Philadelphia Housing Authority to preserve and build 20K affordable units under new ‘Opening Doors’ initiative

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The Philadelphia Housing Authority is set to play a major role in Mayor Cherelle Parker’s push to create and preserve 30,000 units of housing during her first term.

Under an ambitious plan of its own, PHA will remake its entire public housing portfolio while adding thousands more subsidized units through new construction projects and the acquisition of privately held properties.

In all, the housing authority plans to preserve, redevelop, build or acquire roughly 20,000 units over eight years — an estimated $6.3 billion investment amid a deepening affordable housing crisis. And it’s expected that all of these units will be counted under the Parker administration’s $2 billion housing proposal, dubbed the Housing Opportunities Made Easy, or H.O.M.E., initiative.

“PHA is coordinating and working in tandem with the Parker administration’s H.OM.E initiative that is addressing overall the city’s housing crisis,” said PHA President Kelvin Jeremiah during a recent news briefing at the authority’s North Philadelphia headquarters.

Jessie Lawrence, director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development, called PHA a “key partner” in the administration’s housing plan.

“However, in no way does PHA’s plans mean that the Parker administration is changing any of the programs, initiatives, and investments outlined in our proposed $2 billion H.O.M.E. housing plan,” Lawrence said in a statement.

The housing authority is calling its strategy the “Opening Doors” initiative. It was launched last January but was detailed for the first time Monday — about two months after the Parker administration formally launched the H.O.M.E. initiative, a multipronged proposal rooted in a promise made on the campaign trail.

Under PHA’s plan, the authority expects to spend $3.8 billion to modernize and redevelop roughly 13,000 units of conventional public housing, the majority of which are more than 70 years old. All of these units will also be converted to Section 8 housing, a designation that generally comes with more stable funding and helps ensure long-term affordability.

Jeremiah estimated that another $2.5 billion will be needed to build or acquire roughly 7,000 more units, bringing the grand total to about 20,000. PHA’s so-called “Faircloth Limit” — the number of public housing units for which the agency can receive capital and operating funds  —  sits just above 21,000 units.

The housing authority has more than 100,000 residents across its various waiting lists.

“We know by now that there is an affordable housing crisis that the city is confronting, and as a result, we want to position ourselves, and have positioned ourselves, to address that very issue,” Jeremiah said.

A flexible plan

The initiative gets underway at a time of great uncertainty for housing authorities across the country, including PHA.

President Donald Trump has spent his months in office making drastic cuts to a variety of departments within the federal government as part of a broader effort to make it more efficient. That includes the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where the administration has so far cut staff, canceled contracts and frozen funding.

It is unclear if PHA, which receives 93% of its funding from HUD, will face severe funding cuts in the near future. Jeremiah told reporters the “Opening Doors” initiative will proceed regardless, even if it means the plan needs to be adjusted in response to “some belt tightening” or tariffs that further raise the cost of construction.

The plan, for example, may be shifted to include more acquisitions because those units are considerably cheaper than newly constructed units. A new unit costs PHA about $550,000 to build, while acquiring a unit costs about $225,000.

Jeremiah added the housing authority has done nothing that would draw the ire of the president.

“PHA, more than any housing authority in the country, reflects a lot of the values the Trump administration has been espousing. The fact is that we are managing this housing authority within the resources. We’ve taken a lot of steps to address in the past the structural deficit. The waste and mismanagement that existed no longer exists,” Jeremiah said.

To finance the initiative, the housing authority plans to leverage existing authority funding while also seeking a combination of public and private sources. The list includes Low Income Housing Tax Credits and CHOICE Neighborhoods grants, as well as tax-exempt bonds and private mortgage financing.

Jeremiah said he would also welcome funding from the city and state. Unlike many other places, neither contributes directly to the housing authority.

“All across the country, municipalities are stepping up because they understand, as we do, that housing is an essential need and that it provides a basis and a platform upon which we can address a whole host of social ills,” Jeremiah said.

What’s been done so far?

To date, a total of 8,772 units are either completed, under construction or in the pipeline, according to a public-facing dashboard PHA created to track the initiative’s progress. About $2 billion has either been spent or allocated for those units.

More than 1,000 of those units were acquired by PHA. That includes 231 units at The Dane Apartments in Wynnefield and 360 units at Brith Sholom House in Wynnefield Heights, which the authority purchased last year after years of turmoil under previous ownership. The agency has also purchased four properties in Germantown, totaling 381 units.

Jeremiah, who said countless developers have reached out to PHA about an acquisition deal,  says the goal is to enable low-income residents to live in what he is calling “non-traditional” neighborhoods — neighborhoods that PHA tenants have historically not been able to access.

PHA has so far preserved another 1,193 scattered sites and started redeveloping some of its “obsolete” public housing sites, including Bartram Village in Southwest Philadelphia. Over the course of five phases, the agency will build 688 mixed-income units with the help of Low Income Housing Tax Credits and a $50 million Choice Neighborhood Implementation Grant.

The authority also plans to overhaul Westpark Apartments in University City, which will include rehabbing all three of the site’s high-rises.

“It does not make sense for us to just build because it’s not something that we can do to get ourselves out of the housing crisis,” Jeremiah said. “We have to preserve the existing portfolio and that means that we have to raise money to invest in it.”

“There isn’t going to be a savior. We’ve been waiting for one for the last 25 years. One hasn’t come yet.”