"Neighborhood Stabilization Boot Camp" to Draw Top Officials from 12 Cities and the Obama Administration

Press Release

As foreclosure crisis worsens, national and local leaders convene to define game-changing solutions for stabilizing hard-hit communities and leveraging Federal funding

Dozens of local officials from 12 of the regions hit hardest by the housing crisis are meeting at Harvard University March 14 -16 to develop new strategies for stabilizing neighborhoods that experience large numbers of foreclosures.

The Boot Camp will convene teams of government officials, nonprofits and real estate firms from Baltimore; Chicago; Cuyahoga County (OH); Denver; Los Angeles; Michigan; Massachusetts; New Orleans; Philadelphia; Phoenix; South Florida; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota where promising approaches are taking hold, along with the largest national mortgage lenders and servicers such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank. Senior officials from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of Treasury, FHA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac will also participate.

"The Neighborhood Stabilization Boot Camp" is sponsored by Living Cities together with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University. Living Cities, an innovative philanthropic collaborative of 22 of the world's largest foundations and financial institutions, hopes that the intensive, two-day session will result in a dramatic increase in the speed and scale of smarter, more sustainable neighborhood stabilization by:

* Helping to define new strategies that will have a material impact on targeted neighborhoods;
* Sharing "game-changing" practices that will accelerate keeping units occupied and putting property vacant units back into productive use
* Significantly leveraging the more than $6 billion in federal funds, with an emphasis on accessing larger and more flexible amounts of private capital

"Everyone, from government agencies and nonprofits to financial institutions and foundations, are frustrated by our collective inability to get stabilization efforts to scale. This Boot Camp is a direct response to that frustration," said Ben Hecht, President and CEO of Living Cities.

The neighborhood-level impacts of concentrated foreclosures can be devastating: blight, depressed property values, diminished property tax collections and a reduction in municipal services - a negative feedback loop that repeats and worsens. In 2009 alone, foreclosures have may have reduced property values of nearby homes--most owned by families paying their mortgage on time--by more than $500 billion, according to the Center for Responsible Lending.

"It's important that government at every level, along with the private sector and non-profit community, ramp up our collective effort to confront the foreclosure crisis head on," said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. "The scale of this challenge demands that we redouble our efforts to stabilize neighborhoods and restore a real sense of sustainability to our American Dream."

Mercedes Márquez, HUD's Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development added, "Boot camp is the perfect descriptive for this meeting and how we have to address the foreclosure and abandonment crisis taking place in far too many neighborhoods. All of us need to roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and do the heavy lifting that's required if we're going to revitalize these communities."

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