and click play. And, let’s let it run for a little bit. We’re going to get into the 1990s here in just a second. And, the first thing you’ll notice, we’re in 1993. Excuse me, is that you’ve seen the purple areas expand. The number of majority-minority census tracts in the area has increased. You’ll also notice that the mortgage lending has vanished from a large part of the map here. So where did it go? Well, let’s back up a little bit, and you can see that a lot of the lending shifted to outer portions of the metro area and areas just to the south of Nashville. This is not an unusual pattern. The ’90s saw a lot of construction outside of cities, and you’re seeing a lot of that mortgage activity shifting from the city itself, especially from the high minority areas, out into these exurban areas. Let’s go a little bit further, though.
Richardson 06:44
We’re going to stop around 2005, so we’re talking about 2005 being kind of the height of the housing boom period in this country. And, you see again, there’s been a shifting pattern here. Mortgage lending has shifted to the east and the southeast of Nashville, and you can also see some more changes. I’m going to zoom in again here a little bit. Some more changes in the share of loans that are being made in majority-minority census tracts. You’re starting to see areas around the airport near Antioch that have become majority-minority. Generally, we don’t see a whole lot of lending in many of these areas, but to the southeast of the airport, you do see quite a bit of lending during this time. Now, I understand that during this time we saw a significant migration of African Americans from Nashville into this area, and that’s going to show up here in just a minute because right after this, we experienced the housing crash in 2008.
So, let’s go to 2012. There we go. Now [in] 2012, we had officially recovered supposedly from the recession. However, we can still see a lot of patterns in the lending here that are concerning. First of all, let’s zoom out again, and we again see these concentrations of loans to the east and to the southeast, but look what’s happened in Antioch, where the minority population has grown so much. There’s an absence of mortgage lending during this time. Now, if we zoom back into Nashville proper, we can also see a very clear pattern where mortgage lending is concentrated only in the White communities to the south. In fact, if you zoom in even closer, this area of downtown Nashville that was majority-minority when we started this discussion has shifted to majority-White, and the area to the north that was heavily minority is now 80 percent or more minority when we started is now still majority-minority, but not as heavily. And, if we play this through to the last date, 2021, the pattern is not going to change very much. And, that’s where we’re sitting today. So, you can go to the website yourself and play around with this map. I’m going to stop sharing now, and we’re going to shift to the rest of my presentation. And, if anybody has any questions about the HLD map, that’s the HMDA longitudinal database, then just email me after the call, and I can help you out more with it if you want to understand where that’s coming from.
Now, we’re going to talk about data. We’re going to talk about mortgage lending, small business lending, and commercial lending in Nashville. In 2025, there were 25,297 loans across the Nashville metro area. Those are home purchase loans. There were 591 individual lenders, and 20 lenders, the top 20, made half of those loans. Who got those loans? So, it’s interesting to look at not just who got the loans, but also the population in the area. Here you see the blue lines indicate the share of loans going to each individual racial group. The pink lines below it are their share of the population. Those little black vertical lines there are new figures. It’s just to give you something to compare to. The things that hop out at me here are pretty simple. 77% of home purchase loans in 2025 went to White applicants, who are 69% of the adult population. Hispanic borrowers actually got slightly more loans than their population size. That’s part of a national trend that we’re seeing across the country with Hispanic borrowers. However, Black borrowers are receiving less than half of the share of loans that they should be getting based on their population size. Asians are also a little overrepresented, but the American Indian and Native American, as well as the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations, are relatively small, so who’s doing all this lending? Here are the top 20 mortgage lenders in the country, or in the, I’m sorry, in the Nashville area. United Wholesale Mortgage is one of the top lenders in the country, so it’s no surprise that they’re there. And, my guess is most of you probably have never heard of United Wholesale Mortgage, so they are a wholesale lender. Most of their loans would have been made by mortgage brokers or smaller lenders. The same with CMG Mortgage.
Richardson 11:05
Then, you get to First Bank, and, if you’ll notice, there’s only a few banks in this list: First Bank, and then Pinnacle Bank, which is a Tennessee-based bank, Old National, J.P. Morgan, and another Tennessee bank, Wilson Bank and Trust. This rounds out the top 20. So, when you look at those individual lenders though, the share of their loans going to Black borrowers is dramatically different across lenders. Your top three here includes Wilson Bank and Trust, one of those Tennessee banks that we mentioned earlier. But, at the lower end, some of these lenders are making very low amounts of loans to Nashville African Americans despite their sizable portion of the population, commercial lending and small business lending.
So, commercial lending in the last 13 months, across April 2025 through May 2026, we’re talking about 6.9 billion dollars in lending. This is for apartments, office buildings, retail, industrial properties, 311 total transactions across 153 different lenders. Top lenders and commercial lending is a little more complicated. There are often multiple lenders but [one of] the major lenders here [is] Fannie Mae for apartments, which is not a surprise. They’re the largest apartment lender in the country. But, for industrial, office, retail, and hotels, Pinnacle Bank and Wilson Bank and Trust, local banks that are based in Tennessee. In fact, when we look at the number of commercial deals, Pinnacle and Wilson are on top, followed closely by Renaissance and First Bank. Small business lending. So, commercial lending is for large properties. Small business lending are loans under a million dollars to small businesses. In 2024, which is the most recent year of data that we’ve got, 2.1 billion dollars in small business loans were made in the Nashville area. We’re talking about 56, almost 57,000 individual loans across 174 lenders. Half of them are going to businesses that are considered small businesses, where the revenue is under a million dollars a year. And, who is doing these loans? First of all, you’ll notice by loan count, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, American Express, these are credit card lenders. So, it’s not a surprise that they’re leading the pack in terms of the number of loans. But, look on the right-hand side in terms of dollar volume, Pinnacle Bank on top, 117 billion dollars followed by, you know, some other national banks, but the fact that a local bank is on top here by a significant margin, I think, is really interesting.
So, what have we learned? First, [the] Nashville market is unequal. Black applicants are denied much more often. I didn’t really get into that too much, and Black and Hispanic borrowers are concentrated in the same low- to moderate-income tracts that the HLC graded as hazardous in the 1930s. The market is concentrated. You have 591 home purchase lenders, 153 commercial lenders, but the top 20 home purchase lenders capture almost half the market. Nationally, that, you know, differs quite a bit nationally. The top 20 lenders only capture 38.6% of the market. So, Nashville is actually a little more concentrated than the national market. Local, meaning that locally headquartered headquartered banks lead commercial lending, they lead small business lending, and they’re very important for mortgage lending. So, the map from the 1930s is interesting because within the context of the city of Nashville, you can see how it still shapes where the mortgage lending is going, and that is something that we see across the country. Cities that I look at all the time they show the same pattern. The 1930 maps captured segregation that existed in those cities at the time, and they instituted a program where banks spent a generation avoiding those areas because they knew that nobody would buy the loans. Today, we still see the echoes of that. Those properties are generally less worthless, and banks are finding it harder to make loans there.
Well, with that, I’m going to turn things over to Oscar. Oscar’s going to talk a little bit about the importance of local and regional banks, I think and I hope, that I can’t wait to hear it. Thank you very much.
Abello 15:05
All right. Well, thank you, Jason. Appreciate the presentation. It’s pretty fascinating, and it really, really just jived in with what I found in my work as a journalist, writing, and reporting about community development and economic development across the country over the past 10 years. So, you know, a lot of that work culminated in my first book, The Banks We Deserve, which came out last year. I might have seen some of you on [the] book tour last year in 18 different cities. Some of these photos are in Cleveland or Rochester, San Francisco, Baltimore. It was really all over the country talking about pretty much what Jason found in the data so, you know, and this, the book, itself draws on my reporting for Next City. So, at Next City, we’ve been around since 2003 and we are an online newsroom covering solutions to advance social, racial, and environmental justice in cities across the country. I’ve been there since 2015 myself, so about 10, so over 10 years now, and I’m currently [the] economic senior economic justice correspondent.
And so, you know, one simple way to think about my job is I’m looking at community development, especially economic development on the economic side in historically redlined neighborhoods. I’m looking at who’s doing it, where are they getting the funds to do it, who owns the properties, who owns the businesses, how are they getting access to capital. You know, I’m looking at where the money is coming from, and that’s what I’ve been doing since 2015. These are some of the headlines just from 2023, which was the the year I kind of took a break toward the end of this year to start working on the book and, like I said, my job basically is to look at who’s doing economic development in historically redlined neighborhoods and, particularly as a journalist, you know, follow the money. Where’s the money coming from? And, of course, I know it’s… I don’t have to tell you all. The money is mostly coming from banks.
The thing is, if you just look at where the money is coming from and, I’m just looking at the assets of the banks, I might get distracted by the big banks, right? Because the big banks here are in the orange, right? These are banks with more than $100 billion in assets. There’s only 32 banks across the country that have more than $100 billion in assets, and then the blue is the banks with $100 billion or less in assets. There are more than 4,000 of those banks – 42 actually – 4,200 of those banks in the blue. But, of course, the bigger banks are the bigger banks, and they dominate. They seem to dominate the market today. If you just look at the top line assets, but what am I looking for? What am I looking for as a journalist? I’m looking for who’s doing things like building housing anywhere but, in particular, in restricted redlined neighborhoods. Who’s doing things like financing commercial real estates on main streets and commercial corridors in cities across the country?
Then, whether it’s revitalizing old storefronts or taking old industrial buildings and turning them into something new for a neighborhood, or taking housing that’s been neglected by landlords for decades and trying to renovate it and fix it back up and put it back on the market, hopefully at prices most people can actually afford. Turns out, you know, if you’re going to do all that work, you’re going to need a construction loan from somewhere. And, where are the construction loans coming from? It’s not that giant orange slice, because if you just look at that, look at just the construction and development loans of bank books across the country, that orange slice becomes much smaller. You can see the blue slice – banks with $100 billion or less in assets – these are your local and regional banks. That’s where 73% of all construction and development lending from banks comes from. It comes from those 4,200 smaller local and regional banks. The next, if you look at the uncommercial real estate, same story.
Abello 18:57
Commercial real estate, most of the 74% coming from banks, the 40-200 banks with $100 billion or less in assets and, then on, small business lending. Okay, a little, a little bit, the larger banks doing a little bit better, as Jason pointed out, a lot of credit card lending in that orange slice in this picture. But, on that blue slice, you’re talking about, as Jason said, longer relationship-based loans to buy the buildings, you know, for a business owner where they’ve been operating their restaurant or their barber shop or whatever it might be -loans to buy equipment for a grocery store or a bodega. Those longer-term, larger relationship-based loans, again, coming mostly from those smaller banks.
So what’s going on here? You know, I’m a journalist, I’m supposed to figure it out. One of the things I found is that those local and regional banks… They have a real relationship with the people that they’re lending to, especially when it comes to construction and acquisition, rehab. Commercial real estate and small business lending, and just to give you an example of, like, what’s possible here, what’s in that blue slice. The City of Bridges Community Land Trust. You know, this is a newer community land trust. It’s a newer developer, so to speak. You know, they don’t have decades of experience in affordable housing, but they built a relationship with First Commonwealth Bank, a $12 billion bank based in Western Pennsylvania (a regional bank), and they just have a relationship with this first Commonwealth Bank. They have a weekly call every Wednesday, just like every other affordable housing developer or any developer in in the bank’s portfolio. They have a regular call with the bank. If for, in City Bridges case, it’s at 2 o’clock every Wednesday. They have a phone call to talk about what’s in the pipeline. That’s the kind of thing that’s possible. So, again, what’s going on here? So, it turns out that the size of the bank isn’t just about, like, what what deals it’s interested in or able to do. It also has a lot to do with the structure of the bank and how it actually makes loans, sources loans, and underwrites loans.
Community banks – they have these longer-term relationships with customers. They have loan officers, credit committee members, even boards that are meeting every week to talk about specific loans to specific businesses or specific projects in specific locations, and they’re talking about what we all know in small, which we’re dealing with small business or economic development location. They’re talking about, you know, is this the right business? Is this the right project for this location for this neighborhood? Who do we know who lives in the neighborhood? Are they going to shop at this business? Is this a project that this community needs in this location? It’s not just how they source loans; it’s also how they underwrite loans. It’s how the credit committee talks about every loan, every one of these loans that they’re making. This is a quote from Douglas Amaro, who works at the $3 billion Ponce Bank, a community bank, one of only two banks based in the South Bronx. They meet every week. I mean, sometimes, they’ll meet multiple times a week, just on a specific deal that might come across the plate that might have some kind of time urgency, and it’s not, it’s part of the underwriting, right? They don’t just source the loans through relationships.
They also [are] able to tell the regulator we’ve done our homework as a bank. We know the neighborhood, we know the borrower, we know the business, we know the developer. We know that this is a safe and sound loan to make. That’s the reason why these smaller banks do so much more than those larger banks, and it’s really stark, especially when you get to, like, when you compare the smallest banks and the biggest banks. Right, those biggest banks, just the big four – Chase Bank, Wells Fargo, and Citi – they’ve got $9 trillion in assets compared to the $2.7 trillion at the three 900 community banks. So, you think, oh, big four banks again? Are they the partners we need? Are they doing the work that we need banks to do?
Abello 22:52
The answer is pretty much no, they’re not. Those those 4,000 community banks do three times more construction loans than the big four banks combined. They do three times more commercial real estate loans than the big four banks combined. They even do twice as much small business lending than the big four banks combined. This is what’s in their their portfolios right now, as of the latest call report from the federal regulators. Just as another example of, like, what’s possible. Again, here’s a real estate cooperative just north of Minneapolis in a place called Brooklyn Center. We’re about there were a few dozen business women, mostly Black and immigrant business women in the Minneapolis suburbs. If, you know, the Minneapolis suburbs, this is a heavily immigrant neighborhood. Something like 25% of the population was born outside of the U.S. in Brooklyn Center, but the landlords weren’t giving them opportunities to lease out storefronts in strip malls that are vacant. Like, they all got stuck in these office buildings. I’m talking about like a hair salon or a nail salon operating on the third floor of an office building, and what the heck is going on? It’s the only opportunity they could get. So, a few dozen of these women got together, pooled their capital, and they got a loan, a $3.4 million loan out of $5 million in capital they needed to raise to acquire this strip mall last year, or about two years ago now.
So, and you can see here, I’ve got a quote here from the commercial from the loan officer that worked on the steel, and she’s looking at their cooperative model and saying, “Yeah, you know, this is creative. These women have been in the neighborhood. Some of them have businesses that have been around for 15-20, or 20 years.” They can talk to them. They can go out and meet them, and she can bring the credit committee to go out and meet these business owners, and they can all build a relationship and say, yeah, you know what? These landlords, conventional models, conventional landlords can’t figure out what to do with these strip malls. You have, but you guys have thriving businesses despite being stuck in these office centers, office buildings, like, this travel agency you can see on the right. They, this is one of this, is the travel agency that one of these travel agencies. It was, it was stuck on, like, a second floor of an office building around the corner from this strip mall. Now, it’s got this beautiful storefront. She’s expanded into selling luggage, suitcases, travel accessories. Right, her name’s Janie Sabor. She’s the chair of the co-op that bought this strip mall. So, now she’s in there and she owns the strip mall along with the 30 other women in the real estate cooperative that acquired this a couple years ago. Again, relationship building – it’s all about relationships. It’s community. It’s community based, and that’s what’s possible when you have a local bank involved.
So, what’s the problem, right? This is the big problem, right? You know, Jason pointing out the numbers and giving you the national picture. It’s local banks, community banks, regional banks that are doing most of the work that communities actually need. But, here’s the story that I think a lot of you know at NCRC. There’s been [a] tremendous consolidation of the banking sector. We haven’t just lost, you know, it’s the banking sector itself has grown, right? But, we’ve lost the institutions, and when we lose the institutions, we lose the relationships, the networks that those institutions lend through. So, it’s not just the fact that we have larger banks now shifting from a large bank-based from a small bank-based system to a large bank-based system means shifting what the system is able to do, and that’s of course not the only problem, right? Jason talked about redlining, and those community banks, these existing community banks, they’re the banks that redline, right? We’re talking about, you know, when you think about all the community banks we used to have, they were part of this history.
Abello 26:35
They were part of that Fannie Mae history of, like you know, all those billions and billions of dollars of more small dollar mortgages issued by community banks going to 98% [of] White families, and they’re still doing it. When we talk, not everybody has the same access to that community-based underwriting. What you’re looking at here is the chart that shows the different kinds of lenders using HMDA data. So, the the smaller bars in the middle, those are your community banks, the smallest bars, meaning they’re the least likely to serve majority-minority census tracts, less than even the the top 25 largest banks. You can see them just to the right. Credit unions doing a little bit better. CDFIs is doing a little bit better than credit unions. But, who’s doing the best? It’s the minority depository institutions. In this chart, that includes both community banks, includes both banks and credit unions that are NDIs. That’s no surprise. They’re the most likely to serve majority-minority census tracts because it turns out relationship-based lending and relationship and community-based underwriting is both a strength and a weakness, right? If you’re lending [is] based on who your board, your loan officers, your credit committee [is], if you’re lending based on who they know, the neighborhoods they understand, then who they are really matters.
And, so that’s why this number is just so stark and shocking to me. It’s still something I think about. I wake up and think about it almost every day. Out of the 3,900 community banks that are still out there. Out of the 3,900 of those community banks doing all the community-based underwriting, commercial real estate lending, construction lending, talking about specific deals in specific places, talking about it every week at the credit committee and the board level. Only 130 of those banks are owned or controlled by non-White Hispanic communities. So, you just think about like how many CDFIs are there? 1,400 CDFIs. Okay, great. There are 4,000 community banks doing all that construction, commercial real estate, and small business lending to the communities that they know, based on who serves, who’s on their board, who’s on, who are the loan officers, who’s their credit committee. There are 4,000 of those banks doing that work for White communities and only 130 for everybody else. And, if you break it down by geography, it really gets really stark, right? I live in New York City. You can see we got 19 White community banks in New York City serving 2.6 million White folks. Only one community bank for Black folks. Only one Hispanic community bank for Hispanic folks, and it’s everywhere, right? Here’s New Orleans, stark. It’s the same. Here’s Chicago. Chicago’s crazy, right? Chicago’s got the metro area’s got 73 White community banks. You have some beautiful downtowns and main streets in the Chicago metro area, whether it’s on the north side of Chicago or out in the suburbs, in the White suburbs, beautiful neighborhoods out there. One community bank, Black community bank left. Zero Hispanic community banks left for Chicago. Detroit, same story, and Nashville.
We’re talking about Nashville today. Here you are. You’ve got 19 White-owned community banks in Nashville. Only one Black community bank, and I’ve got them listed out here for you. Jason mentioned, you know, Pinnacle Bank here is a regional bank. It should, it’s doing what it should, what it’s always been doing, what they’re structured to do as as a regional bank. They’re doing what they’re doing, but you only have one NDI bank here. Now, I don’t want to leave you with just a picture. So here, so what’s possible with an MDI bank even today? And, if and should we have more of them? I mean, if you just think about it, like maybe we should have more. I don’t. I don’t know how many exactly more we should have. But, what if? What if you just started a new one today? What could it do? So, in Columbus, Ohio, Adelphi Bank became the first newly chartered African American NDI since 2003 since before the crisis, right? The first new one. They’re three years in. They’ve already got 100 million in assets.
Abello 30:28
You can see here almost $27 million in construction and development loans, $38 million in commercial real estate, $20 million in commercial and industrial. So, that’s mostly small business lending. So, just three years in and where’s where is it lending to. Okay, so here’s a map of the Columbus metropolitan area. So, this [is] Columbus and the surrounding area. The star is where Adelphi is – one branch. They only have one branch so far. It’s a new bank, right? One branch, the star. It’s in the historic east side of Columbus, historically Black east side of Columbus, and you can see in this racial dot map. So, every, you know, if the font’s kind of hard to see, but basically you’re looking for the yellow, right? The yellowish areas, the yellow dots, are the Black population in Columbus. And, like many cities, the Black population ended up on one side of the city, and Columbus it ended up being the east side. So the east side of Columbus, you can see the yellowish areas. Now, if we go to the next slide, these yellow dots are where Adolfo Bank is lending. As close as I can approximate the two maps together, right? Unfortunately, I’m not the greatest for graphics. Maybe Jason can do this, but the yellow dots are primarily in the predominantly Black neighborhoods throughout the Columbus area, from the historic east side around the branch to other parts of the Columbus area where there are Black neighborhoods.
I looked at the racial demographics of the zip codes where, um, where Adolph Bank has made these mortgages. You know, the yellow again, each yellow is one commercial, is one mortgage. They’re primarily commercial real estate mortgages. And, Adelphi Banks’ top five zip codes. If you look at the top five zip codes where they’re lending, three of the top five are majority Black neighborhoods, and a fourth is 40% Black. And, then, the fifth of the top five is the zip code that that includes the Ohio State University. Which, of course, I mean, how can you avoid making a loan to a business near a college like that? So, that’s possible in just three years of work. Like, imagine what it’ll be in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years as a bank having the same access to the kind of banking, the relationship-based, community-based underwriting that the White neighborhoods have now. They have access to that in the Black neighborhoods in Columbus, and yeah, I’m excited to hear from Corey about the work that his bank has been doing, Citizen Savings Bank and Trust in Nashville.
Hammonds 32:42
Thank you, Oscar. My name is Corey Hammonds. I’m representing Citizen Savings Bank and Trust here in Nashville. Our claim to fame: We are the oldest African American-owned bank in the country. We were founded in 1904. We are an MDI, and then we are also a CDFI bank. I am here to talk to you very briefly about banking relationships and how your most important source of capital is the local community banks. I serve proudly as the chief operating and credit officer of the bank. I’m also the founder and owner of the Hammonds Group, which is a appraisal, a real estate development and brokerage firm. My focus is bridging the gap between corporate banking, real estate investment, and community growth. My mission, and also the reason why I’m affiliated with Citizens Bank, is their mission of empowering local entrepreneurs, expanding assets to capital, and building long-term generational wealth.
As Oscar mentioned, and as you have heard over this panel discussion, banking relationships do matter, and when you bank with a local community bank, whether you are an individual, whether you are an organization, nonprofit, or even a small business, the best time to build an institutional banking relationship is long before you need a request for a loan. So, no matter what it is that you need, it starts with a banking relationship, a depository relationship. I tell folks all the time, Citizens having the long history and foundation and longevity that we do have. Just imagine if we led the way into in-deposit generation. If we were as big as, let’s just say, a Wells Fargo from a depository standpoint. A lot of the issues that we’re talking about on this panel discussion right now would not exist for Black and Brown people. So, the main takeaway from that is where you put your money is really what you support. And, so if you really have a interest in making a difference, where you bank, where you have your excess cash, where you have your operating deposits, think about putting those with a local community bank because local community banks are the first line of folks and organizations that put money back directly into the communities that they serve. What helps projects gain traction?
So, I get a lot of very mission-minded projects that different developers want financing for, but what bankers really look for outside of that is clear. Framework, real contingencies, and a structure sponsor contribution model. So, what that really means is we really want to define scope of not only just how your project, from an economic development standpoint, helps the community. We also, we are still a bank, so we still have to make sure to de-risk and to make sure that the cap, the cap stack, as we call it, is diversified. So, when folks come to us, we want realistic timelines, reliable contingency allowances, and material sponsor equity to demonstrate alignment with your project. We also need balanced funding architectures combining sponsored equity, tax credits, state federal grants, and traditional debt. It’s very, very important if you’re doing any type of development that’s affordable housing, workforce housing, or anything that’s [a] economic development model or framework is to make sure that your capital stacking, your equity is in place, and that what helps community banks specifically underwrite the deal and make sure the deal is not only profitable to the bank and also profitable to the developer, but also good to the community. So, one of the reasons why banks might walk away is that there’s gaps.
You know, the the underwriting roadblocks, overly aggressive projections lacking submarket historical validation. You have to know the information of your market, of your development, of your project, equity deficits is another one. Intervention sponsor, financial commitment, or direct operational equity. What that basically means is there’s not enough cash injection or equity being put into the project. One of the things that people fail to think about is what we call underwriting friction. You know, as banks request things, late document submission, unaddressed liabilities, or missing reports. It’s critical to have all the information that you really need on the front end. So, when banks, we can build that rapport with potential borrowers who are doing good in the community. Some of the other things is the “Trust us” narrative.
Hammonds 36:57
Just because you’re doing good, like I said before, and you have a a project that is good for the community. We still need all of the information that we got to have. Compressed time windows, meaning you know a project, no matter what size or what scale it is, we really need to have enough time to underwrite it properly, and then also you know operating on flat budgets without material cost overrun assumptions. When you’re doing development deals, there’s always something that’s going to come up, so making sure that you have all of that cushion, or contingency capital, squared away is very, very important. So, the core principle of this is banks rarely decline deals due to mission alignment. I get a lot of requests throughout the Nashville area where there are mission-aligned projects, especially with the mission of Citizens, normally it’s walked away because the risk cannot be underwritten securely. So, from a capital stack perspective and from a cash flow perspective, that is very, very important in making sure that the bank is with you as it pertains to providing you the financing that you need.
So, to end my presentation, successful community development financing occurs at the intersection of three things: 1) strong relationships, but it starts at the depository level. 2) measurable community impact. We want to see not only that you’re a current customer of the bank or current customer of, you know, the community. We also want to see how do you measure the community impact based on what it is that you’re doing, and then thirdly, because we are a bank, we still have to, you know, stick to sound banking fundamentals, and that’s making sure capital stack is adequate, and that’s also making sure that the information that is requested cash flows properly, so we can stick to sound banking fundamentals. Thank you for the presentation, and I’ll turn it back over to Monchiere’ for any questions that anyone might have.
Holmes-Jones 38:43
Corey, thank you so much. That was really, really good, and succinct. I love that. If you have any questions, I saw a couple questions in the Q and A, and thanks Jason for getting in there and answering a couple of those. We have one that I need to answer, and I will need a little help on this one that I see still out there. How long will the replay be available? Not sure if we know that just yet, but I’ll get that information. But, if there’s any additional questions, someone’s typing that answer now. Thank you. Any additional questions for any of our panelists? I would love to open the floor for that. If you can just go into the Q and A at the bottom of your screen, screen there, we can get those answered. This has been a great presentation. I was taking notes. I need to go back to that map. That map for Nashville. Thank you for doing Nashville. That’s really huge for us here. Again, Jason, Oscar, Corey, great, great, great presentation! So excited! Oh, Ron Thompson, thank you, Ron. What can Nashville do today to turn this trend around? I’ll throw that to Oscar just based on some of your notes of kind of surveying the whole United States with your book. And then everybody else can follow … Corey Jason… and I can answer it again if you don’t see it.
Abello 40:04
Oh, I can see it. Yeah, I mean, one thing that, I guess, [is a] pattern I would say has existed over time. It’s not necessarily what’s happening, what’s been happening recently. If you do look at the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which just passed, there are several provisions in there that are specifically tailored to support community banks, local and regional banks, to be a more significant piece of the sort of affordable housing infrastructure in every across the country. Right, there’s a cap on public welfare investments, raising the cap on public welfare investments, making it easier to hold reciprocal deposits or custodial deposits. So, you know, if you have a large deposit or anchor institution like a hospital or university, you know, there’s only so much, and they can leave deposited at a community bank, a smaller bank. But, that amount is a little bit bigger now. But that bill that just passed, you know, is probably the first time in a very long time when policymakers centered local banks in the delivery infrastructure for community development, you know, writ large.
You know, once upon a time when we created the FDA, the Federal Reserve. Let’s start with the Federal Reserve, the first one, right? When you create the Federal Reserve, that was originally to support local banks. That’s the reason why there’s 12 Federal Reserve banks. There’s not one Federal Reserve in New York, even though you know we can talk. I can talk. I will talk offline about what’s the New York one dominating the others. But, there’s a reason why there’s 12 federal reserve banks. The FDIC originally created to support local banks that needed the backing of the federal government so that they could continue to attract deposits locally. The federal home loan banks originally created again to support small savings and loan associations across the entire country. Once upon a time, policymakers centered community banks and local banks in everything that they expected to happen when it comes to community development and economic development. The idea of having big banks come in and be a partner did not figure into the equation because they didn’t exist until recently, right? In 1986, when we had 15,700 community banks, those community banks were 40% of the banking system, and the top four banks, the same top four banks we have today, those four banks were 6% of the banking system. We had a much more local and regionally-oriented banking system back in the day, and that was a result of policymakers centering local banks, and that can happen at the state and local levels too. It doesn’t just happen at the federal level. State and local governments can also do a lot to support local banks.
Hammonds 42:55
I want to add one thing to that. Yeah, especially in the Nashville area, which I’ve been a part of personally, is public and private partnerships. I think that is very, very important for the public sector and the private sector to come together and make sure that economic development, community reinvestment actually does take places in the areas, specifically of Nashville, that is needed for.
Holmes-Jones 43:19
That’s good. We love public and private partnerships in Nashville for sure. It’s how we move the needle. I’ll also add, you know, community development entails a lot of things. So, when we have these public and private partnerships, these webinars like this and events that we have, are really key to meeting the right people and the people who are ready for those types of conversations. So, beyond going, driving, yourself to the bank, so don’t forget to sign up. We’ll have some stuff for that in the future towards the end. Thank you for that, Oscar and Corey. I have another question here, and let me see if I can sum it up here really quick. Carmelita Turner, thank you. Enjoyed hearing your talk, Corey. It looks like, sounds like, the comments alluded to the Black community not being prepared or bankable, and so Citizens helps with that. She doesn’t have that data in front of her, but she was wondering. She never hears the organizations tell the person how they can. I love this. I’ve never liked hearing organizations tell the person who has been hit by a car to get up and walk over to the ambulance. I’ll go ahead and say, Citizens is definitely not those folks. They will hold your hand from front to back. Great partnerships. I’m a banker at Citizens as well and a Black-owned business on historic Jefferson Street. But, I’ll let Corey go ahead and answer that to your point on that.
Hammonds 44:36
Not only just, you know, Black and Brown communit[ies], but anybody that is, you know, underserved or underbanked. What we specifically do, we have a partnership with a nonprofit out of Atlanta called Operation Hope. It is free to the community, to anybody that wants to come about, and it is for individuals whether they need budgeting, is for small business or entrepreneurs who need counseling to get their businesses off the ground. This is not a one-time type of counseling. You can come as many times as you want, and it is totally free. And, what we do is we try to prepare whether it’s an individual, whether it’s an entrepreneur, or some type of other organization. We want to prepare them for the financing that they need, especially when what they’re doing is community-focused.
Holmes-Jones 45:20
Okay, I love it. We have one more question before we turn to our closing notes. How have the community and regional banks played a role in the housing recovery since 2008? Jason, I felt like when you said that earlier, that was a good primer. Like, did we get back together by 2012 in real life? Let me see. I don’t think so, but this question I’ll kick to you from Athena Gore.
Richardson 45:43
I’m sorry. Let me take a look here.
Holmes-Jones 45:45
No, it’s okay. How have community and regional banks played a role in the housing recovery?
Richardson 45:50
So, what we’re finding, so ever since the housing crash, banks have every year we’ve seen them pull back further and further from mortgage lending, and I’m going to confine my comments right now to mortgage lending because it’s what I work with the most. So, for a variety of reasons, banks have every year ceded the mortgage space to mortgage companies. In fact, in 2025, only 30% of home purchase loans nationally were made by a bank. About 10 or 11% were made by credit unions. The rest of them are made by mortgage companies. Large banks were actually finding now that they are turning from making mortgage loans directly. Instead, they’re opening up massive lines of credit for mortgage companies, and by doing so, banks can sidestep regulations like the Community Reinvestment Act in certain ways, and I think that that is a particular concern.
NCRC has been a strong advocate for modernizing the Community Reinvestment Act to cover mortgage companies as well. And, if you’re not familiar with it, the Community Reinvestment Act is a law that requires banks to reinvest in the communities where they take deposits from – it’s a really simple concept. You cannot take deposits from a community and then refuse to lend money in that community, or simply avoid that community. And, right now, mortgage companies are exempt from that, so there is no obligation for them to service lower-income areas of Nashville, and we feel that is, you know, a gap certainly in oversight that we hope at some point is corrected. One other thing we’ve done is help groups promote state-level Community Reinvestment Act[s]. Illinois just implemented [one]. New York has a state-level CRA and, hopefully, New Jersey soon will as well. So, you know, and I’m kind of sidestepping your question here because I don’t have specific data about Nashville for the entire time period for regional banks, but I can tell you that banks like Wilson Bank and Trust and Pinnacle Bank that I talked about, they have remained in the mortgage business, and I think that’s great. They are regularly examined to make sure that they are lending in lower-income areas and to lower-income home buyers. But, if you have any specific questions and you’re a member of NCRC, keep in mind you can just drop me a line anytime. Shoot me an email. I put my email in the chat, and I’m happy to look at specific banks or banks in your specific area.
Holmes-Jones 48:25
Awesome, thank you, Jason. That’s really, really good, and also I think the link was in the chat as well. But, to his map, that map that was really, really helpful. So, if you have not grabbed it, I want to go ahead and take these last few minutes here to get you ready. This was first of many. We will host a training in Nashville related to community development and investment. So, if you’re in the Metro Nashville area and would like to attend, go ahead and email Greg Wilson, G Wilson at NCRC.org. For those of you on the West Coast, NCRC will be hosting our Reinvest Washington Economic Summer Summit in Tacoma, Washington on September 22. That sounds amazing. And, for those of you across the country, NCRC will be hosting our 2027 Just Economy Conference May six through seven, Washington D.C. Of course, if you have an idea for a need, for a panel, and we need to submit that idea, please do that by July 30th of this year. For more information, you can always become a member to stay tuned and stay connected and get all of this good information by going to ncrc.org/membership. And, for more details on future events and webinars like this, do the same thing. Go to ncrc.org/events. Today was amazing. Content was solid. Thank you all so much. We appreciate you here in Nashville, of course, but we appreciate NCRC just as well. Thank you so much, and have a great day.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
