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Page 9 GREENSBORO AFFORDABLE HOUSING EFFORT A RESOUNDING PRESERVATION SUCCESS AND NATIONAL MODEL In 1993 , if anyone had asked the city of Greensboro , the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, or the HPO what was special about the Programmatic Agreement (PA) for the city' s Community Development Block Grant and HOME programs , they would have been * told " There ' s nothing special about this agreement . It covers the program years 1994 to 2000 and is pretty much the standard agreement for housing programs . " Who would have guessed that the PA , which took two years to craft , would be amended in 1998 and become the catalyst for an amazingly successful affordable housing program that serves as a national model for combining rehabilitation, affordable housing, and community empowerment ? As part of the identification effort called for in the PA , the city and the HPO agreed that the boundaries of the South Greensboro National Register Historic District should be enlarged to include areas in the Old Asheboro neighborhood that were targeted for redevelopment and in which the city had purchased nearly two dozen substandard houses . The city' s plans were to demolish the houses and build new, single-family, owner-occupied , affordable houses . Under the PA , rehabilitation had to be considered as an alternative to demolition , but the city worried that the cost ' of rehabilitation to the agreed-upon Secretary of the Interior 's Standards would make the finished products too expensive for what was already proving to be a very slow market . To investigate new and creative ways to address the many concerns of the city, the HPO , and the neighborhood, the city hired the National Trust for Historic Preservation' s Community. Partners at just about the same time that the Advisory Council was crafting its policy statement on historic preservation and affordable housing . Working together, the parties agreed that they would try to develop design guidelines for the South Greensboro Historic District to ensure suitable and affordable rehabilitation and address the community ' s desires to retain the neighborhood ' s historic character , provide affordable , single-family housing, and revitalize the area. And if everyone endorsed the new standards , the PA would be amended to incorporate the neighborhood-specific rehabilitation guidelines and provide for the development of similar guidance for new construction . The trust ' s Community Partners hired Jo Ramsey Leimenstoll , a Greensboro architect with historic preservation experience and a member of the faculty at the University of North ' Carolina, to develop a set of illustrated design guidelines and to work with a rehabilitation and construction expert to develop a case study on the cost of rehabilitating one of the historic houses using the various alternatives offered by the new guidelines . She , along with staff members from the trust , city, and HPO , met several times with the neighbors and their representatives to make sure that everyone was aware of each others ' concerns and how historic preservation could address many of the area' s problems .