COLUMBUS, OHIO — JOHN Edgar carefully navigates his Nissan Altima through a southside Columbus neighborhood on a sweltering September afternoon. As he drives though a few dozen once-distressed city blocks, he points out the rehabilitated housing and riffs on the mechanics of housing tax credits and urban infrastructure improvements, punctuated by colorful asides about the various personalities who have played a role in the slow redevelopment of this neighborhood.

The tour wouldn’t be exceptional if he was a developer or a city councilman intent on reviving the fortunes of his constituents. But it does seem fairly unusual for an ordained minister.

He preaches the gospel to his modest inner-city United Methodist congregation, perched on folding chairs in a makeshift church carved from a former furniture warehouse in a seemingly impoverished southside Columbus neighborhood.

But the Harvard-trained Rev. Edgar, 65, would take serious issue with that characterization of the area. He likes to tell his low-income congregation that “we live in an economy of divine abundance.” As he wrote in a recent op-ed published in the local paper: “When communities focus on an asset-based vision of what they want, not a deficit-based vision for what they ‘need,’ true transformation begins.”

For at least a generation, Edgar has been a key driver of that transformation in this neighborhood, an area that’s come to be known as the South Orchards. The leaders in city government and the nearby hospital have changed over the years, says State Sen. Charleta Tavares, who formerly chaired redevelopment efforts as a city councilperson. “But the constant seems to be Rev. Edgar.”

Isolated from downtown by the construction of interstate highways in the 1960s—one study notes that 97 percent of Franklin County‘s high-opportunity census tracts are north of Interstate 70—the South Orchards area was further ravaged by the spiral of white flight to the suburbs. That greatly increased rates of poverty for the residents left behind, unable to improve their aging housing stock. The neighborhood lost half its population between 1970 and 2009. It’s now home to about 4,300 people, nearly a quarter of them children.

That spiral was only aggravated by the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008. With nearly one-third of the houses vacant or badly deteriorated, the area was becoming a dangerous place to walk and a breeding ground for gangs.

Through the church’s community development arm, Community Development for All People, Edgar’s small congregation supports a wide range of programs—from a store that distributes free gently used clothing, shoes, toys and household items to a bike shop, Bikes for All People, that donates hundreds of free bicycles to neighborhood kids. In partnership with several organizations, the church also operates a gleaming new career center.

The church has a strong health-and-wellness emphasis. It maintains three community gardens and offers classes on everything from cooking to relaxation. Working out of a converted drive-through beverage outlet across the street from the church, it also operates a bustling fresh market that has become the single largest distribution point for free food from the region’s food bank, which serves an 18-county area. It even helps support a small health clinic adjacent to the church because, says Edgar, there are no doctors in private practice nearby.

Kay Perry, 69, volunteers at the fresh market – out of gratitude, she says. She was living in Chillicothe, Ohio, 16 years ago when her daughter told her about the Free Store and the church, which eventually arranged for Kay to live in nearby below-market housing.

“They’re really nice apartments, more like two-bedroom townhouses,” she says. Without the church, says the single grandmother of 13 and great-grandmother of three, “I don’t know what I would have done.”

But the church’s signature efforts in this neighborhood have been in helping to rehab vacant and deteriorating housing. They began modestly in 2005, backed by a few wealthy private individuals such as Don Kelley, a prominent developer who grew up nearby and who for a time funded a fulltime church staff member to focus on redevelopment.

They achieved larger scale three years later when the group partnered with nearby Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Located in this area for more than a hundred years, Nationwide Children’s had grown into a renowned research center and the country’s largest children’s hospital. In hopes of stabilizing its neighborhood, it had bought up many homes, but it hadn’t won any popularity contests from nearby residents for its role as a landlord. And when the hospital system unveiled plans for a massive $1-billion redevelopment of its main campus and began buying up and tearing down nearby houses, residents and city leaders began demanding more restorative forms of engagement with its immediate neighborhood.

The hospital, which initially injected $5 million into a program called the Healthy Neighborhood, Healthy Families initiative, joined forces with Edgar’s church and other local businesses to affect real change in South Orchards.

Since 2005, the partners have collaborated on millions of dollars more in residential redevelopment and new construction, with the hospital having invested $22 million thus far. Funding has also come from United Way, the City of Columbus and the state of Ohio, private donors and a handful of partnerships with commercial developers taking advantage of low-income tax credits.

The Accountable Care Act of 2010, or Obamacare, introduced new incentives for hospitals and other care providers to focus more attention on actual health outcomes, prompting a greater focus on prevention. Under the new system, Nationwide Children’s gets a fixed amount from Medicare to tend to the health needs of 330,000 children in central Ohio, rather than the traditional fee-for-service model. Under those new incentives, “you’re motivated to go upstream and find a prevention angle,” says Dr. Kelly Kelleher, a pediatrician and vice president of the hospital’s research institute.

Policymakers and people in the healthcare industry have long been aware that social determinants—such as poverty, housing instability, neighborhood violence and lack of nutritional food–play a big role in the health of particular populations. “New studies are showing that living in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood is the equivalent to missing an entire year of school,” noted a 2012 study from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity at Ohio State University.

But most traditional care providers have felt handcuffed to address the larger problems with their patients. “Clinicians get very frustrated spending their lives putting band-aids on gaping wounds, which are really child-development problems,” says Kelleher.

In a recent paper published by the medical journal “Pediatrics,” Kelleher outlined how Nationwide Children’s used this multi-faceted program of housing intervention to treat its nearby neighborhood as a patient, by addressing some of the underlying conditions that make the children who live there sick.

Kelleher says hospitals are good at tracking patient statistics such as the number of immunizations and surgeries, “but we’ve never really asked families: ‘How healthy are your children, and what kind of housing do they live in?’ It’s remarkable.” His group plans to publish such findings soon, research that is expected to document how children in the neighborhood are getting healthier.

With home prices in this area now on the rise and vacancy rates plunging to just 6 percent, the partners have begun turning their attention to a new potential problem, a natural outgrowth of their success: gentrification. The partners say they didn’t collaborate on fixing up the neighborhood only to watch current residents get displaced.

Toward that end, the housing initiative recently began supplementing its home ownership program with a new focus on affordable rentals. The partners have raised a $20-million loan fund that would allow them to purchase more vacant, blighted properties they can rehab and rent to low-income families at below-market rates. “Our goal is to become landlords of scale, so we can preserve a mixed-income neighborhood,” says Edgar.

As usual, the pastor of this small congregation is thinking big. “Our big project now is to control enough rental housing so as to preserve a plateau of affordability and avoid a tipping point to gentrification and displacement,” he says. “We think that we maybe have the best shot in the United States right now to actually pull this off—to do a neighborhood where the blight is pretty much eliminated, and we do not displace the current residents. If we actually succeed in this, we think it has the chance of being a national model.”