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Jennifer Wright, the president and CEO of Hilltop Neighborhood House, and Amy Osburn, the nonprofit’s vice president and director, can talk almost endlessly about the horrors they witnessed across the street, at 465 College Ave. in Valparaiso.

The smell of drugs being smoked wafted from the home and drug paraphernalia was in the yard, not far from where Hilltop’s childcare participants played outside. People passed out, sometimes undressed, on the property. Constant police calls to the property forced the childcare center to go on lockout, and the coroner’s van pulled up time and again.

The kids in the childcare, Wright said, “couldn’t read, thankfully.”

Now they have a new vision for the former eyesore, a green space to develop and expand w

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