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Spending on Infrastructure toward Equity (SITE) Tool User Guide

Why We Created This Tool

Ideally, infrastructure—transit, roads, plumbing, power lines, and even homes—links all people to the resources they need to live a full life. It connects people to education and jobs, ensures access to quality dwellings, transports clean water, and provides parks to promote community health. The US federal government recently expanded investment in infrastructure through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and has maintained funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). These investments intend to make transportation safer and more effective, increase access to broadband internet, ameliorate water quality, and reduce housing costs, while ensuring benefits go to communities where they are needed most.
Historically, however, infrastructure development has immensely benefitted some communities while harming others, including many low-income communities of color. An inequitable distribution of federal infrastructure funds may contribute to disparities in health, poverty, and overall life outcomes. Today, Congress and public agencies’ decisions about investments in infrastructure have the potential to reinforce—or reverse—these inequities.
The distribution of dollars through new investments will have equity implications that will be critical to understand in order to prevent worsening disparities. Through the Spending on Infrastructure Towards Equity (SITE) tool, we aim to explore the equity implications of federal infrastructure investments by evaluating the funding distribution of grant programs originating from IIJA and IRA as well as longstanding programs funded by HUD. Our work responds directly to the Biden administration’s pledge to “allocat[e] federal resources to advance fairness and opportunity.”
To our knowledge, this is the first project to attach equity metrics to the national distribution of infrastructure funding. Readers may also be interested in exploring the data and analyses available at the following sites:

How to Use This Tool

Elected officials, policymakers, and advocates at the federal, state, and local levels can use this tool to understand the ways in which federal funds are distributed. Here are some potential ways to use the tool:
  • Congress members and congressional staff can explore the distribution of program funding through the formulas they write, such as for the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Performance Program. They can explore, for example, the degree to which current rules result in states with a higher share of people of color getting a fair share of funding.
  • Federal departmental officials can identify whether the programs they administer through competitive grants, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care Program, are expanding support for communities with high levels of homelessness.
  • Elected officials and staff from state, local, and tribal governments can evaluate the degree to which their state or community is receiving funding on par with the rest of the nation. They can look up data for Colorado, for example, or for Cook County, Illinois.
  • Advocates can collect information about what federal infrastructure programs are available and how funding is distributed to help them understand how best to maximize the value of federal investments.

How This Tool Is Organized

The SITE tool allows users to explore data by three different geographies: state, core-based statistical areas (CBSAs), and counties. CBSAs are made up of metropolitan and micropolitan areas, which include an urban area and its surrounding communities. For example, the New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metro Area includes New York City, Jersey City, and several surrounding counties in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The tool also allows users to explore the data by specific infrastructure programs.
To use this tool, start with the search bar on the landing page and look up a state, county, CBSA, or infrastructure program. If you don’t know specific program names, you can search for an infrastructure category to navigate to a list of related programs.
On the state, CBSA, and county pages, we include five data visualizations: a table of programs and their funding amounts; a map and a beeswarm comparing the amount of program funding nationally (for states and CBSAs) and state-wide (for counties); an equity score comparing a program’s per capita funding to indicators of need in that geography; and a barbell chart showing differences in program funding between the selected geography and the median of similar geographies. These pages intend to show how much funding the area has received compared to its need for infrastructure investment relative to other areas across the country.
On the program pages, we include a brief description of the program as well as four data visualizations: a map and a beeswarm comparing the amount of program funding nationally; a drop-down menu showing a suite of funding distribution measures that indicate whether communities received an equitable share of funding; and a bar chart comparing program funding across different community characteristics. These pages intend to show how much funding has been made available through a program and how well that funding is addressing the infrastructure deficits in the communities most in need of investment.
To learn more about the data behind each of these visualizations, see the About the Data section below.

Key Terms and Operative Language

1. Infrastructure: Infrastructure is an umbrella term used to describe elements of the built environment, though there is no single definition or use of the term. IIJA (see below) largely uses it to describe transportation, energy, water, and broadband projects. For this project, we chose to expand that definition to housing, which is a key element of the built environment.
2. Equity: Equity means “the state, quality, or ideal of being just, impartial, and fair,” as defined by Race Forward. For this project, we focus on distributional equity across states and counties according to race, ethnicity, and economic class, meaning we look at which programs and policies result in a fair distribution of benefits and burdens across all segments of a community, prioritizing those with the highest needs. These distributions are, in part, the product of funding choices made by public officials, but it is worth emphasizing that achieving equitable outcomes depends on whether investments improve communities or degrade them. We do not measure these outcomes as a part of this project.
3. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA): In November 2021, Congress passed this law, which will distribute $1.2 trillion through various funding programs between fiscal years 2022 and 2026 to rebuild American infrastructure and “invest in communities that have too often been left behind,” according to the Biden White House. Throughout this project, we refer to the infrastructure law as IIJA; some officials refer to it as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, or BIL.
4 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): In August 2022, Congress passed this law, which will distribute or provide tax credits for more than $800 billion between 2022 and 2032 to strengthen America’s clean energy economy, cut pollution, and promote environmental justice. Throughout this project, we refer to the act as IRA.
5. Formula grant: Formula grants are awarded to eligible entities based on congressionally established funding formulas, often based on population and other local characteristics. In some cases, these formulas were established by prior laws, and Congress has maintained funding levels to state and local jurisdictions based on those formulas without updating them to account for present conditions. Most formula grants are distributed to states, but some (such as Community Development Block Grants) are distributed to localities and others (such as Housing Choice Vouchers) are distributed to public agencies.
6. Competitive grant: Competitive, or discretionary, grants are awarded by federal departments after a request for proposals that invites applicants to submit ideas that meet federal priorities. Through competitive grant programs, governmental bodies, public agencies, and occasionally nonprofit and for-profit entities can apply for federal funding for specific programs or project ideas. Once received, applications are evaluated based on merit by a team of reviewers from the awarding agency.
7. Capacity: Capacity represents the extent to which municipal governments have the time, staff, and money to apply for and receive grants by developing compelling proposals. In the context of this project, we define capacity as the number of per capita staff members working in county and local government offices. We calculate this figure for staff working in transportation, housing and community development, and the environment, depending on the program.
8. Externalities: An externality is an outcome, effect, or consequence of some project or investment. Positive externalities are the planned or unplanned beneficial outcomes of some effort. Negative externalities are outcomes that cause harm (often referred to as “costs”). In the context of infrastructure work, negative externalities are often undesired byproducts of construction and facility use, such as the air pollution and traffic noise associated with highways. Each project funded by IIJA programs is likely to generate some amount of negative externalities that affect communities in the immediate vicinity of the project and in the surrounding regions. We describe a large number of these externalities for different project types in the appendix of Is Federal Infrastructure Investment Advancing Equity Goals?.
9. Need: We use the term “need” in two ways for this project. First, we use it in the context of community demographics, when referring to communities with high shares of people with low incomes and people of color, because we are interested in racial and economic equity considerations. Many of these communities have either historically received less investment or experienced more negative externalities from inequitable investment than whiter or more affluent communities. As such, these communities may have a greater need for investment today. Second, we use the term “need” in the context of programmatic indicators to describe jurisdictions that have a higher need related to a specific program; for example, jurisdictions with higher housing cost burdens might have a higher need for housing assistance.
10. Indicator(s): Indicators are data points that align with programmatic need. As in the example above, one indicator for the “need” for housing investment is housing cost burden.
11. Per-capita measurements: Per capita measurements calculate specific data per person. In this project, per capita calculations typically represent data values per 1000 people; we note if otherwise. Per capita measurements allow us to compare funding amounts across counties and states with different populations; for example, a county with 1,000,000 residents is likely to receive more funding overall than a county with 100,000 residents, but per capita funding can more easily be compared between jurisdictions.

About the Data

For this tool, we analyzed (1) 85 unique grant programs funded by IIJA that will each distribute a total of at least $1 billion between fiscal years 2022 and 2026, (2) 9 unique grant programs funded by the IRA that will distribute at least $1 billion between fiscal years 2022 and 2032, (3) 14 housing programs each distributing at least $1 billion in 2022 through annual HUD appropriations, and (4) 2 programs funded through annual DOT appropriations. The data presented in the tool are limited to fiscal years 2022 and 2023. We collected data from federal departmental announcements and project fact sheets. See the methods appendix in our 2023 report Is Federal Infrastructure Investment Advancing Equity Goals? for more detail on the programs included in the original version of the tool, published in October of 2023. In March 2025, we updated this tool with fiscal year 2023 data for existing programs and added 42 new programs (listed below) using the same methods for data collection, cataloguing, and analysis.
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act programs added to tool in March 2025:
  1. Affordable Connectivity Outreach Grant Program
  2. Battery Materials Processing and Battery Manufacturing and Recycling Program
  3. Brownfields Program
  4. Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program
  5. Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program
  6. Carbon Storage Validation and Testing Program
  7. Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant Program
  8. Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements Program
  9. Clean hydrogen electrolysis, manufacturing, and recycling activities
  10. Climate-Ready Coasts
  11. Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas Program
  12. Federal Aviation Administration Contract Tower Competitive Grant Program
  13. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration discretionary grants
  14. Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail Grant Program
  15. Flood Mitigation Assistance Grant Program
  16. Great Lakes Restoration Initiative
  17. Grid Innovation Program
  18. Grid Resilience Utility and Industry Grants
  19. Indian Health Service Sanitation Facilities Construction Program
  20. Land ports of entry projects
  21. National Culvert Removal, Replacement, and Restoration Grant
  22. National Infrastructure Project Assistance Program (Mega Program)
  23. Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-Saving Transportation Competitive Program
  24. Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs Program
  25. Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs Program
  26. Smart Grid Grants
  27. Transportation Alternatives Program
Inflation Reduction Act programs added to tool in March 2025:
  1. Agricultural Conservation Easement Program
  2. Conservation Stewardship Program
  3. Drought mitigation funding opportunities
  4. . Environmental Quality Incentives Program
  5. Green and Resilient Retrofit Program: Comprehensive, Elements, and Leading Edge cohorts
  6. National Laboratory infrastructure grants
  7. Regional Conservation Partnership Program
  8. Rural Energy for America Program
  9. Urban and community forestry grants
US Department of Transportation–funded programs added to tool in March 2025:
  1. Thriving Communities Program
  2. State Planning and Research Program Subpart B
US Department of Housing and Urban Development–funded programs added to tool in March 2025:
  1. Supportive Housing for Persons with Disabilities
  2. Emergency Solutions Grants Program
  3. Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS Program
  4. Housing Trust Fund
Other IIJA and IRA programs may not be included in the tool because the funding they will distribute is lower than $1 billion. Also, more recent award allocations may not be reflected in the tool because they were announced after June 2024, when we paused our annual data collection.
The federal government issued funds to regional, state, local, tribal, and private awardees. We indicate the county, CBSA, and state where funding was injected, but do not indicate the specific awardee. The county, CBSA, or state associated with an overall funding amount is not necessarily the specific awardee of some program funds (we use the county level as the smallest unit of geospatial analysis in this tool because it is nationally comprehensive). For example, we would classify a grant awarded to the Chicago Transit Authority to Cook County and Illinois.
When possible, we visualize indicators and programmatic data at the county level. Project funds occasionally cover multiple counties. In these cases, we assume that funds are spread out evenly across these counties. Because CBSAs are made up of counties, we aggregated the county-level funding data to create the CSBA funding data. The federal government distributed some awards directly to state governments for projects whose geographies were not yet defined. In these cases, we include awarded funds in state and program totals, but not at the county or CBSA level. Many formula funds are distributed to state governments through formula, so we do not break down these data to the county or CBSA level because we do not have adequate information to know how those funds have been spent.
We collected data for demographic and need-indicators from a wide range of publicly available sources, including the US Census Bureau 2016–20 five-year American Community Survey and data produced by other federal agencies. These indicators allowed us to investigate the degree to which program funds were disbursed (1) compared with local demographics and (2) compared with a jurisdiction’s possible investment needs. Demographic indicators include characteristics such as population density, share of residents who are people of color, and median household income. Program-related need indicators include broadband speed, number of public transit stops, share of vacant housing units, and share of bridges in poor condition, among others. For the full list of indicators and data sources used in this tool, see table 1.

Interpreting the Data and Applying Results

We present measurements that capture several different dimensions for how federal funding may be meeting need and equity goals in this tool. Each measurement should be interpreted within its local context and evaluated with the understanding that infrastructure projects generate both positive and negative externalities.
We provide data on a variety of indicators that may help paint a picture of the level of need for infrastructure in specific communities. But these indicators do not always tell a clear story. We use miles of major roads and highways (per capita per square mile), for example, as one way to evaluate transportation programs. Places that have more roads might need high levels of transportation funding to help maintain those roads, but places with fewer roads might also have a high need for funding to build new roads and connect communities that currently lack transportation options.
How a program distributes funding depends on the processes and people in charge of making funding decisions. These actors may differ depending on whether a program uses the formula funding process or the competitive funding process described above.
  • In the formula process, the primary decisionmakers are (1) Congress, in the creation of the initial formula and allocation of funds, and (2) state government agencies, which decide how to distribute most of these funds. Some local governments, tribal governments, and local agencies also receive formula funds.
  • In the competitive process, the primary decisionmakers are (1) federal agencies, which review proposed projects and make decisions about which to fund, and (2) applicants (e.g., state, county, city, and tribal governments; transit authorities; regional entities), which make decisions about whether to apply for funding, which projects to submit, and how to fill out applications.
Once we collected the program funding data and established the demographic and need-indicator categories, we analyzed each of the 110 programs by comparing the distribution of funds across counties and states with the various indicators. This process allowed us to explore whether infrastructure funds are more likely to support communities with certain characteristics.
First, we calculated an equity metric for each jurisdiction, which calculates the difference between the funding percentile and indicator percentile for each program and relevant indicator combination. A score of 0 indicates that the jurisdiction’s funding is proportional to the indicator. A negative score indicates the jurisdiction is receiving less funding than its indicator value would imply; a positive score indicates the jurisdiction is receiving more funding than its indicator value would imply. For example, if a county was at the 40th percentile for the funding it received from the Bridge Formula Program, but in the 70th percentile of need for its share of bridges that are in disrepair, that county would have an equity metric of –0.3 for that program and indicator combination. This metric might indicate that the Bridge Formula Program is not meeting that county’s needs in terms of bridge repair, at least when placed in the national context.
Next, we produced four types of funding distribution measures for each program:
  • The concentration measure indicates, for each program, how national funding is concentrated in the highest-need jurisdictions according to a selected indicator. For each indicator, we have compiled the highest-need jurisdictions that comprise approximately 25 percent of the US population. (Depending on which jurisdictions are included, slightly more than 25 percent of the US population may be included.) Scores range from –1 to 3. A score of 0 indicates that jurisdictions accounting for the top 25 percent of the US population, ranked based on a given indicator, receive roughly 25 percent of the funding. A lower score means that these jurisdictions receive less than 25 percent of the funding, and a higher score means that these jurisdictions receive more than 25 percent of the funding. For example, if a program has a county-level concentration score of 1 when measured in terms of share of people of color, that would mean that the program distributes about 50 percent of its funding to the quarter of the population living in counties with the highest shares of people of color.
  • The variability measure indicates the degree to which a program’s per capita funding aligns with the nation’s overall per capita funding. A variability score of 0 means that the program’s state-level funding distribution is similar to the national distribution. A higher variability score indicates that the state-level funding distribution for that program is farther from the national distribution, in either direction. Scores for most programs fall between 0 and 10. A program having a score of 8, for example, might mean that the typical state is receiving either much higher or much lower per capita funding than would be true if funding were spread evenly across the country. This metric is relevant for formula programs only, in which large amounts of funding are distributed to all states.
  • The persistent poverty measure indicates the share of a program’s funds going to counties that are in persistent poverty. Counties are considered to be in persistent poverty if 20 percent or more of the population was living in poverty in the 1990 decennial census, the 2000 decennial census, and the 2022 Small Area Income Poverty Estimates. This measure is only provided for programs with county-level funding data.
  • The disadvantaged county measure indicates the share of a program’s funds going to disadvantaged counties. As part of the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, census tracts are considered disadvantaged—and therefore a priority for funding—if they meet several indicators of underinvestment and environmental burden, including for income levels, climate risk, legacy pollution, energy costs, health risks, housing affordability and quality, transportation barriers, water quality, and unemployment. Federally recognized tribes, including Alaska Native villages, are also considered disadvantaged communities. We therefore consider a county to be disadvantaged if more than 50 percent of its census tracts are disadvantaged, or if more than 50 percent of the county population lives in disadvantaged tracts. This measure is only provided for programs with county-level funding data.
We added the persistent poverty and disadvantaged county measures in our 2024 tool update because they align more directly with measures used by grant applicants and federal agencies to track funding needs.
There is no such thing as a “perfect” measure. All measures show just one dimension of how a program may be meeting equity goals and should be viewed in combination with each other and with local context in mind to get a fuller picture.

About the Authors

About the PERC Initiative

The Melville Charitable Trust funded this work as a component of the Partnership for Equitable and Resilient Communities (PERC), a new justice venture that aims to build cross-sector collaborative partnerships nationwide, prepared to secure and implement public funds specifically focused on advancing economic development, housing, and civic infrastructure. PERC works with cities to strategically form and activate powerful coalitions that center the voices and expertise of Black, Indigenous and Latino/a/x communities, deliver measurable and results-based outcomes, and ultimately, redefine the decision-making process for investment, implementation and long-term impact of public funds.
By creating the first database that pairs equity metrics with federal infrastructure funding distribution data, this research project supports the PERC Initiative’s goal of advancing racial equity through conscientious local development by providing insight into how federal dollars are distributed across the country and by helping local leaders better understand the positioning of and opportunities for federally supported infrastructure work in their communities.

About

Update: This tool was updated on March 13, 2025 to include data from fiscal year 2023, additional federal infrastructure programs, and new funding distribution measures. The title was also changed to "Are Federal Infrastructure Funds Meeting Your Community’s Needs" to make it clear that the tool tracks funding by a variety of characteristics, including geography, race, income level, and indicators of local need. This tool was originally named "Is Federal Infrastructure Spending Advancing Racial and Economic Equity?”

For this tool, we analyzed 85 grant programs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, 9 grant programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, 2 programs funded by annual appropriations to the Department of Transportation, and 14 housing programs that use annual HUD appropriations. The data presented here are limited to fiscal year 2022 and fiscal year 2023. We collected program data from federal departmental announcements and project fact sheets. Demographic and need indicator data are sourced from approximately two dozen publicly available sources, including the 2016–20 American Community Survey five-year estimates from the US Census Bureau and data produced by other federal agencies.

To learn more about how to use this tool, see our user guide. To review the complete list of data sources and methods used in this work, see our full report.

Project Credits

This data tool was funded by a grant from the Melville Charitable Trust as part of the Partnership for Equitable and Resilient Communities Initiative. We are grateful to them and to all our funders, who make it possible for Urban to advance its mission. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Funders do not determine research findings or the insights and recommendations of our experts. More information on our funding principles is available here. Read our terms of service here.

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