Neighborhood Preservation Inc. president Steve Barlow and Clean Memphis co-founder Janet Boscarino discuss neighborhood blight and what we can do about it, and a new city-wide initiative called “Memphis Transformed.”
NPI and Clean Memphis are the leading groups addressing our city’s issues of blight, in its many forms: empty houses; houses in disrepair; properties overrun with weeds; rental properties that are virtually unlivable.
The work of this group and its partners is not only one of the most important issues we face as a city, but it’s also perhaps the dirtiest. And this group handles the dirty work – from getting into literal weeds, to getting into the legal weeds of turning blighted properties into something the city can be proud of. Anyone who has ever said ‘They’ ought to do something about that house, or ‘They’ ought to do something with that empty store front, or “someone” should clean up that empty lot, can relate to the work these two organizations perform.
