Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership recognized with Visionary Award by the National Housing Conference

ANDP President/CEO John O'Callaghan Photo by NHC

HUD Region IV Regional Administrator Ed Jennings, Jr. speaking Photo by NHC

The Piece by Piece Regional Foreclosure Initiative led by the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership, Inc (ANDP) in partnership with HUD and eight other partner organizations recently received the Housing Visionary Award at the National Housing Conference (NHC) 2015 Annual Gala at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. The highly prestigious award was in recognition of ANDP's innovative and collaborative efforts to coordinate strategies for responding to the foreclosure crisis and its aftermath in the Atlanta Metro area. The conference was co-chaired by Mel Martinez, chairman of the southeast U.S. and Latin America for JP Morgan Chase, former HUD Secretary and Nancy Andrews, president and CEO of the Low Income Investment Fund(LIIF).

The initiative began in 2010 working towards the goal of unifying the metro area community organizations to address the foreclosure crisis that had affected so many communities and homeowners. The vision of ANDP was to create a fabric of forward thinking and innovative organizations along with HUD to significantly address the metro Atlanta area's foreclosure crisis which eventually grew to 155 public and private partners.

Those partners from Atlanta that attended the NHC event to accept the award included Marc Pollack, ANDP's board chairman and CEO/chairman of Pollack Shores Real Estate Group; ANDP President/CEO John O'Callaghan, and Piece by Piece Coordinator Susan Adams; HUD Region IV Regional Administrator Ed Jennings, Jr.; David Ellis, vice president of the Greater Atlanta Homebuilders Assoc.; Pam Cross, Wells Fargo; Don Phoenix, NeighborWorks America; and Odetta MacLeish-White, Enterprise Community Partners.

"NHC is pleased to recognize ANDP and Piece by Piece for their work in stabilizing metro Atlanta neighborhoods and for crafting a unique partnership that engages hundreds of organizations and neighborhood leaders in the effort," NHC President Chris Estes said in a statement. "By focusing on issues of property taxes, negative equity, code enforcement, housing counseling, loan modifications and more, Piece by Piece has helped metro Atlantans toward a path of greater neighborhood recovery."

"As representatives of the Piece by Piece Regional Foreclosure Initiative, we are proud to accept this award on behalf of the more than 150 public and private sector partners who make up the Initiative," said Jennings. "Coming from the city of Dr. King, Atlantans believe in the power of collaboration to meet our most pressing societal challenges. Piece by Piece was formed in that spirit."

"We are pleased to accept this recognition on behalf of 155 metro Atlanta partner organizations," O'Callaghan said. "We also acknowledge the guidance and support of our leadership organizations…together, we've crafted a regional response to attack the crisis on multiple fronts to help stabilize families and neighborhoods hit hard by the lingering impacts of the crisis."

There still remains much work to do in the region as ANDP indicated that nine of the nation's top 10 hardest hit ZIP codes are in the Atlanta region with Clayton County being the hardest hit ZIP code in the country with 76 percent of homeowners underwater.

Led by ANDP, partner organizations such as the Atlanta Regional Commission, Clearpoint Counseling, Enterprise Community Partners, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association, The Home Depot Foundation, the National Housing Conference and NeighborWorks America provided essential support in making the initiative successful. The initiative featured former HUD secretaries Henry Cisneros and Shaun Donovan, and, in March, NeighborWorks America CEO Paul Weech speaking at the Carter center to Piece by Piece team member organizations.

The mission of ANDP is to promote, create and preserve mixed income communities through direct development, lending, policy research and advocacy that result in the equitable distribution of affordable housing throughout the metropolitan Atlanta region.

ANDP was created in 1991 as a result of the merger of the Metropolitan Atlanta Chamber of Commerce's Housing Resource Center and the Atlanta Economic Development Corporation's Neighborhood Development Department. The impetus for ANDP's creation was to address the diminishing supply of affordable housing in the Metropolitan Atlanta region as well as to help reclaim declining neighborhoods in its core. Throughout its history, ANDP has supported the creation of more than 8,000 units of housing for people of low-to-moderate income.

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