NEWBURGH - Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has initiated a new pilot program called “Neighbors for Neighborhoods” that will provide New York State land banks with $4 million in subsidies to go towards renovating abandoned properties in New York and rehabilitating them into affordable rental housing.

The program is estimated to yield up to 80 affordable rental homes across the state for working families in cities and towns where there are active land banks.

The program will award approximately $50,000 to selected community members on a project-by-project basis to rebuild decaying properties on the condition that the new housing remains affordable for at least 20 years, aiming to keep predatory landlords at bay.

Neighbors for Neighborhoods was created with community development nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners and the funding for the program comes from the Attorney General’s 2014 and 2015 settlements with Citigroup and Bank of America over the banks’ conduct leading up to the housing crash in 2008.