Neighborhood Progress, Inc.

Descripción

Neighborhood Progress, Inc. uses innovative programs to strengthen Cleveland’s neighborhoods:

* Competitive Grants:

Our experienced staff of development experts studies Cleveland to find out which neighborhoods have the best opportunities for growth, the strongest comprehensive plans and the most effective development corporations. Then we fund those corporations, awarding over $1.6 million every year. This program is financially supported by the Cleveland Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners and the George Gund Foundation.

* Strategic Investment Initiative:

For the top-performing six participants in our Challenge Grants* program, Neighborhood Progress provides additional leadership and management training, technical assistance and project planning advice to help Cleveland’s best neighborhood groups achieve their goals.

* Vacant Property, Foreclosure and Land Assembly:

We continue to demonstrate leadership in the community development field through our Vacant Property Prevention, Reclamation and Strategic Land Assembly Initiative. Specific goals of the initiative include: promoting policy changes that reduce predatory lending and flipping as well as the foreclosures and abandonment that result from such practices, removing systemic obstacles that impede recovery and redevelopment of vacant and abandoned property, identifying local and national best practices in vacant property reclamation and land assembly, developing new tools for financing land assembly and abandoned property reclamation, and increasing the capacity of CDCs and local government through training and technical assistance in property acquisition.

· Opportunity Homes:

Faced with the growing foreclosure crisis and the resulting vacant homes, Neighborhood Progress worked with the Cleveland Housing Network to develop a new program, Opportunity Homes. With support from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency, KeyBank, Living Cities and Enterprise Community Partners, Opportunity Homes has developed a comprehensive one-of-a-kind market recovery strategy designed to counter the effects of foreclosure in the following six Cleveland neighborhoods: Slavic Village, Buckeye/Shaker, Fairfax, Glenville, Tremont, and Detroit Shoreway. Opportunity Homes is an entrepreneurial collaboration of strong, experienced partners, which aims to restore market confidence, eliminate blight, preserves existing property values and enables homeowners who are currently faced with the loss of their homes, to retain their property and re-establish their credit. This pilot initiative will act as a model that is replicable in other neighborhoods in the City and throughout Ohio.

The first year goals of Opportunity Homes will be:

o Mitigation: Keep 100 families who are currently at risk of losing their homes from being foreclosed upon through work with foreclosure counseling agencies.

o Demolition: Demolish 100 currently vacant blighted structures that are not suitable for rehab.

o Redevelopment: Redevelop 121 currently vacant structures for homeownership, either through immediate sale or lease-purchase/rental arrangements.

* Village Capital Corporation: We use community development expertise and our nonprofit status to secure low-interest financing for neighborhood projects. By leveraging almost $18 dollars of private and public money for every dollar from Village Capital, we’ve leveraged over $750 million worth of new private investment to Cleveland.

* New Village Corporation: We create projects that have the power to transform entire neighborhoods. We act as the deal-maker for developments that are too large for community development corporations and too risky for private developers to accomplish on their own. Since the program started in 1991, we’ve built new neighborhoods of affordable and market-rate housing, plus shopping centers and grocery stores. We’ve brought over $150 million in new development to Cleveland.

NPI is also a founding partner of "Reimagining a More Sustainable Cleveland" (http://reimaginingcleveland.org/)

Northeast Ohio Green Map
updated 03/2012 by Northeast Ohio