Community Organizing at a Rally

Programs

Today PACC serves a wide geographic area in Central Brooklyn that encompasses Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Prospect Heights with a strong focus on Community Districts 2 and 3 (CD2 and CD3).  PACC’s role is of critical importance to neighborhood stability in the face of shrinking housing subsidies, tenant displacement, overcrowding, building neglect, and rising home prices.  PACC’s community organizers encourage and mobilize local residents to improve their surroundings and confront broader concerns such as environmental hazards, code enforcement and rent regulation.  Through our tenant counseling and support services, we address day-to-day problems, while also helping residents address issues that affect their lives.  Our extensive housing development efforts, which build on these services, have expanded to include financially and physically distressed occupied buildings.  Through building rehabilitation and property management, our goal is to preserve this valuable resource of affordable housing and to provide a stable base from which residents can build their lives and community.  

PACC has a long history of providing assistance to homeowners and prospective homebuyers. Our homeowner services promote neighborhood stability by making homeownership and improvement affordable. We tackle the increase in foreclosures, tax lien sales, and contractor fraud in our neighborhoods through our Homeowner Education and Loss Prevention Program (HELP).  In this current year PACC is participating as one of three local organizations in PACE Initiative to prevent foreclosures through targeted outreach, education and counseling.  Of equal importance, we recognize that, to maintain our neighborhood’s ethnic and economic diversity, neighborhood residents must be given the opportunity to build assets, become financially secure, and to actively pursue options such as home and business ownership. Through our program, we prepare residents for homeownership and other financial decision making through direct counseling, educational seminars and financial literacy and homebuyer workshops, and direct links to purchasable homes.

Understanding the connection between a vigorous, job-producing economy and neighborhood vitality, in 1997, PACC established an economic development program to foster the proliferation and stabilization of local businesses that meet area residents’ needs.  In the ensuing years, PACC has provided workshops, counseling, loan application assistance, marketing services, and a host of other forms of technical assistance to hundreds of entrepreneurs.  PACC’s Commercial Revitalization Unit is now focusing its efforts on establishing a Business Improvement District, and to rehabilitating a stretch of mixed-use properties on a segment of Fulton Street in Clinton Hill to enhance the retail possibilities available to neighborhood residents.