Climate Change: It Does Change Everything

Tarik Abdelazim serves as the Associate Director of National Technical Assistance for Community Progress. From 2010 to 2014, I served as Director of Planning, Housing and Community Development for the City of Binghamton, a city of about 48,000 in upstate New York that shares all the historical scars and future potential of other small former…

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The Next Frontier in Neighborhood Stabilization – The ReClaim Project

By Craig Nickerson, National Community Stabilization Trust and Rebecca Regan, Housing Partnership Network In numerous communities today, REO inventories are declining and overall foreclosure rates are at five-year lows; however, the importance of continuing the work of stabilizing hard hit neighborhoods is far from over. Many neighborhoods, often low- to moderate-income and multicultural communities, continue to…

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After the last bell rings, cities explore options for vacant school buildings

Urban school districts are seeing schools close due to population declines, the buildings’ age, and other factors. The trend is particularly pronounced in cities that have faced the decline of large industry and subsequent hard times. Elaborate, sometimes multi-structure facilities once cherished as neighborhood centers – built to provide thousands of kids with an education…

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#LoveThatLot: Your Valentines for formerly vacant lots

Parcel by parcel, on blocks across the country, transformations are underway: local champions are turning vacant, abandoned lots into local gems. These projects are changing neighborhoods and touching lives but, too often, they’re known only to those who are lucky enough to live nearby.  Last week, we issued a call for Valentines to shine some light on these special spots and you responded without…

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Seven Cities Selected for Community Progress Leadership Institute

Delegations from seven cities across three states have been selected to attend the 2015 Community Progress Leadership Institute (CPLI), a training program focused on equipping leaders with the skills to address large inventories of blighted and vacant properties for the benefit of their communities. The cities that will be sending delegations of up to six…

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Send your favorite revitalized lot some Valentine’s love with #LoveThatLot

Around the country, vacant lots and abandoned properties are being transformed into everything from new housing to urban orchards to pop-up beer gardens to go-kart race tracks. It’s time to show them some love! Between now and Valentine’s Day, use #LoveThatLot on Twitter and Facebook to share photos of your favorite formerly vacant lots that have been transformed into…

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Dallas, Detroit, Gary and Trenton awarded technical assistance scholarships

Community Progress launched the competitive Technical Assistance Scholarship Program (TASP) in 2014, to help us find and support today’s pioneers in the work to reclaim and revitalize problem properties. TASP seeks out “changemakers” who are improving the field of practice, and it helps those leaders effect positive change on the ground. Today, we’re pleased to…

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How the Cuyahoga Land Bank is helping refugees “Discover Home”

Land banks can work in concert with a whole host of private, public, and nonprofit partners, using those creative partnerships to help the communities they serve. An example of one such partnership is the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (Cuyahoga Land Bank)’s Discovering Home program–described in Take it to the Bank: How Land Banks Are…

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What does a successful land bank look like?

What does a successful land bank look like? It’s one of the questions our new report, Take it to the Bank: How Land Banks Are Strengthening America’s Neighborhoods, explores. Based on our research, there are a number of common characteristics critical to successful land banking. The following is a breakdown of these five key characteristics as laid…

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Do Urban Neighborhoods Need Homeowners?

Originally posted on the National Housing Institute’s Rooflines blog At a conference I attended last week, one of the speakers, a colleague whose judgment and knowledge I respect, offered his take on the future of urban single family neighborhoods. The lower income families who have the credit and can get together the down payment to…

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