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One of the exciting things happening in New Jersey is that community-based organizations (CBOs) across the state are increasingly using neighborhood planning as a tool for transforming distressed urban neighborhoods through development projects and programming. New Jersey now has an innovative program, called the Neighborhood Revitalization Tax Credit (NRTC), which is designed to support the creation of highly participatory, resident-led revitalization plans by supplying funding for their implementation. The original NRTC legislation was crafted by the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey and is the nation’s first program that offers a 100 percent tax credit incentive for corporations (against their state tax liability) to invest in specific projects and initiatives outlined through these completed plans. Ultimately, this means that each neighborhood where a CBO has engaged their local community in creating a vision for the future development and redevelopment of a neighborhood, can receive up to $1 million per year, to help ensure these plans become a reality.

There’s a real opportunity in places like Paterson to use historic preservation and adaptive reuse as guiding principles for redevelopment. But what is more specific to Paterson is that it’s one of the few cities in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan region where you can really “feel” 18th- and 19th-century industrial building techniques and surroundings.

Paterson is a living case study in the positive and negative impacts of industrialization. As initially designed by Hamilton, Paterson harnessed the power of the Great Falls to power the city and its industrial base and capitalized on the renewable nature of the city’s waterpower. As with most industries tied to extractive methods, Paterson’s treatment of the natural environment created a legacy of pollution and contamination that remains a challenge to this day.