In October, Woodstock Institute held a virtual workshop guiding participants through our Community Lending Data Portal. Our portal provides accessible mortgage and small business lending data for Illinois. Users can analyze and compare lending trends at several geographic levels across demographic groups, income levels, and financial institutions. This data is available thanks to two federal laws: the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).
For comprehensive information about the portal, a user guide is available for download. This user guide includes the history of HMDA and CRA, tab-by-tab explainers, a data dictionary defining key terms, and more!
In addition to the portal training, Woodstock Institute gave in-depth demonstration of our new data visualization Excel templates. Using these tools, analysts can copy and paste their selected data from the portal to generate charts, graphs, and other tools that facilitate analysis of lending patterns and disparities. Templates are available for analyzing mortgage data and top lender data. Detailed instructions are located within the documents after downloading.
If you have any questions about using the portal, our data repository, or the data visualization templates demonstrated in the training, please contact us at Research@woodstockinst.org.
