Credit: Jan Mejía-Toro
The Housing Initiative at Penn is working to confront Philadelphia’s affordable housing crisis, including responding to the recent proposal to sell properties that contain over 900 affordable rental homes in the city’s West and Southwest neighborhoods.
The University initiative, which is run out of PennPraxis — the applied research arm of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design — conducts empirical research on housing conditions in Philadelphia to advise policymakers. Last month, the private developer Neighborhood Restorations announced its intention to sell its portfolio of federally subsidized affordable rentals in West and Southwest Philadelphia, marking the latest challenge for HIP.
The properties, which were built in the late 1990s and early 2000s with federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, have 30-year affordability restrictions that have already begun expiring and will continue to do so until 2037. Once the restrictions expire, Neighborhood Restorations can keep the houses affordable or sell them to a new owner. If the new owner chooses to move them up to the market rate, the tenants of the properties — who number over 3,000 — could be priced out, according to HIP founder and faculty director Vincent Reina.
“What we’re seeing in Philadelphia, much like the rest of the country, is essentially this scenario where in any given year, there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of units where the affordability restrictions on these properties are set to expire,” Reina said in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian. “That doesn’t necessarily mean all the rents will go up, but it means they absolutely can.”
A request for comment was left with Neighborhood Restorations.
The expiring affordability restrictions constitute a “knowable problem,” Reina said. City officials know when the restrictions on properties are set to expire, allowing them the opportunity to “proactively assess” which properties will expire and plan in advance to combat the effects of those expirations.
According to Reina, the impending expirations provide an opportunity for the city to maintain affordable prices and even improve housing quality through recapitalization.
“These properties often need some form of recapitalization, because they’re so old,” he said, adding that expiring affordability restrictions allow the city government to “apply public resources [and] public will to ensure that many of those properties, if not all, are not only maintained as affordable, but also recapitalized so they’re high-quality places to live.”
Reina has been working with city governments to inform housing policy since 2018, when he helped to create Philadelphia’s first citywide housing plan.
“We realized there was a real kind of opportunity and need to partner with municipalities to help them both develop housing solutions, but also evaluate their impacts,” Reina said.
That work, he noted, emphasized the “need to partner with municipalities” to “develop housing solutions” and “evaluate their impacts.” That realization eventually led to HIP’s creation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, HIP established itself as one of the leading authorities on emergency rental assistance research. In May 2020, HIP assisted city officials from Philadelphia, Atlanta, Cleveland, Baltimore, Oakland, and Los Angeles with the implementation of emergency federal rental assistance programs developed during the pandemic.
In January 2023, the initiative received a $600,000 grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to study the effectiveness of the rental assistance program. The project studies the impact of the program on eviction rates during the pandemic and the factors that affected the program’s influence on housing stability.
According to Reina, HIP now hopes to confront the problem posed by expiring federal affordability restrictions.
“Many other cities have gone through this effort, and there have been a lot of local efforts within Philadelphia,” Reina said. “There’s a real distinct opportunity to be consistently ahead of this conversation … to leverage existing city resources to address that problem.”
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