A new community-driven initiative is asking Philly to spend more housing funds on the lowest-income households

About 30 people of various ages, races, and backgrounds representing Philadelphia organizations gathered in Chinatown last month to talk affordable housing.

They discussed Philadelphia’s rising housing costs and the incomes that haven’t kept up. They practiced how to share their and their neighbors’ stories of struggling to afford homes. And they pledged to get as many people as they could to show up outside City Hall on Thursday.

That’s when City Council returns, and for the 10th year, members of the city-based organizations that make up the Philadelphia Coalition for Affordable Communities plan to spend that morning rallying outside the building to call attention to the need to create and preserve accessible housing that Philadelphians can afford.

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This year, the coalition’s latest housing campaign asks Council for legislation that would require Philadelphia to spend half of the federal, state, and city funding it uses for housing programs on households making $25,000 or less. In 2021, 27% of Philadelphia households made less than $25,000, according to the most recently available year’s American Community Survey.

The campaign’s goal is for “more of the city’s housing dollars [to] go to those who need it most,” said Nora Lichtash, executive director of the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Women’s Community Revitalization Project, a member of the coalition. “We want [Council members] to know that affordable housing is a critical issue and they need to pay attention to that.”

The Philadelphia Coalition for Affordable Communities was formed in 2014 to get laws passed that fund more accessible and affordable housing. It has pushed the city to bolster its Housing Trust Fund and make improvements to the Land Bank, which manages city-owned land. The coalition has grown to 76 community, disability, faith, labor, and other organizations.

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To support potential Council legislation for the latest campaign, the coalition plans to release a report in 2024 analyzing how the city allocates its housing dollars by income group. But coalition members said they are frustrated watching the city direct funds toward Philadelphians with middle incomes while calling their homes affordable housing.

“We want to let Council know that what the city calls ‘affordable’ is not affordable,” Lichtash said.

Though the established federal definition of “affordable” is housing that costs no more than 30% of a household’s income, policy makers, developers, housing advocates, and community members have varying ideas of what affordable housing is. The term may be used to mean homes for low-income households, and it’s sometimes conflated with federally subsidized housing. It’s also used as blanket term for attainable housing.

The city’s Turn the Key mortgage assistance and construction program for first-time home buyers, for example, is open to Philadelphians making up to $80,100 for a household of one and $103,000 for a household of three. City officials call Turn the Key, which gives preference to city employees for price-restricted homes, an affordable housing program.

The program does offer money to buyers with lower incomes to cut the cost of homes. But the program’s income limits are based off federal guidelines that include earnings across the broader Philadelphia area, which includes wealthy counties such as Chester and Montgomery. The region’s median household income is $114,400, according to federal calculations.

Rosie Hepner, senior director of the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing, said she likes that Philadelphia has housing programs “at all different income targets.” A few years ago, the Urban Land Institute gave Philadelphia a policy award for its work to help middle-income households become homeowners. She said programs for these households relieve pressure on the housing market.

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“Which, in turn, helps your lower-income groups,” she said. “And so that’s why it’s important to do all sorts of different things. To help homeowners. To help renters. To help housing preservation strategies for naturally occurring affordable housing.”

She points to Philadelphia as a city that has been proactive in trying to address affordable housing needs, with initiatives such as offering city-owned land to build homes for people with limited incomes and providing free legal assistance for renters facing eviction.

“There’s obviously a huge need at that very low-income household income target,” Hepner said. “And I do see Philly has done a lot for them, too. I’m sure more could be done.”

The Philadelphia Coalition for Affordable Communities wants more “deeply affordable” housing to be built instead of “luxury homes,” said Staci Moore, chair of the board of directors at the Women’s Community Revitalization Project.

Politicians act “like the housing that’s being made is good enough,” she said. “Regular working people can’t afford all these houses. That begs the question: Who are you building these houses for?”

Decades ago, Moore spent more than 10 months in a shelter with her young son. She has lived in Northern Liberties since 1993 and said a lot of her neighbors have moved out.

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“I’m surrounded in all four directions by housing that goes up to a little more than a million dollars. I can’t afford that,” said Moore, who works for the state of Pennsylvania and said she’s “lucky” that she has a “great landlord” and can afford to stay in her home.

Rebecca Yae, director of the Housing Initiative at Penn, a housing policy think tank at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “it feels to me like the sentiment and the heart of [the coalition’s campaign] is in the right place.”

“It is really important to consider deeper income targeting for people with the lowest incomes,” she said.

» READ MORE: Low incomes make Philadelphia homes less affordable, Pew study finds

But the universal problem, Yae said, “is that there is just not enough funding and investment devoted to affordable housing initiatives at all, which means that localities just cannot serve everybody who has a need.”

City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier said she’s “hopeful as this campaign rolls out and we really start showing how the city is spending its money and the gap that exists between how we’re spending that money and the needs at the lowest ends of the income spectrum, that folks will feel an onus and responsibility to do something different.”

Gauthier said her support for the campaign “is based on the outcry that my office experiences from constituents every single day.”