It’s an innovative partnership, the one formed between the city of Clinton and Sampson Community College, and the prospects are great that the marriage of these local agencies will bring positive results for citizens.

The partnership was devised after city officials began to remove neighborhood blight from communities where overgrown and unsafe homes had dotted the area, providing havens for vagrants and drug dealers.

The razings left voids, an emptiness city staff believed could be filled with an idea that would positively impact the town’s landscape and, at the same time, open up housing availability where little had existed.

Enter Sampson Community College and its building trades program and a fundraising project students had been doing to both give them hands-on training in construction and, at the same time, return much-needed funds to the program for equipment and supplies.

With the city’s need for affordable housing and the college’s desire to keep their students building, a match was made, and last week the pair were joined by a vote of City Council to move forward with the project and the purchase of the first SCC house.

It’s a laudable effort on the part of the college, city staff and mayor Lew Starling and council members to combine efforts that will, in effect, put quality homes on lots that were once overgrown and unsafe.

What’s more, it opens an avenue to affordable housing for many median-income families who will now have a shot at home ownership.

The first house, purchased by the city at a price of $65,000, is a 1,200-square-foot home that will be placed on a city-owned lot at 115 W. Lee St. It is a site that was once home to a dilapidated, overgrown house.

The project’s complete success, however, weighs heavily on someone actually buying the home and moving in, something we feel certain will happen.

But even after it’s moved to Lee Street and sits waiting for an owner, the home will add both aesthetic and financial value to the neighborhood.

Like the city and SCC, we want this project to be a success so there will be another house after this one, and another, and another, until all neighborhoods are ridded of the blight and provided with homes worthy of the people who live within the communities.

No question this fledgling project can be, as SCC president Dr. Bill Aiken said, a “win-win” situation for all those involved, most particularly those looking affordable housing and those across the city looking to bring good neighbors into their communities.