New Article: Coordinating Community Development

Posted by Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) on June 30, 2026

The Making Missing Markets initiative is marshaling funds and support groups to help towns across the United States.

If money is like water—it must move in the right direction to be useful—the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sees one place where this is not happening: the flow of funding for community development. With a mandate that includes promoting a healthy economy, the New York Fed decided to take action. In 2024, led by its community- development team, it launched Making Missing Markets, an initiative designed to drive more capital into low- to moderate-income communities.

It’s not that capital for these communities is lacking, says David Erickson, the New York Fed’s head of outreach and education. He points out that funding is often available to tackle problems such as climate vulnerability, poor access to health care and education, or lack of economic opportunity. But while these problems and their solutions are often overlapping or interconnected, the funding and interventions tend to be siloed and narrowly targeted.

“A missing market is an instance where there is sufficient money to pay for complex interventions that we know work,” he explains. “But no one entity owns the problem, and therefore we have a coordination problem.”

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