Housing People Can Actually Afford

The fastest way to lose a neighborhood is to let the people who made it get priced out of it. In Philadelphia that is not a forecast, it is the last fifteen years.

Keep the people who are already here

Part of the housing crisis is the homes this city has not built yet. The other part is a roof that needs ten thousand dollars of work, a tax bill that jumped, and a deed that was never properly transferred when a grandmother died. Both are solvable, and on the second one the City already has the programs — they are just underfunded and hard to reach.

• Fully fund the Housing Trust Fund. Every year, as a baseline, not as a line item that gets traded away in June.
• Expand the Basic Systems Repair Program and get the waiting list down, so a broken heater does not become a vacant house.
• Fund tangled-title legal services. Thousands of Philadelphia families live in homes they cannot borrow against, insure properly or pass on, because of a paperwork problem.

Build more, and build it faster

Philadelphia does not build enough housing, and the process is slow enough that the delay itself shows up in the rent. Carlos has spent two decades in real estate and construction: he knows what a permit that takes nine months instead of nine weeks does to a project, and who ends up paying for it. More homes, built sooner, is the only thing that brings prices down and keeps the trades working.

• Cut the permitting and inspection backlog. A faster yes and a faster no both cost less than a year of waiting, and the small builders who do most of the work in this city are the ones a slow process pushes out.
• Write the rules down and keep them steady. What a zoning approval commits to should be recorded and checked later, so a builder can price it up front and a neighbor can count on it.
• Make the mixed-income bonus work as intended, with in-lieu payments spent in the neighborhoods that generated them.
• Publish, every quarter, what was approved, what was built and what it produced — good policy is measured, not argued about.

Put vacant land to work

Vacant, publicly held parcels sitting behind a chain-link fence for a decade are a choice. The Land Bank should be moving those parcels to affordable and community uses on a clock, with a public dashboard, and councilmanic holds should never be used to sit on land indefinitely.