It also has led to complaints that sidwewalk bridges erected for inspections and repairs often stay up too long and become neighborhood blights.

But only Logan is offering a vivid on-site experience and eyewitness guides through a tortured saga of neighborhood blight, political promises and bureaucratic nostrums.

Mr. Spitzer even sued one participant in this program during the Cuomo years and cited "massive fraud" that was increasing neighborhood blight.

As a result, more communities have been drawing up regulations to curtail what they view as neighborhood blight.

It is also designed to avoid "industrial neighborhood blight," created when companies leave their sites.

But now neighborhood blight is about to be replaced by new housing: a 78-unit community with a mix of town houses and rental apartments.

Others, like the 78-acre Pugsley Creek Park in the Bronx - a park in name only, it seems - are neighborhood blights.

The formerly homeless and the mentally ill are living together with almost an equal number of working people, neighbors in a newly restored building that used to be a neighborhood blight.

Large scale development benefits from what economists call economies of scale, and reduces the surrounding negative influences of neighborhood blight, crime, or poor schools.

Mr. Freimuth said home ownership is a powerful weapon against neighborhood blight.