(The Austin housing authority purchased this 452-unit apartment complex to operate as non-profit housing | Image: Community Development Trust)

Everyone would like to see a lot more affordable housing created in Philadelphia, but the most common ways that capital-A Affordable Housing is created today makes this unaffordable to scale. 

A week before the May primaries, Council President Clarke and 10th District Councilor Brian O'Neill introduced a little-noticed resolution creating a new Council-controlled Zoning Code Review Commission that will be tasked with making big changes to the reformed zoning code passed fewer than 10 years ago in 2011. The Commission would be staffed entirely by Clarke and O'Neill, two of Council's most retrograde housing thinkers, rather than going through the official process that voters adopted in a 2007 Charter change for these kinds of commissions—the Zoning Code Commission. 

When last year's affordable housing package passed City Council, the big news was the Kenney administration's commitment to dedicating a lot more general funding to the Housing Trust Fund from expiring tax abatements, but as we've been pointing out, the more interesting story may be the Mixed-Income Housing density bonus program. 

(Thin Flats | LEED Duplexes from Inhabitat)

Affordable housing advocates demonstrated in Council last year in opposition to a move to open up the city's Housing Trust Fund to "workforce housing" projects, which are targeted at lower-middle class residents instead of the lowest-income residents. That measure still passed, but advocates had a good point: if there are only so many public dollars for affordable housing to go around, the most housing-insecure groups should come first. 

A new report and mapping project from William Stancil at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute of Metropolitan Opportunity presents a novel way of visualizing different types of neighborhood change over two decades in regions across the United States, adding an important new layer of context to the debates over gentrification and displacement. In Philadelphia, the report's findings highlight the extent to which displacement through disinvestment is by far the biggest neighborhood change problem that most neighborhoods are struggling with. 

City Council is out with a new anti-poverty plan timed to the primary elections that you can think of as a sort of campaign platform for incumbents. There are several good ideas in there, but also some misguided ideas, particularly in the affordable housing plank, which unfortunately just reinforce an unhelpful narrative about housing that we were just starting to get away from with Council's much better affordable housing package that passed last Fall.

(Image: Kevin Gillen, Lindy Institute)

The Lindy Institute's new Q4 housing report from economist Kevin Gillen shows Philadelphia's housing market still deep in seller's market territory with record low inventory of homes for sale and prices continuing to rise, albeit more slowly this quarter. It's a situation that calls for local elected officials to shake off their complacency and start thinking harder about their role in ensuring there's available and affordable housing for everyone who wants to live here.

(Stop! | Image: JKRP Architects)

The Kenney administration's Department of Planning and Development has found itself in the absurd position of having to appeal a bad decision by the Kenney administration's Zoning Board of Adjustment —a board that nominally lives within that very Department—to allow a large self-storage facility just steps from the subway on Broad and Spring Garden Street, and across the street from where Eric Blumenthal just announced he's now planning a new high-rise.

(Most of Fishtown's Frankford Ave will be eligible for inclusionary zoning, but not the interior neighborhood | Photo: Jon Geeting)

The year-long affordable housing funding debate in City Council finally wrapped yesterday, at least for the time being, with Council passing a package of bills that together would fund the Housing Trust Fund to the tune of $71-100 million a year, depending on who you ask. 

(Awesometown, an affordable housing project by Post Green Homes and NKCDC)

The Kenney administration and City Council have been working toward finalizing details of a compromise plan to fund affordable housing, as an alternative to the 1% construction tax that passed Council back in June, which the administration opposed. The compromise plan has two main parts—about $50 million from expiring tax abatements, and about $20 million from the newly-revamped zoning bonuses that allow greater density in housing projects that either include some below-market-rate units or make an in-lieu payment into the Housing Trust Fund.