In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the state of Louisiana has taken steps to make asset building a priority. The Louisiana Department of Social Services has embraced the concept of asset building, and is implementing programs that offer opportunities for asset building to low- and moderate-income residents.

Read full story >
Read all stories >

Donate to CFED >

The 2007-2008 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard is a state-level snapshot of how the country is performing in six key areas: financial security, business development, homeownership, health care, education, and tax policy and accountability. The Scorecard uses a broad array of outcome and policy measures to assess states' asset-building and asset-protection capacity. Letter grades are assigned for the outcome measures. Twelve core state policies are assessed separately and states are rated on the strength of their policies. Grades are not issued for the tax policy area since it does not include outcome measures.

After analyzing 46 outcome measures across the five graded issue areas, 10 states receive overall A's: Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming. In looking at the 12 core policy measures, 5 states have 4 or more "strong" or "very strong" core policies: the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Vermont.