Neighborhood Stabilization Program

The Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) offer grants to states and local communities to purchase foreclosed or abandoned homes and to rehabilitate, resell, or redevelop these homes in order to stabilize neighborhoods and stem the decline of neighborhood housing values. TRF’s team of experts can help states or local communities to focus, design and evaluate how to invest NSP resources to meet a specific community’s problems and opportunities. We have developed diagnostic tools to assist entitlement communities, public and private entities to target foreclosure intervention services and resources including HUD’s NSP into areas that are most likely to positively respond to the investment.

For example, in the first round of NSP, TRF’s PolicyMap provided applicants with an effective tool to quickly understand HUD’s key indicators. PolicyMap mapped HUD’s data, allowing applicants to easily visualize a place and determine eligibility for NSP funds. TRF also offered applicants customized assistance and more fine-grained data analyses to better target foreclosure intervention resources. This included using comprehensive market data to identify those areas where state policy objectives could be supported with NSP-eligible activities.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey turned to TRF for analytical expertise with their first round NSP plans. TRF devised a data-driven method for prioritizing where funds should be spent within each county in the state to increase the likelihood of market stability. Building on HUD’s guidelines, TRF identified areas where foreclosure, not long-term disinvestment, is the primary problem threatening neighborhood stability. The tools help to measure the density of the problem at the census block group level and determine if local strategy is adequately sized and appropriately located to address the foreclosure problem. TRF also helped the states make the analyses available to their counties seeking to distribute those funds within local communities by creating interactive maps that displayed the information. Together these two state governments received roughly $110 million of the $3.97 billion of first round NSP resources.

Questions? Contact PolicySolutions@trfund.com or call 215-574-5800.