Housing GSO: HRA Greensboro Affordable Housing Plan

NEIGHBORHOOD REINVESTMENT

The City can begin to overcome disinvestment in historically segregated areas of Greensboro by pursuing focused neighborhood reinvestment in partnership with neighborhood residents. Many areas of Greensboro, particularly in the south and east, have suffered from disinvestment, partly a result of decades of discriminatory housing policy nationwide. Such policies forced residents to live in neighborhoods characterized by low property values, blight, and racial and economic segregation. Targeted reinvestment efforts should be deployed to rehabilitate substandard housing, offer support for affordable homeownership, and stabilize neighborhoods with self-sustaining residential markets. The process of determining target neighborhoods must balance careful market analysis with neighborhood capacity and represent a top-down and bottom-up partnership. Historically, top-down neighborhood reinvestment strategies have been ineffective or damaging to communities of color.

1951-1968: The Smith, Warren, Morningside, and Hampton Homes are opened in East and South Greensboro.

2009 — : Since the subprime mortgage crisis, Greensboro’s black homeownership rate has declined each year.

1959: The Cumberland Project, North Carolina’s first urban renewal project, begins in East Greensboro.

1937: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation releases its Lending Guidelines Map of Greensboro.

HR&A Advisors, Inc.

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