Casilda Pallero and Jorge Burgos are congratulated on their new home on Appleton Street.

The Providence Journal / Tom Mooney

PROVIDENCE — One more step in the long march to revitalize a city neighborhood occurred yesterday when Jorge Burgos and Casilda Pallero accepted the congratulations of three dozen people gathered in their new home on Appleton Street in Olneyville.

Many of the at-risk young men who built the couple’s home were there to participate in the ribbon-cutting ceremony. So were their new neighbors, and Mayor David N. Cicilline and Frank Shea, whose nonprofit group Olneyville Housing Corporation has been working since 1988 to lift up the neighborhood, once the industrial center of Providence’s West Side.

The corporation, which provides affordable houses to qualified first-time buyers, employs the strategy that pride and investment in where you live is generated best when you own the threshold you cross every day.

The housewarming celebration stood in sharp contrast to the hammering of recent foreclosures that have left many Olneyville homes, as elsewhere, boarded up.

“Our strategy is to stabilize this neighborhood by increasing home ownership on the block, which brings in people who are committed to the neighborhood,” Shea, the corporation’s executive director, said prior to the afternoon event. “This particular neighborhood has been pretty impacted by foreclosures. This is our way of fighting back against it. Unfortunately it is one house at a time.”

Burgos, 27, a fork-lift operator, and Pallero, 23, a bank teller, had been living above a neighborhood grocery on Manton Avenue. The couple is expecting twin boys in April.

“I used to drive by here all the time while they were working on it and I was afraid to ask how much it was,” said Burgos, who arrived in Providence from the Dominican Republic 12 years ago.

Then he ran into someone from the Olneyville Housing Corporation who encouraged him to look into buying it.

“This is great,” said Burgos from his new kitchen were a crowd of neighbors, builders and corporation representatives mingled around a counter of cheese and crackers and other snacks. “This is the American dream, you know?”

The green two-story home sits on what was a vacant lot before the corporation bought the property from the city around 2003 with the purpose of building a house to help revitalize the neighborhood.

Then last year, the corporation turned to its collaborative partner, YouthBuild Providence, for the sweat and muscle. The 10-month alternative education and work-force development program helps out-of-school youth get back on a path toward employment. Two groups of 15 alternate over the 10 months between classroom study and hands-on building experience.

The home at 74 Appleton St. was the program’s 11th project, said program director Andrew Cortes.

“This provides as close to a model solution for many of the community’s problems than I know of,” said Cortes.

The program, he said, provides solid job skills for the untrained and unemployed, affordable housing for low-income families and revitalized neighborhoods for the community as a whole.

The new home of Burgos and Pallero has three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms and an open floor plan that connects the kitchen and living areas. It also has a private backyard, plenty of parking and sits close to the RIPTA bus line.

The corporation sold the house for $140,000. The city of Providence provided Burgos and Pallero with financial help for the 20-percent down payment. According to the corporation’s Web site, home buyers in the program have to successfully complete a training course in home ownership, learning everything from managing credit, qualifying for a mortgage and home maintenance

The corporation will keep ownership of the lot the house sits on, Shea said, to ensure that future owners meet the income qualifications.

tmooney@projo.com