MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

• Operation Neighborhood Recovery

  Urban Essex County, New Jersey, one of the hardest hit areas in the state by the ongoing foreclosure crisis, could be the laboratory for a reinvention of community development. A local CDC there has completed the successful acquisition, by way of an alliance of nonprofits, of 47 mortgages expected to foreclose with an eye toward stabilizing neighborhoods in some of the oldest suburban communities in New Jersey.

• The Continued Importance of Fair Lending in the Age of Obama

  Housing discrimination continues to plague the market, as does the myth that the housing crisis resulted from extending homeownership and home mortgage credit to historically underserved groups: minority families. Even with the Obama administration’s Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan and, within that, the Making Home Affordable program, minority groups continue to suffer ongoing discrimination and fair housing violations.

• Can The Silk City Forge Its Next Industrial Revolution?

  New Jersey’s Paterson is among the nation’s oldest planned industrial cities, but it has fallen on hard times since the once-booming silk industry there declined in the latter half of the 20th century. Much of the industry in this city of 150,000 has since left, but now a geological attraction once envisioned by Alexander Hamilton as something that could be harnessed for industrial might, is fully protected, and could be channeled, this time, for its community-building potential.