a brief reprieve....

How Smart Community Developers Work
Among the supporting cast of the great urban revival of the 1990s were community development corporations, nonprofits that bought and rehabilitated housing and encouraged neighborhood business development. Many of these organizations were long on vision but short on strategic and business skills, but some were strikingly effective. There is just such a CDC in Baltimore. In 10 years’ time, it has been so skillful at buying, rehabbing and selling housing that it is running out of opportunities to improve its own neighborhood and is thinking of moving elsewhere.
It was easy to dismiss CDCs in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, the prevailing image was that they were made up of hippie carpenters, urban homesteaders and assorted do-gooders. And they seemed to be fighting losing battles: For every house bought and rehabilitated on a block, two more were lost to slumlords. But when interest in in-town living suddenly revived in the 1990s, the CDCs were already in place with a welcoming hand, advice about restoration and some success stories to show the newcomers.
What many of them didn’t have was much financial or real estate knowledge — how to buy and sell houses, manage subcontractors or budget properly. The groups were supported by grants from foundations or governments, but at some point they should have generated a fair amount of revenue from sales and rentals — assuming they were doing a good job. Alas, many weren’t.
But Baltimore’s Patterson Park CDC was. The Patterson Park organization did the things other CDCs did, according to a recent profile in the Baltimore Sun; it just did them better. And that can be traced to two things: good leadership, principally its executive director, Ed Rutkowski, and good luck (more on this later).
What the CDC did was buy houses before slumlords could get their hands on them, repair or restored the properties, then sell or rent them. (One of the missions of the CDC was to preserve the neighborhood’s ethnic diversity and provide affordable housing; hence, the CDC charges an average $800 a month in rent.) In the mid-1990s, finding rescue properties was no problem; some were sold for $1. But as Patterson Park’s popularity grew, the bargains dried up. These days, fixer-uppers cost the CDC upwards of $97,000, the Sun said. (Another way of measuring progress: The earliest CDC rehab was sold in 1997 for less than $55,000; recent ones have gone for more than $400,000.)
All of which has Rutkowski and his organization thinking that its work may be ending. “High prices for everything that is available says that there’s really no need for us,” he told the Sun. “We always contended the important thing was to keep houses out of the hands of slumlords.”
So now what? Well, the CDC still owns rental houses (140, to be exact) and supports a charter school in Patterson Park and an organization that helps manage the 137-acre park that gives the neighborhood its name. But the CDC is considering moving its rehab activities to an adjacent neighborhood or lending its expertise to other Baltimore organizations. That would be welcome, others involved in housing said. “Baltimore cannot afford to waste the human capital that Ed has assembled,” an official at another CDC said.
Whatever happens, Patterson Park is clearly a better place than 10 years ago. Crime is way down, housing vacancies are at a tidy 5 percent, and housing prices are way, way up (fivefold, the newspaper reported). All in all, not a bad decade’s work.
Footnote: So what about the luck factor? It gets back to the old real-estate axiom that the three most important factors are location, location, location. Patterson Park is just north of Canton Park, one of those industrial and warehouse districts that became hip early on. As rents in Canton Park soared, couples looked nearby for affordable housing and discovered Patterson Park. Still, neighborhood leaders say, without the CDC’s stabilizing work in the 1990s, few would have taken a chance on the area, affordable or not.

Hey, it's hard to find good things about Body-more. This is one of em.