Our Impact
Since 2010, the Center for Community Progress has provided urban, suburban, and rural communities battling systemic vacancy with the policies, tools, and resources needed to address the full cycle of property revitalization throughout the United States. Through work with more than 300 communities, our impact has reached 35 states and millions of residents, and uplifted innovative solutions including the National Land Bank Network and the Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference.
To learn more about our impact, download our past impact reports below.
2022 | The Future is Vibrant
In our 2022 Impact Report, we share the building blocks for how we help every neighborhood realize a vibrant future. Setting communities up for sustained success. Creating lasting networks that strengthen the field. Bringing people together to discover solutions to collective problems. Sharing our nation-leading expertise with the field. And driving local, state, and federal policy change.
2020-21 | Vibrant Communities
For our first ten years, the Center for Community Progress achieved change on the ground through intimate conversations with councilmembers and grassroots leaders; through one-of-a-kind event experiences; and through workshops that help practitioners and residents change the systems that prevent them from addressing problem properties.
The pandemic forced us to change how we did this deep and dedicated engagement, but it didn’t change the strength of our commitment to community revitalization.
In this rich retrospective of the last two years, you’ll find stories of how the leaders, advocates, and experts at Community Progress continued to transform places into strong, vibrant communities. You’ll see examples of how we used policies, tools, and resources to help places realize the untapped potential of underutilized properties, and right systemic wrongs by implementing equitable, sustainable practices.
2016 | In Service of People and Place
Our work is about serving people. It’s about creating places of opportunity, places that are safe and vibrant, places that reflect and respect the culture, experience, and dreams of their residents. In this annual report we share three stories from 2016 that are emblematic of our work to improve the wellbeing of residents and the places they call home.
2015 | Building a Bold Moment
The story in Flint is about more than water, and represents one horrifying symptom of broader systemic injustices. Flint’s challenges are the result of inequitable public policies, and sadly echo similarly distressing stories shared by the majority of the places where Community Progress works. Flint’s great need is emblematic of why we work to create systemic change around land use practices. There is so much work yet to be done to create communities that are safe, vibrant places of opportunity for all residents.
2014 | Celebrate Progress
Every week you mow the empty lot next door to your house on the street where you’ve lived for 27 years. You think about everyone who used to call this block home. Your neighborhood has a past, but you wonder: does it have a future? Does anyone care?
2013 | Annual Report
“I was excited to have a significant community revitalization tool to help our communities tackle blight and for the opportunity to spearhead the effort countywide,” said April Kopas, executive director of the Westmoreland County Land Bank (WCLB) in Pennsylvania, reflecting on the passage of Pennsylvania’s land bank enabling law.
2012 | Annual Report
With the right systems in place, the early signs of neighborhood destabilization are not difficult to spot. Key indicators include the number of properties with code violations, the rate of tax delinquency, and the rate of foreclosure, often on a block-by-block level. But many communities across the country do not have the systems in place to track this data, recognize these signs, and intervene effectively in the early stages of a neighborhood’s decline.
Ensuring that communities have the tools to preserve the stability of vital, but threatened, neighborhoods is central to Community Progress’ mission.
2011 | Annual Report
When the Center for Community Progress launched in January 2010, counties and municipalities across America were facing unprecedented challenges: the fallout from the mortgage foreclosure crisis continued to weaken the nation’s housing markets, and communities around the country faced growing budget deficits alongside depressed property values and neighborhoods decimated by vacant and abandoned properties.