East Lake, where an infamously violent housing project dubbed "little Vietnam" once characterized the neighborhood, took center stage at a Washington D.C. conference last week as a model of holistic community improvement. Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Bank president, credited real estate developer and philanthropist Tom Cousins with decentralizing East Lake's poverty. Twenty years ago, East Lake's crime rate was 18 times higher than the national average. [Saporta Report]
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