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Majority white areas of California received more money from the federal Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses than majority Latino areas did, according to a study by UCLA researchers.
The disproportionate amount of PPP money going to wealthier, whiter areas may make economic and racial disparities worse across the state, the study said.
The disparities arose primarily because the loans, which are awarded to businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, were distributed on a first-come, first-served basis by big banks, said Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, director of research for the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, which released the study on Wednesday along with the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge.
January 15, 2021
By mid-March, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic, UCLA classes had moved online and university employees in nonessential roles were working remotely. Soon after, on April 1, the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, or CNK, based at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, issued its first research report about the health crisis.
By late September, researchers affiliated with CNK had released more than a dozen COVID-19–related studies on their own or in partnership with other centers at UCLA and elsewhere in academia. Roughly, that works out to an astounding pace of one new study every two weeks.
Filed in Research & Studies on December 28, 2020
A new study published by the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative and the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that neighborhoods in California whose populations are majority Black, Latino or Asian benefitted less than White neighborhoods from the $500 billion in forgivable loans distributed nationwide through the Paycheck Protection Program amid the pandemic.
The report found that stimulus funds helped majority-white neighborhoods retain 51 percent of their pre-pandemic jobs, compared to 44 percent in majority-Latino neighborhoods and 45 percent in majority-Asian neighborhoods. And although the program helped retain 54 percent of pre-pandemic jobs in Black neighborhoods, that figure is somewhat misleading because those neighborhoods typically had a smaller job base to begin with. When standardized on a per-resident basis, the federal loans supported 5.8 jobs per 100 residents in Bla