Reacting to a surge in foreclosures, the city will begin overseeing a program to turn boarded-up houses into renovated homes. Announced in October, the Neighborhood Stabilization Program will subsidize housing rehabilitation through a nonprofit group, which will hold title to the properties until they can be sold to families making roughly $80,000 to $90,000 a year.
Yesterday Mayor Bloomberg confirmed that the city has been approved for $24 million in federal financing to move forward with the initiative, starting with two houses on Staten Island, one in Queens and one in the Bronx. He told reporters at a press conference, "We’ve worked hard over the past seven years to build strong, safe neighborhoods, and we can’t — and we won’t — let the current mortgage crisis destabilize our communities and threaten our quality of life."
In 2007, there were 15,000 foreclosure filings in the city, up from 7,000 in 2005; this year the number of foreclosure filings is expected to reach 20,000. One of the worst-affected neighborhoods is South Jamaica, Queens, where 39 out of 140 properties on one four-block stretch have been in various stages of foreclosure since 2004. According to the Times, the prevalence of boarded-up buildings echoes the housing crisis of the late 1970s and early ’80s, which the city tried to solve with a flawed plan that left many abandoned houses to decay and ended up costing the city $220 million a year to manage.
Currently, 115 properties throughout the city are targeted for the program. Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an expert in city housing policy, tells the Times she's "uneasy about it being in so many neighborhoods, because it’s going to be so much harder to control and so much harder to assess than if they put it in one demonstration neighborhood."
Photo courtesy Jenna Bascom.
