In the News
The New Urban Landscape
The transformation of public housing
Why public housing, once the scourge of the city, now is a vital part of its life and its future.
By Larry Eichel
Philadelphia Inquirer, December 5, 2005
At 46th and Fairmount, in the downtrodden Mill Creek section of West Philadelphia, you can stand and watch the urban landscape being transformed. Amid the abandoned buildings and the trash-strewn lots, an ever-expanding swath of inner-city suburbia is rising from the rubble.
Here are 120 freshly built townhouses and twins, with all-new streets, big backyards, rear driveways, and wrought-iron fences. What's most remarkable about this improbable community is that all of it is public housing - just like the three grim, crime-ridden, 17-story high-rises that once stood on the site, deadening and stigmatizing an entire neighborhood.
And this sort of change is happening not only in Mill Creek.
Throughout the city, over the last 10 years, the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) has demolished old projects and built new communities, with an impact that can be felt citywide.
"It's one of the major factors in the revitalization of the city's real estate market," said Jeremy Nowak, chief executive officer of the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit group that finances projects in low-income areas. "These places were liabilities before. They aren't now."
Spacious and open, the new developments are fully integrated into the city's street grid; their predecessors were separate and threatening worlds of dimly lit dead-end streets and litter-strewn courtyards.
In the immediate surroundings, crime is down, property values are up, and cautious optimism is rampant.
"Things are a whole lot better," said Sabrina Williams, 25, who grew up in the old Richard Allen Homes in North Philadelphia and now lives in the new version. "You got so used to hearing gunshots."
Experts say that this transformation qualifies as one of the most significant and least-noted changes in the city's overall look and feel.
"For a while, a lot of people didn't understand what I was doing," said Carl R. Greene, PHA's executive director, who, in nearly eight years at the helm, has made the quasi-independent agency into perhaps the city's leading force for neighborhood revitalization. "We're not just building houses to be building houses. We're creating economic impact."
To what degree this approach is helping the city's most needy is another question.
The new low-density developments, which are expensive to build, have significantly cut the number of PHA-run units - at a time when the number of poor people in Philadelphia has risen dramatically and the waiting list for public housing has swelled to nearly 46,000 families.
Since 1996, PHA has put $1.2 billion - most of it from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and very little from city coffers - into the refurbishing, demolition, reconception and reconstruction of what had been some of its most notorious projects.
Tasker Homes, a rundown collection of boxes along the Schuylkill Expressway, is gone, replaced by Greater Grays Ferry Estates. The Mill Creek Apartments, the towers that once stood at 46th and Fairmount, have given way to the Lucien E. Blackwell Homes. Southwark Plaza is now the Courtyard Apartments at Riverview.
Removing the old and building the new has caused property values to rise faster in those areas than in the city as a whole, according to a report done for PHA by Applied Real Estate Analysis of Chicago.
In the blocks surrounding the Martin Luther King Plaza development, just south of Center City, the average sale price of homes rose 161 percent from 1999 to 2004, almost three times the citywide increase.
What PHA has done is hardly the sole factor fueling the growth in property values and tax revenues. In some cases, the authority targeted neighborhoods that were well-situated for revival.
Residents appreciate all that has changed.
"It is so quiet," said Helen Gates, 68, who lives in a two-story, three-bedroom unit at Falls Ridge, the new PHA development in East Falls, along with her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter. "The only thing you might hear is the sound of children playing, and you don't mind that at all."
Houses come equipped with dishwashers, garbage disposals, off-street parking, and central air-conditioning. Eligibility rules have been changed in an attempt to create a more positive social environment. The aim is to keep out people with criminal records and drug histories while creating a larger complement of working-class families.
In some locations, homes are available for purchase at subsidized prices by families making as much as $55,000 a year, and demand has been strong.
"The implications are clear," said Mayor Street, who serves as PHA chairman. "Families are no longer running from public housing but are willing to live near PHA sites."
Over the last decade, other cities have made similar changes, taking advantage of a Clinton-era federal program known as HOPE VI, with HOPE standing for Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere.
Indeed, Philadelphia was something of a latecomer in terms of knocking down old projects and trying to replace them with something better. But along with Chicago, Atlanta and Washington, the city has been among the most successful in securing multimillion-dollar grants from the program.
Other cities in the region, notably Camden and Chester, also have received HOPE VI money. In Camden, the housing authority used some of it to demolish an old-style project, Westfield Acres, and to replace it with a widely praised, suburban-style, mixed-income community known as Baldwin's Run.
PHA has been creative in finding other financing sources - such as private capital raised through the state-run, federally funded Low Income Housing Tax Credit program - to keep the transformation going.
While the new housing is universally considered a vast improvement over the old, the change is not without its critics. They say, among other things, that the new housing costs too much to build, that it looks too suburban, and that not enough of it is available to the people who need it most.
Construction of the new units runs about $250,000 apiece, according to PHA data. "Can this approach possibly be cost-effective at $250,000 per copy?" asked Howard Husock, an expert on housing and social policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "Not if the question is what's the best way to help the poor advance."
A study done for the Reinvestment Fund in 2002 found that the cost of government-subsidized residential construction ran about 23 percent higher than private work.
PHA officials say the average cost of the units themselves is roughly $190,000; the $250,000 figure includes the cost of new sreets, underground utility lines, and community centers.
Greene calls the cost question a "valid concern" but urges a broader perspective. "We're serving the poor, undoing the mistakes of the past, creating new assets, increasing property values," he said. "We think that when you look at all those benefits, you could have never gotten a private developer to do those projects and serve those public purposes."
As for the architecture, residents love the suburban feel of the new developments. But some planners say that the layouts seem out of place in rowhouse neighborhoods.
"In my mind, it's just inappropriate for its context," said Tim McDonald, a Kensington-based architect. "Good architecture and good urban planning begin with appropriateness."
Michael Johns, PHA's assistant general manager, says the suburban look at some sites is intentional and points to one phase of the Richard Allen Homes as an example.
"To get anyone to come to North Philadelphia, it better look like something done by Toll Bros.," he said. "It had to be dramatic if we were going to change people's notions about public housing. We were making a statement."
Advocates for the poor worry about the overall supply of affordable housing in Philadelphia. The old, demolished projects had twice as many units as the new ones.
To some degree, such reductions in numbers were inevitable; the density of the old projects helped make them unlivable. But at a time when demand for affordable housing is rising and PHA waiting lists are swelling, having fewer units is a problem for the city.
And there's the question of who gets to live there. While 64 percent of PHA renters citywide have incomes of less than $10,000, two-thirds of units at some of the new sites are reserved for families making $20,640 to $34,400 (which is 30 to 50 percent of the area's median income for a family of four). Other rule changes also have opened the doors to those who, while far from rich, are not quite poor.
"This raises the broader issue: Who should public housing's customers be?" said John Kromer, a former city housing director. "In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the neediest and the homeless were the priority. Now, it's decent families."
This isn't the first time the nature of public housing in America has changed. Long considered a policy disaster, the program was created during the Great Depression, with Philadelphia's first projects, including Richard Allen, opening in 1941.
The original concept was that the housing would provide temporary shelter for working people who had fallen on hard times. But it didn't work out that way. By the early 1970s, many families had become permanent residents, and public housing was known for dehumanizing architecture, slipshod maintenance and racial segregation. Historian John Bauman called Philadelphia's projects "publicly owned slums."
In 1975 alone, the twin towers of Schuylkill Falls hosted three murders, four rapes, and 159 robberies or assaults. The high-rises were abandoned a year later.
"I'd go to work at Schuylkill Falls with a .38-caliber revolver in my belt and a big stick in my hand," recalled Joseph Petrone, a former PHA maintenance supervisor. "The stick was for the German shepherds people kept tied to their doorknobs. The halls were covered with trash because the dogs would tear up the trash bags. We'd find bodies in the elevator shafts; the kids would play there, get stuck, and fall or get crushed."
Conditions continued to deteriorate into the 1990s. No new projects were built. PHA developed a reputation as a dysfunctional agency - so much so that HUD took it over for a year.
Then along came HOPE VI. Enacted in 1992, the federal program for demolishing the old projects took off in the mid-1990s after it was reshaped by President Clinton's HUD secretary, Henry G. Cisneros. New regulations called for fewer units and more of an income mix
"The vision was that concentrated poverty was damaging not just to the people living there but to the entire city," said Bruce Katz, who was Cisneros' chief of staff at the time. "This was a dramatic revolution in social policy."
Raymond Rosen in North Philadelphia was the first local project to be demolished, falling in 1995. Mill Creek was the most recent, coming down in 2002
"In the old developments," Greene said, "people were forced to live like the castoffs of society because they were treated like castoffs. Today, they're treated like upstanding, contributing members of society."
PHA still has plenty of work to do.
The new Martin Luther King Plaza is only about half-complete six years after the old towers were demolished. Construction in East Falls has moved at a similar pace. Asked for an explanation, Greene noted that in both of those cases PHA initially handed over responsibility for construction to a for-profit company, Pennrose Properties, and a nonprofit, Universal Community Homes. In 2004, PHA took over greater control of Martin Luther King, and it hopes to do the same in East Falls.
Over the next six years, plans call for building an additional 1,560 units, one-fourth of them to be sold to low- and moderate-income families, at eight locations.
With diminished federal funding, it's an ambitious plan. And if reducing concentrations of poverty is the goal, Philadelphia still has miles to go.
A report earlier this year by the Brookings Institution found that 28 percent of Philadelphia's poor live in neighborhoods of extreme poverty, seventh-highest among the the nation's 50 largest cities.