Photos: SADA

New homes for an old neighborhood: San Antonio Development Agency

Historic Gardens, situated near downtown, was developed by the San Antonio Development Agency. SADA began the project in 1995 by acquiring substandard and dilapidated properties, relocating tenants, preparing for redevelopment and conducting environmental cleanup.

Twenty-two individual and unique homes were constructed to reflect the historic character of the existing Victorian and Folk Victorian homes. All twenty-two homes have been sold providing first time ownership opportunities to twenty-two families. The Historic Gardens Community is testament to an ambitious and cooperative effort to address environmental, social, and historical concerns to produce a revitalized inner city neighborhood.

Photos: TxLIHIS

Rebirth of a devastated neighborhood: Blackshear Neighborhood

For more than twenty years a large part of Austin’s Blackshear neighborhood was a giant tract of vacant land left behind by a failed Urban Renewal project. No longer willing to wait for government to fulfill its promises of new housing, homeowners formed a nonprofit community development corporation, built twenty single family homes and sold them to the neighborhood’s extremely low income former residents for $295 per month.

(above) Members of the nonprofit Blackshear Neighborhood Development Corporation in front of a new home they built on vacant urban renewal land in their neighborhood. (right) Many of the contractors hired to build houses in Blackshear were neighborhood residents.

Revitalizing a historic community’s commercial life: Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation

Drawing courtesy of 5th Ward CRC

Neighborhoods are more than houses. The 5th Ward Community Development Corporation of Houston is rebuilding an old, vacant commercial building into a mixed commercial and residential center (drawing at left) to revitalize Houston’s historic Fifth Ward.