Economy
West Coast Cities Have Better Access to Credit, Maps Show
A new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York breaks down the geography of credit security — a little-explored metric of a community’s financial health.
A new analysis looks at communities’ access to affordable credit, which affects residents’ ability to get mortgages, among many other things.
Photographer: David Ryder/BloombergAccess to affordable credit has improved in much of the US over the last two decades, but a geographic breakdown from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reveals vast disparities in residents’ capacity to borrow money.
Across the US, rural areas had worse credit health between 2018 and 2023, the NY Fed found. The researchers created a credit insecurity index as another way for cities and communities to gauge their financial well-being.