When Sandra Ruiz Butter returned to her childhood home in the Bronx after college two decades ago, she found nothing but a desolate lot. Like most of the neighborhoods in the East Tremont, Morrisania, and East Concourse areas, she said her block was one empty space after another, populated by drug dealers and packs of roaming dogs.

When Ms. Butter stood before an open lot near her old home yesterday, she saw something much different: the construction site of a six-story building. Although currently just floors, stairways, and an unfinished brick exterior, the structure will house 64 studio apartments for people on low income.

The building is the latest in a string of development projects led by Ms. Butter’s local nonprofit group, VIP Community Services, which builds housing for the homeless, recovering addicts, and people living with HIV/AIDS.

While vacant lots comprised 25% of the East Tremont/Belmont neighborhoods in 1986, the year of the earliest available data from the Department of City Planning, they claim only 4.4% of local land today.

Unfortunately for VIP, the area’s improvement has made the local real estate market much more competitive. The group is running out of lots to build upon. “We’ve become victims of our own success,” Ms. Butter said. “Property values have beyond doubled.”

As an example, she said that lots in the area that the city sold for $4 a square foot in the 1980s are now being sold at $50 a square foot. Spectators who had bought land for $100,000 or less now possess property worth about $1.5 million, she added.

“The 1980s were the years of abandoned spaces,” Ms. Butter said. “A girl could be walking down the street, get pulled into an empty building, and assaulted. It was painful to see the neighborhood falling apart. We’re happy to put it back together again.”

The newest building will cost $9.3 million and when it’s completed in November, the new home will join the nearly 500 rental units in 20 new or renovated buildings that VIP has established in its mid-Bronx neighborhood since opening in 1974.

As with most of its previous projects, VIP’s expenses have been covered by city and state loans, Ms. Butter said. The investment has paid off with the growth of the local community.

The City Council’s majority leader, Joel Rivera, who represents the area, keeps a constant reminder of its evolution in his office: a large VIP poster displaying a revamped Bronx block.

Prior to moving into a facility with his wife and 9-year-old son in July, Glen Simmons lived in transitional housing for homeless families in Brooklyn. He is now running for president of the tenant association.

“I can tell people I live in a condo in the Bronx now and they wouldn’t know the difference,” he said. “And when you live in a nice place, you will make yourself adapt to it and be nicer too.”