Philadelphia Daily News (PA), June 19, 2006
RIDE UP AND down the streets of Philadelphia these days, and almost everywhere you’ll see housing construction and rehabilitation. This is wonderful. It brings new people into the city. Creates jobs. And helps revive neighborhoods that for too long have been in decline.
New development also has tremendous potential for ameliorating social problems. Poverty, to start with, means low wages and frequent unemployment. But that’s perhaps not the worst of it. Low wages and unemployment are made much worse when you live in a neighborhood that is declining commercially, that lacks city services, parks and recreation facilities; that suffers from housing deterioration; and that is constantly threatened by crime. Children there are cut off from mainstream economic and political life and have little hope for the future.
New development offers a chance to create a city of economically, ethnically and racially diverse neighborhoods, with public and private amenities, that give young people hope for the future and the incentive to overcome the obstacles in their lives.
But, unless we take action soon, we are going to miss that opportunity. Alongside our housing boom, the city is facing a housing crisis. Those with upper-middle and high incomes have an extraordinary range of housing choices. Those in poverty and with low incomes are finding it increasingly difficult to find affordable housing.
Low-income families make up one out of every five households in our city and, on average, they pay more than 50 percent of their income on housing. A family living in the Philadelphia area would have to earn nearly $38,000 a year to afford rent on a modest two-bedroom apartment. And there are approximately 60,000 fewer affordable housing units in our city than are needed for low-income people.
It’s bad enough that housing is so expensive. What’s worse is that people are being pushed from their homes and neighborhoods. Long before Philadelphia became the next great city, it was a city of neighborhoods. But today new development is creating skyrocketing rents, rapidly increasing home values and higher tax bills. People are being forced out of their neighborhoods and young adults can’t afford the neighborhood where their families have lived for generations.
It is unjust and unfair for those who lived through the bad times in their neighborhoods to be pushed out just as the good times are beginning. The dream of living in diverse and integrated neighborhoods is being replaced by a nightmare of displacement and despair.
We don’t have to settle for that – we can reclaim the dream.
Development in Philadelphia is not an accident. It is driven by public policy, and, in particular, by the 10-year tax abatement on residential development. And it can be changed by other public polices, in particular by “inclusionary housing.”
The basic idea of inclusionary housing is simple. Residential developers are receiving substantial help from the city. All get the tax abatement. Most receive zoning variances or other subsidies that make their projects possible.
The premise of inclusionary housing is that developers who get benefits from the city should, in return, provide affordable housing. They should either set some percentage of units aside for those who can’t afford the market rate or put money in a fund to create affordable housing. Inclusionary housing is easy to administer and provides new affordable housing without raising taxes. That’s one reason that 300 local governments across the country have enacted such programs.
Inclusionary housing is badly needed in this city because our housing efforts are increasingly falling short of what we need.
Even though the poverty rate has gone up in Philadelphia since 2000, the number of units of public housing has declined by a third in the last 10 years.
The number of new affordable rental and ownership units subsidized by the city each year is about 400 at best. At that rate, we’ll solve our low-income housing problem in roughly 100 years.
With inclusionary housing, we’ll create much more affordable housing and take a major step toward making Philadelphia not just a great city but a just one.