Steve barlow memphis tn

He knew the courts would have to give property owners the opportunity to fix or tear down the properties, and if they didn't or couldn't , the court would then bring in a third party nonprofit to take care of it.

Barlow expected many properties would go into receivership, and wanted to be that third party solution. Whenever I describe the mission of NPI, literally it is a nonprofit that was formed to address the challenge of vacant and abandoned properties because the government can't or doesn't have the capacity, and the private sector won't because there is no money in it. We're here to fill in that gap. We live here in Memphis; we get to take more time than anyone in their right minds would take to face this challenge.

NPI has taken a leadership role in galvanizing grassroots, public sector, and business community partners who want to be a part of the solution to this challenge, developing an action plan and convening in meetings on a monthly basis. In collaboration with entities from the government, private, nonprofit, and foundation sectors working on dealing with vacancy and abandonment issues, they released the interdisciplinary Memphis Neighborhood Blight Elimination Charter in , a single, focused strategy with an adoptable action plan to effectively and permanently remove blight from Memphis neighborhoods.

NPI is also experimenting with community development, investing in some areas where they see an opportunity to turn things around. Barlow says the NPI approach is to think about neighborhood revitalization in a parcel-by-parcel or property-by-property kind of way to resolve the challenges in order to have a positive impact. We look at every parcel and work on resolving these title issues, so the real estate can become developable and useable again — an asset instead of a liability. Related Tags Memphis.

Across Our Network. Contact Subscribe. Steve Barlow Photographed by Andrew Breig. He earned a masters degree in urban anthropology and worked in community development, neighborhood building, and affordable housing before attending law school, with the ultimate intention of marrying his passion for community organizing with the practice of law.

There are an estimated 13, structures or vacant lots in Memphis that qualify as being blighted. Since , Barlow has worked in legislative advocacy and community development in Memphis, leading efforts to use civil litigation to hold negligent property owners accountable for blight. He initially started by volunteering to sue the owners of vacant properties on behalf of neighborhood groups and uses the full power of the law to fight blight in Memphis, promoting respective and efficient code enforcement and effective property tax foreclosure systems.

These efforts led to the establishment of a coalition of economic and community development leaders working together to eliminate blight and build neighborhoods, Neighborhood Preservation, Inc.

They have also increased their policy advocacy work at the local and state levels, and work with data collection and tech companies like Memphis Property Hub and Innovate Memphis so that all agencies working on remediating blight have access to all of the data available on blighted properties. He knew the courts would have to give property owners the opportunity to fix or tear down the properties, and if they didn't or couldn't , the court would then bring in a third party nonprofit to take care of it.

Barlow expected many properties would go into receivership, and wanted to be that third party solution. Whenever I describe the mission of NPI, literally it is a nonprofit that was formed to address the challenge of vacant and abandoned properties because the government can't or doesn't have the capacity, and the private sector won't because there is no money in it.

We're here to fill in that gap. We live here in Memphis; we get to take more time than anyone in their right minds would take to face this challenge.