Vacant Spaces into Vibrant Places
We envision a future where widespread vacancy, abandonment, and deterioration no longer exist
The Center for Community Progress is the only national nonprofit dedicated to comprehensively tackling vacant properties. Since 2010, our team has delivered customized, expert guidance to leaders in over 300 communities and provided hundreds of hours of free educational resources as well as leadership programming to help policymakers, practitioners, and community members return properties to productive use.
Get Help for Your Community
If you’re ready to take a comprehensive approach to ending systemic vacancy in your community, we can help
In addition to free tools and resources, we offer high-impact consultation services for government officials and decision makers tailored to your community needs. Our team combines decades of legal, planning, and strategic expertise to assess the state of vacant property in your community, craft recommendations for policy and practice changes, and forges lasting relationships to make sure you have ongoing support to succeed.
Recent News
Answering Big Questions Following Tyler v. Hennepin County
Answering the most common and important questions we’ve heard about property tax foreclosure in the wake of Tyler v. Hennepin County.
ARPA SLFRF Update: Interim Final Rule Expands Eligible Uses
The ARPA SLFRF expanded eligible uses allow funds to be deployed to help address vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties in new ways.
What is a tax lien sale and why is it a bad way of dealing with vacant properties?
Tax lien sales are one way that cities and counties try to recoup some of the public dollars they’ve spent maintaining properties abandoned by private owners. But tax lien sales rarely fix the problem, nor lead to a vacant property being returned to productive use.
Equity Commitment
As leaders in our field, it is our responsibility to uncover and disrupt the systems that perpetuate inequity – in the communities we serve and within our organization. Systemic racism is a root cause of vacant, abandoned, deteriorated properties and an immense barrier to achieving our mission. Therefore, we must ingrain the pursuit of racial equity in our programs, partnerships, and people. We do this by embedding racial equity into our programming; dedicating time and resources toward implementing an annual Equity Action Plan; and providing racial equity training and education opportunities to staff and board.
Our Programs
Leadership & Education
We educate grassroots leaders who want to strengthen their neighborhoods, uplift successes and best practices, and bring champions of community revitalization together. Learn More »
Technical Assistance
We deliver customized, expert guidance to help communities prevent and reduce entrenched vacancy and build relationships to make sure local partners are set up to accomplish lasting change. Learn More »
Policy & Research
We advocate for equitable policy change to help local, state, and federal leaders understand and reform the systems that perpetuate vacancy and deterioration. Learn More »
National Land Bank Network
We support the growing community of land bank leaders across the country by connecting these dedicated professionals to the tools they need to revitalize their neighborhoods and each other. Learn More »