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In the early 1990s, after three decades of widespread
real estate divestment and abandonment, the city
owned the title to tens of thousands of dilapidated
housing units in some of America’s toughest, most
crime-ridden neighborhoods. Over the past seven
years, the Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Program
(NEP), a public-private venture of the New York City
Partnership, has achieved remarkable success in
building community capacity by rehabilitating more
than 3,500 dilapidated homes in neighborhoods
once given up for dead, including Harlem’s 140th
Street, Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the
Bronx’s Hunts Point.
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To bring about profound, neighborhood-wide change,
NEP targets clusters of city-owned buildings and
then offers market incentives to help small, local
entrepreneurs acquire, refurbish, and manage
them. By providing affordable housing and
entrepreneurship opportunities, the program has
enhanced community capacity in direct ways. |
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It
has also done so indirectly, by catalyzing retail
development, job creation, capital formation, and
community organizing.
Helping to meet the fundamental need for safe,
affordable housing has provided the foundation upon
which more ambitious efforts, including those that
involve clever applications of technology, can be built. |