Source: TRINITY UNIVERSITY submitted to NRP
REDLINING IN RURAL AMERICA? DATA COLLECTION TO INFORM CONTEMPORARY RURAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Sponsoring Institution
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Project Status
ACTIVE
Funding Source
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
1032378
Grant No.
2024-67024-42620
Cumulative Award Amt.
$300,000.00
Proposal No.
2023-09932
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Project Start Date
Jul 15, 2024
Project End Date
Jul 14, 2026
Grant Year
2024
Program Code
[A1661]- Innovation for Rural Entrepreneurs and Communities
Recipient Organization
TRINITY UNIVERSITY
ONE TRINITY PLACE
SAN ANTONIO,TX 78212
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
This project focuses on the connection between historical discriminatory policies and present-day persistent rural poverty. Understanding this connection is foundational to crafting effective present-day rural economic development policy that would undue these legacy effects. This seed grant will collect and longitudinally link data in preparation for applying for a future Standard Grant submission from AFRI. Consistent with the requirements of Seed Grants, this work will thus not fund a stand-alone project, but rather a project that will lead to further work applicable to the Rural Economic Development AFRI Program Area. Specifically, the long-term goal of this Seed Grant is to spur rural economic growth by developing a data foundation for research-based knowledge of, and thereby support for, rural economic growth, with particular attention to minoritized ethnic and/or racial and gender groups. New, researcher-constructed datasets will be freely released to the research community to further research into outcomes for minoritized populations in rural areas.To develop specific research questions from initial data to be answered through the submission of a Standard Grant project, this Seed Grant will proceed in three steps: (1) enhance the documentation of the historical administrative behavior of FmHA and FCA by investigating and digitizing records at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); (2) web-scrape public online historical records to develop a dataset of the historical geography of FmHA and FCA loans; (3) develop intergenerational (and longitudinal) linkages using restricted-access microdata from multiple federal agencies.
Animal Health Component
20%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
80%
Applied
20%
Developmental
(N/A)
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
61061103010100%
Goals / Objectives
Our project focuses on the connection between historical, discriminatory policies and the present-day persistence of rural poverty. Understanding this connection is foundational to crafting effective present-day rural economic development policy. This Seed Grant will collect and longitudinally link data in preparation for applying for a future Standard Grant from AFRI. Consistent with the requirements of Seed Grants, this work will thus not fund a stand-alone project, but rather a project that is foundational to further work applicable to the Rural Economic Development AFRI Program Area. Specifically, the long-term goal of this Seed Grant is to spur rural economic growth by developing a data foundation for research-based knowledge of, and thereby support for, rural economic growth, with particular attention to minoritized ethnic and/or racial and gender groups. New, researcher-constructed datasets will be freely released to the research community.Developing this data foundation is a prerequisite for understanding and quantifying the long-run effects of historical policies still lingering in rural communities today (Clark et al. 2022; Albrecht 2022; Parker et al. 2022). Thus, numerous questions specifically related to the Rural Economic Development program area priority emphases remain unanswerable without this project's data foundation.
Project Methods
We will use standard economic and statistical software packages (e.g., SAS, R, or STATA) to longitudinally (and intergenerationally) link federal administration data. In turn, we will use powerful econometric techniques common to panel data analysis. The choice of technique will be contingent on the qualitative and quantitative (mixed methods research) analysis of records from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and county mortgage records.

Progress 07/15/24 to 07/14/25

Outputs
Target Audience: Nothing Reported Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Consistent with the project objectives, during the period in question, PI Anders mentored five undergraduate students who were working on various data collection efforts. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Nothing Reported What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?PI Anders and Co-PI Carpenter will continue to lead efforts to document data availability as well as to transcribe data scrapped from the web into formats that are useful to the research community. For example, we seek to build a clean, well indexed spreadsheet of land records that could be merged to other datasets for the purpose of statistical analysis

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Consistent with our proposal timeline, we have made important progress towards building the data foundation described in the project. In particular, we have employed undergraduate research assistants to discover web based sources of historical county mortgage data and made progress in documenting county-level availability of these resources. We have also started to employ web scrapping algorithms to transform the web based data into a clean database suitable for statistical analysis. Specifically, several counties' historical mortgage records have been scrapped and are currently in the process of converting those PDFs into spreadsheets

Publications