GREEN BANKS
Green bank underwriting prices the engineering — the panels, the payback period, the credit risk. Nothing in that file prices whether the community around the project will steward what gets built, or whether the low-income households a program carve-out is designed for are the ones its outreach reaches. Best Use of Place and Community Intelligence read that variable directly, at the census-tract level, before the financing closes.
Every dollar a green bank deploys gets underwritten for engineering. None of it gets underwritten for whether the neighborhood keeps it.
We exist to bring trust back to the places it's gone missing.
What's Missing From the Underwriting Process
Green bank underwriting is genuinely rigorous on the things it was built to measure: energy savings, credit risk, project engineering, portfolio diversification. What it wasn't built to measure is whether the community around a financed project will use it, maintain it, and defend it once the ribbon-cutting is over — or whether it sits underused, drifts into disrepair, or becomes the project residents point to when the next proposal comes through. That's not a knock on the model. It's a genuine gap, because until now nobody had a rigorous way to close it.
Community Intelligence (CI) is a trust-mapping instrument built to close exactly that gap. It reads public data — census, health, housing — down to the census tract, and produces a structural answer to a question every green bank is currently answering by instinct: not "will this community resist us," but "what belongs here, and will they hold onto it."
Best Use of Place
We call the instrument Best Use of Place. It's two independently scored reads, multiplied.
On a real 20-acre brownfield site under active redevelopment pressure, the read converged from two independent directions — structural gaps in the neighborhood's civic pillars, and the community's own values priorities — and landed on the same answers without being told to.
Build: a community health center, workforce and small-business incubator, family and early-childhood services, affordable homeownership, genuine environmental remediation. Avoid: market-rate housing, nightlife anchors, corporate anchor tenants, unprogrammed passive park space — every one a use that would have read as extraction, not investment, to the people who live there.
The Other Half of the Portfolio: Who the Program Reaches
Most green banks also run a low- and moderate-income carve-out inside their broader portfolio — a Solar for All allocation, a weatherization pipeline, a percentage set-aside for disadvantaged communities. That carve-out has the same blind spot as site selection, one level down: standard outreach (mailers, contractor referrals, call-center intake) reaches some eligible households cleanly and never reaches others, and most programs have no way to tell which is which before the enrollment period closes.
Finds the tracts where institutional trust is structurally lowest — the places a standard mailer or contractor-referral pipeline reliably underperforms, regardless of how well the program itself is designed.
A structural read of physical and channel access — walkability and transit — that correlates with poverty in ways that cut against assumption: some high-poverty tracts are highly reachable by conventional outreach, and some low-poverty tracts are not.
Two instruments, one underwriting file: Best Use of Place scores what to finance and where it will be stewarded. Floor Identification and Reachability score whether the program built to reach LMI households will.
What's Been Proven
Stated plainly, the way we state it everywhere: the instrument reliably finds the floor — the places standard channels won't reach — but it does not reliably rank places along a gradient. The Election Day Test's one failed prediction is part of that proof, not a footnote we're leaving out.
Coverage varies by market. Houston and the Near Northside pilot are live, proven proof points. Elsewhere — including inside your own service territory — whether specific tracts are already read or would need to be added is the first, fastest thing a Ground Truth Sprint establishes. We'd rather tell you that up front than let you assume more coverage than currently exists.
Identify one project or one program allocation currently in your pipeline — a site under diligence, or an LMI carve-out where enrollment is running below eligibility. A 30-day Ground Truth Sprint reads that one geography: Best Use of Place for a site decision, Floor Identification and Reachability for a program-reach question, or both.
No platform commitment, no long-term contract.
If it sharpens one decision, there's a version that scales across the portfolio. If not, thirty days is what it costs to find out.