The Minneapolis Fed's Community Affairs team recently made a few notable changes and enhancements to two of its previously published materials. Details follow.
Online essays expand L3C discussion. In order to expand the discussion of a complex and compelling topic, Community Affairs has added supplemental materials to the online version of a November 2009 Community Dividend article about low-profit limited liability companies, or L3Cs. The article, "The L3C: A new business model for socially responsible investing" by Steve Davis and Sue Woodrow, generated considerable interest, both favorable and skeptical, among our readers. Accordingly, we invited some legal and development finance professionals to present their perspectives on the merits of the L3C business model. In the essays they submitted for that purpose, Daniel S. Kleinberger of William Mitchell College of Law and J. William Callison of Faegre and Benson offer a cautionary, negative assessment of L3Cs, while John Tyler of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Marcus Owens of Caplin & Drysdale provide a cautious but positive perspective. To read the essays, visit the November 2009 edition of Community Dividend.
Report about costs of homeownership programs revised. A recently released Community Affairs report has been revised to reflect changes in the authors' methodology. When the report, "Gaining a Better Understanding of the Costs of Homeownership Programs: A Case Study and Recommendations for Minnesota's Home Ownership Center" by Leo T. Gabriel and Richard M. Todd, was released earlier this year, it triggered discussions among the authors and homeownership service providers regarding the way some components of the costs of homeownership programs had been classified. As a result, the authors decided to reclassify some of the expenses and repeat their analysis. The changes had little effect on the report's principal findings, but some results did change. For example, the average cost for foreclosure counseling at Community Action Agencies is now in line with overall foreclosure counseling costs. The new results appear in a revised version of the report.
