The shortage can also be explained by the fact that there is almost always a lack of available PHA units. It is not uncommon for residents to stay in their apartments for decades because they are never able to earn enough money to leave public housing, which provides heavily subsidized rents. And because poverty tends to run in intergenerational cycles, it is not rare to have grown children and their children living under the same roof as their grandparents.
For Jeremiah, all of it comes back to money. If the federal government supplied more of it, he could build more units. More units means he could accommodate more underhoused families without compromising other families on the waitlist, for example.
“We need folks to step up and not just give lip service to what is becoming increasingly an urgent, urgent need. Our families can’t wait. They cannot wait anymore. It has become an issue of life and death,”Jeremiah said.
Shawlyn Way agrees. The Philadelphia resident lives in a rooming house with 10 other adults, seven children and no fire extinguishers or working alarms. She said the lack of available affordable housing forces people to crowd into unsafe situations. She doesn’t understand why PHA has so many public housing units are sitting vacant given the demand and pointed to agency-owned properties that remain empty.
“PHA needs to get it together to move these families into these empty homes,” Way said.
A PHA spokesperson said the agency has nearly 700 vacant affordable housing units scattered across the city — beyond its traditional public housing portfolio.
No plans for PHA policy change
Dr. Akira Drake Rodriguez, an assistant professor of city planning at the University of Pennsylvania, said Jeremiah’s plea for more funding is not unwarranted. Investment in public housing has been on the decline for decades, and not just in Philadelphia. But Rodriguez also said the issues the fire in Fairmont raises are not new, meaning PHA could have taken steps to address them before last Wednesday. This includes how to better serve larger families who need public housing.
“That is something that I think the housing authority could do is just start to really refocus on the tenants and think beyond the housing stock,” Rodriguez said. “They’re not engaging with them as actual stakeholders.”
For the moment, PHA does not have any concrete plans to change any of its policies or add new ones in the wake of the fire. Jeremiah said everything is on the table, but that anything the agency does must be supported by its tenants.