West Philly affordable housing project is stalled over concerns about drug treatment

Gaudenzia is a Philadelphia institution that dates to 1968, when it was founded in the midst of a previous opioid epidemic.

Now almost 60 years later, it has grown into one of the largest nonprofit substance-use treatment providers in the Northeastern United States.

That history is complicating an effort to build 40 affordable apartments in West Philadelphia’s Cathedral Park neighborhood.

Gaudenzia says the apartments, dubbed Cathedral Park Homes, wouldn’t be earmarked for people in recovery. While that population remains at the heart of its mission, it also operates a few dozen affordable housing units across Philadelphia.

But Councilmember Curtis Jones and local community groups do not believe the organization and are pushing back.

The project is proposed on city-owned property held in the Philadelphia Land Bank. Such property cannot be released without approval from City Council, so without Jones’ support the project is imperiled.

As of the last session of Council on Thursday, Jones had not introduced a bill that the mayor’s office sent over in April to release the property from the land bank for Gaudenzia’s project.

“I currently have, that we know of, approximately 3,000 beds or units of recovery scattered throughout our district,” Jones said.

“My commitment to housing for those reentering after treatment is rock solid,” he said. “However, I do think there is a tipping point where there might be a little too much.”

Community groups have also come out firmly against Gaudenzia’s project in public meetings over the last two years.

For its part, Gaudenzia says that the project would be open to anyone who meets the income eligibility restrictions and that the organization’s primary focus on drug and alcohol treatment has created a stigma against a project.

“It is not primarily for people in recovery,” said Coretta Ginyard, Gaudenzia’s executive director for the Philadelphia region. “But if a person has some substance-use disorder or mental health disability, we don’t discriminate because of that.”

Ginyard said Gaudenzia has everything in place, including the approval of the city’s zoning board, to move the project forward. The only barrier is the bill from Jones to move the parcels of city property out of the land bank. In respect of the tradition of councilmanic prerogative, which gives district Council members the last word over zoning and city land sales in their neighborhoods, no other member of Council will introduce the bill.

Now with Council’s summer recess in effect, the project cannot move forward. Some funding for the project will expire in the coming months if Gaudenzia cannot begin construction.

“If delays until September occur, it does present some funding issues,” Ginyard said. “We still hope to resolve those issues.”

Jones and local neighborhood groups argue that Gaudenzia hasn’t been honest with them.

An application document to the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency for the project from last year, provided to The Inquirer by Jones’ office, describes Cathedral Park Homes as serving “homeless households in recovery from substance abuse.”

The president of the Cathedral Park Community Development Corp., Mark Frog Harris, accused Gaudenzia of obfuscating the true purpose from the neighborhood.

In early meetings, he said, the group told them the homes would be for people in recovery, but in later meetings, they said the buildings would be open to all.

“They are organized solely for drug rehabilitation but are pretending otherwise,” Harris said in an email message. “They have no credibility. Either way, we want nothing to do with them or their proposal. Cathedral Park is overrun with drugs and addicts. We want to clean it up.”

Harris said community groups are also unhappy with the design of the apartments, which are three stories in a largely two-story rowhouse neighborhood and the buildings would be “overshading neighboring homes.” He also said the project could have a “gentrification effect.”

Ginyard said that at early community meetings, her team described Gaudenzia’s larger mission, and that’s where the source of the confusion lies.

She hopes that with the support of the mayor’s office and approval of the zoning board, she can convince Jones to move the land.

“The myth is that this is a drug and alcohol treatment facility, and it is not,” she said.