In October 2020, progressive housing activists celebrated a groundbreaking victory.
After months of protests by more than 150 people experiencing homelessness living in tents, the city and the Philadelphia Housing Authority agreed to hand over dozens of vacant properties for the encampment residents themselves to renovate, move into, and call their own.
“Philadelphia Housing Action claims victory after 6 month direct action campaign forces City to relinquish 50 vacant homes,” proclaimed the activist coalition behind the deal. “Housing Activists Took On Philadelphia and Won,” read a headline in The New Republic a few months later. The group had created a “model for organizing,” according to the left-wing website Democracy Now!
Under the terms of the agreement, the city would hand over 10 properties as soon as activists set up a nonprofit to accept them. Within six months the new organization, the Philadelphia Community Land Trust, would get 15 more homes from the city and another 25 from the housing authority.
“We’re looking forward to our new place,” a woman named Scout, who had been living in a tent with her husband, told the Inquirer.
Yet nearly three and half years later, the city has yet to give the trust a single home. It’s unclear if Mayor Cherelle Parker intends to honor the agreement made by the prior administration or if any discussions between the two sides are currently underway.
Parker has rarely discussed homelessness, except in the context of addressing the open-air drug markets in Kensington. In her 100-day action plan, the section on public safety says her administration will look for funding to provide “long-term housing, care, and treatment for our most vulnerable residents, including the unhoused and those suffering from addiction and mental health challenges.”
The plan’s housing section calls for production of “affordable luxury” homes for low- or moderate- income families, but does not mention homelessness.
City officials acknowledged an inquiry from Billy Penn about the status of negotiations, but did not otherwise respond to several requests for comment.
By contrast, the home transfers promised by the federally backed Philadelphia Housing Authority are slowly moving forward. Of the 25 that PHA agreed to provide to Philly CLT, the first eight are scheduled to be transferred next month, PHA spokesperson Nichole Tillman said.
As part of a separate agreement with encampment organizers, the agency also renovated eight homes on Westmont Street in North Philadelphia and gave them to the land trust, including several properties last September, she said. Families moved into two of the homes in December 2021, and Tillman said at least two others are also occupied. Philly CLT declined to comment on any transfers.
Meanwhile, homelessness in Philadelphia, which had fallen after a pandemic-related spike, has been steadily increasing. According to the latest point-in-time survey in October, it was up more than 5% in 2023, to 4,725 people, at the same time that rents have been rising and the city continues to experience a dire shortage of affordable housing.
The need for housing far exceeds the roughly 59 properties promised by the city and PHA. But Councilmember Jamie Gauthier said if the agreement had succeeded as intended it could have provided outsized benefits for the many people living on Philadelphia’s streets.
“Sixty homes put together by community activists — that would have been huge,” said Gauthier, who helped negotiate with encampment organizers and chairs City Council’s committee on housing and homelessness.
“Not just as an individual project, but as a model for how people can navigate these huge bureaucracies that have been operating in a certain way forever,” she said. “It would have been monumental, and that’s why you saw so much attention to it.”
Stymied by city bureaucracy
Some Philadelphia Housing Action activists and encampment residents were intensely skeptical about the agreement from the very start.
The city and PHA made the housing deals in exchange for lead organizer Jennifer Bennetch agreeing to the dismantling of two encampments, Camp JTD on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and another in North Philly’s Sharswood neighborhood.
Activists like Alex Stewart of the Workers Revolutionary Collective, who initially organized Camp JTD, said he and others thought city officials would reap good publicity from the deal but ultimately provide little lasting help.
“We voiced this exact scenario to people who were a part of the land trust coalition,” Stewart recalled. “If you close the housing encampment and allow the city to gain all this press, they will allow that to die out and then not follow up on that promise for years, if they ever do.”
Without the leverage of homeless encampments that officials urgently wanted to see peacefully closed, the pressure was off for them to follow through on their promises, Stewart said.
Gauthier, however, said genuine good intentions on the part of city officials ended up foundering against the complex process of getting the city’s oft-criticized Land Bank to release properties to anyone, let alone a newly established land trust with little experience managing real estate or dealing with city agencies.
“I do think there was goodwill on the part of PHA and on the part of the administration,” she said. “These processes are hard for developers to navigate — people who are seasoned developers. They are especially difficult for grassroots organizations and lay people to navigate. I think ultimately that’s what the group ran into.”
The long-troubled Land Bank, which oversees the sale of properties owned by several city departments, was last overhauled in late 2019.
The city’s land management dashboard shows that it’s been selling or disposing of more properties every year — especially in 2023 — but the bank still faces ongoing criticism on several fronts. Critics say it operates too slowly, is subject to political interference by City Council members, favors for-profit developers over community gardens and nonprofits, and does not produce enough deeply affordable housing.
Parker has vowed to reform the Land Bank yet again, saying in her 100-day action plan that she would launch a formal review “to develop the policies and processes that will expedite the return of vacant and tax-delinquent properties to productive use.”
The Land Bank would be involved only in providing Philly CLT with the 25 city-owned parcels promised in the agreement. PHA has its own separate process for disposing of vacant properties it owns.
“A disappointing development”
The Philadelphia Community Land Trust’s struggle to transition from a coalition of housing activists to a conventional nonprofit housing provider may have also contributed to the holdup in transfers.
Bennetch, the driving force behind the encampment protests and the trust’s chief negotiator, died of complications from COVID two years ago. Board members Dan Moffat and Ruth Birchett have said it took months for them to recover from her loss and get up to speed on the organization’s workings.
The city had previously provided Bennetch with lists of properties for potential acquisition. Birchett, who had worked closely with her during the encampment negotiations, became board president and was in regular contact with administration officials and the Land Bank through 2022 and into spring 2023, she said.
The city’s then-managing director Tumar Alexander set a goal of transferring 25 city properties by September 2023, she said, and officials kept her and Moffat informed about funding opportunities. The city also put them in contact with other nonprofits that offered tips on moving the process forward.
“The city made incredible gestures,” Birchett said. “People were very generous with sharing information.”
She said she stressed to Philly CLT’s other board members the importance of acquiring homes before the end of 2023.
“The encampment agreement may have dissolved with the end of the Kenney administration, which is why I was trying to bring them along to understand the urgency of certain steps being taken,” she said.
But the other board members didn’t want to pursue city and state funding opportunities, she said, and in September there was more upheaval. She was unexpectedly told by the other members that they’d met separately and voted to remove her from the board, she said.
In an October email obtained by Billy Penn, board member Sterling Johnson told PHA CEO Kelvin Jeremiah that Birchett was no longer part of Philly CLT. He said the board was still “fully functional” and committed to fulfilling the trust’s mission.
“This is a troubling and frankly, a disappointing development,” Jeremiah wrote back. “Who are the remaining board members? What is the status of the proposed agreement Ms. Ruth was supposed to put before the Board for its consideration?”
Birchett, who was the only board member with experience in housing development, contends the removal was illegal. She doesn’t know why it happened, but said she had faced resistance from the others as she pushed to apply for grants, expand the board, and hire staff, so the trust could meet the city’s requirements for receiving homes as laid out in the 2020 agreement.
“You want to acquire 25 vacant structures, and then insure them? Insure them with what? You haven’t hired a grant writer. You haven’t done the kind of fundraising needed to be able to shoulder the liability of such an acquisition. You can’t demonstrate to the city of Philadelphia why you’re a good candidate for conveying the property to you,” she said.
“It really wasn’t a good working group at all. It wasn’t functioning like it needed to. It lost the opportunity to apply for funding twice,” Birchett said.
The remaining board members are Moffat and Johnson, who were involved in organizing the encampments and negotiating with the city in 2020, and Max Rameau, who previously organized housing squats and a shantytown for people experiencing homelessness in Miami in the 1990s.
According to Tillman, the PHA spokesperson, the board members “are trying to move the organization forward” and continue to meet PHA officials. They say they have created an advisory board of residents, have bookkeeping in place, and are working with a nonprofit law firm to process the home transfers planned for March, she said.
Moffat declined to discuss the trust’s status. “We are excited about a lot of new developments,” he wrote in an email, and said the group would be willing to comment in a few months, “when things are further along.”
Helping land trusts succeed
The city and PHA still own thousands of vacant homes, some of them in poor condition and unoccupied for decades. Affordable housing advocates would like to see them turned over to community groups looking to house needy people.
Stewart is part of a collaborative based in Southwest Philadelphia, and allied with the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance, that works to reduce food insecurity and is looking to create a land trust or housing cooperative. Groups beyond Philly CLT — community organizers, churches, small businesses and other stakeholders — “should have a stake” in the disposition of dilapidated PHA properties and vacant public land, he said.
“Those are mostly just sold to developers for large, non-affordable housing projects,” he said, echoing an observation that drove Bennetch to begin her campaign against the PHA several years ago. “We believe that the city’s residents should have a first right of refusal of those properties.”
His group would like to see the city move forward with a proposed public bank initiative that could invest pension funds into affordable housing development, he said. That could not only help unhoused people, but also the many Philadelphians who have homes but are just scraping by as inflation keeps driving up the cost of living.
“You don’t see their suffering because they’re not on the street,” he said. “They have to skip meals or skip health care, or don’t have daycare. Those are the things that we don’t see.”
Gauthier said she believes that community land trusts, or CLTs, can also still be part of the solution. CLTs are run by community-based boards and are structured to keep the homes they own permanently affordable.
Two years ago, she authored legislation directing the Land Bank and the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority to prioritize applications from CLTs and other nonprofits that want land for projects like affordable housing or community gardens. It also gives them time to reserve properties while they gather funding.
The law covers only two council districts, but Gauthier said it could make a difference if it helps future groups similar to Philly CLT get the assistance they need to pay professional staff and deal with city bureaucracy.
“I would love to do something more in the area of funding and financing and capacity building as well,” she said, “because I think that’s truly what’s needed.”
The article has been updated to correct and add detail to the timeline of the land trust’s discussions with city officials, and to correct the mention of homelessness in the mayor’s 100-day action plan.
