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"Where there is coordination, where the city and the state and federal government have either put together funding sources that can work together well, or on the ground, you've figured out how to use those funding sources correctly—that's where real stabilization happens." stabilization," she says. "And we provided them with additional technical support to develop a neighborhood marketing and branding campaign. We provided them with grant funding to implement those campaigns and also engaged a design firm to work to create templates and collateral tools that would help get the message out." The grantees represented a cross-section of American communities, as Sisk notes: "What we've learned from working on responding to the market downturn is that it looks very different across the communities that our network works in. And so we were actually intentional in trying to pick a diversity of places." One of those places was East Camden, revitalization, describes the new housing capacity Enterprise has facilitated: "We've done about $11 billion in low-income housing tax credit syndication since our inception. Using that funding, we've created about 300,000 units of affordable housing." Grossinger draws on his extensive Robert Grossinger, VP for community board. In the chaos that followed the mort- gage crash, NCST was born with the urgent mission of moving a mountain of distressed properties back into the hands of viable homeowners using that army of nonprofits and local governments. At the time, Craig Nickerson was winding up a long public service career with Freddie Mac and HUD. He had watched with horror as the housing sector imploded. "I felt like, frankly, almost 40 years of work in the housing and community development arena was being wiped away," he recalls. He was invited to attend a conference New Jersey, where a NeighborWorks affiliate, Saint Joseph's Carpenter Society (SJCS), has purchased and rehabbed almost 900 properties using a combination of state and private funds. SJCS often targets high-profile corner properties and turns them into neighborhood showcases. To avoid the mistakes of earlier years, buyers are educated and counseled extensively before taking on their new commitment. The efforts are paying off: By March, the default rate for SJCS's buyers was under 3 percent. Meanwhile, neighborhood values are rising, largely as a result of the upgraded properties SJCS has put on the market. Building the Future Another nonprofit on the frontlines of renewal is Enterprise Community Partners, founded as Enterprise Foundation in 1982 by developer Jim Rouse and his wife, Patty. The group's focus on affordable housing has expanded nationwide to include partnerships with local developers and community groups, a policy arm, and a national green initiative. It also has a for-profit subsidiary that provides mortgage financing, tax credit syndication, and consulting services. 54 background with private sector lending institutions to help local groups achieve realistic goals. "I do work with municipalities and community groups around property preservation issues," he says. As such, he keeps tabs on "what's going on in the community in terms of who owns what, who's taking care of what, and where there are synergies or the lack thereof between the owners of the REO properties, or the pre- REO properties, and the people that care about their conditions—the neighbors, the community groups, and the municipalities," Grossinger notes. Synergy is particularly important to Grossinger. "There are lots of federal and state and municipal programs to try and revitalize communities," he says. "And the coordination level between them is very bad. Even the way the programs are drafted and worded in many cases makes them either incompatible, or they lack the kind of cohesiveness that can put those funding streams together to do something worthwhile." Connecting the Dots It was that lack of large-scale coordina- tion that led to the founding of the National Community Stabilization Trust (NCST) in 2008, sponsored by four venerable players in the neighborhood revitalization field: Enterprise and NeighborWorks along with the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC) and the Housing Partnership Net- work. Later, the National Urban League and National Council of La Raza also came on on community stabilization by the Federal Reserve, where he heard about the nascent NCST. "It sounded like a great idea," he says. "And when I inquired about it, I found out that they were looking for someone to head it up." Nickerson proved a good fit for the job and has served as the organization's president since then. Considering the massive scale of the housing crisis, Nickerson realized the response, too, must be comprehensive: "We needed to figure out a way to connect the dots between local community developers— nonprofit, public, and for-profit—with the holders of real estate. And that communication link did not exist. REO historically has been sold from a servicer through a real estate broker to an individual buyer. But now we're talking about whole neighborhoods being impacted. And we needed to do something at scale and with enough coordination and choreography that we could ensure that the purchases were being done in a very systematic and thoughtful way." One of the NCST's initial efforts was its First Look program, which offers municipal governments a chance to buy REO properties below market value before they hit the broader market. As Nickerson explains, "There were two primary benefits: One was that we gave these local community buyers a sort of right of first refusal—an opportunity to purchase a property without having to compete against a whole bunch of other possible buyers that weren't really necessarily focused on neighborhood stabilization. The other benefit, of course, was that if you can do that, and you can assure the servicer that

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