No factor is more crucial to a community’s strength than the condition of its housing, and no city exemplifies this dynamic more clearly than New York.

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.

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. 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.