Press

December 2006  
One Step at a Time
Philadelphia takes a stab at solving a longtime problem.
By Joseph A. Slobodzian
Stop in any Center City Philadelphia hotel and ask the concierge what to see. Chinatown is sure to be high on the list. But besides being a tourist draw, Chinatown is the site of two recent affordable housing setbacks that highlight the discrepancy between Philadelphia's downtown development boom and its continued shortage of moderate- and low-income housing.

The 136-year-old neighborhood creates a link between City Hall at the intersection of Broad and Market streets, and Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell seven blocks east along Market. Just to the west is the sprawling Pennsylvania Convention Center (where APA will meet in April).

Beyond Chinatown's "Friendship Gate" at 10th and Arch is a crowded warren of narrow streets lined with Asian restaurants of all sorts. But while most local leaders are justifiably proud of the neighborhood's success — and of Center's City's remarkable turnaround over the last decade — others ponder a more difficult question: Can Chinatown survive if Chinese and other Asian ethnic groups can no longer afford to live there?

"Chinatown is more than just a place to eat or a tourist destination," says Helen Gym, a board member of one of the area's advocacy groups, the 26-year-old Asian Americans United. She has been outspoken about the need to preserve Chinatown as a gateway for new Asian immigrants, a place where the newly arrived can quickly find work and an affordable place to live.

It's the same question affordable housing advocates nationwide are facing as the trend toward downtown living dramatically boosts real estate prices in neighborhoods known for their supply of inexpensive housing.

With varying degrees of success, in Chinatown and elsewhere in Philadelphia, community leaders have begun lobbying developers and city officials to make sure they have a place in Philadelphia's future.

What boom brings
Center City Philadelphia — usually defined as the area between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, from Poplar Street on the north to Christian Street on the south — has always had a mixture of incomes and a high proportion of home owners (almost 60 percent) compared to renters.

A national study released last year by the Brookings Institution found that downtown Philadelphia remains home to the city's richest and poorest residents. Citing 2000 census figures, the study contrasted Center City's wealthiest census tract (median annual income of $87,027) with the poorest ($8,349). The city has an overall median income of just over $30,000.

Unlike the city as a whole, the area remains overwhelmingly white (73.3 percent). Eight percent of Center City residents are Asian.

Also unlike the city as a whole, where population has essentially stabilized at just under 1.5 million (down from a high of just over two million in 1950), Center City has seen dramatic growth in its residential population. It now has about 88,000 residents, making it the third largest downtown housing market after New York and Chicago, according to the Center City District, downtown's nonprofit business improvement district.

Even more interesting is the rate of growth: 12 percent since 2000 and 17 percent since 1990. If current trends continue, say Center City District officials, the downtown population could reach 105,000 by 2010 and basically absorb now distinct neighborhoods to the north and south.

Chinatown is clearly a target. Earlier this year, the Center City District surveyed 2004–05 real estate sales in eight downtown areas. In Chinatown / Washington Square West, the area with the greatest change, the average home sale price rose 39 percent in just one year, to $704,859, and the average condominium sale price rose 41 percent, to $293,330.

Setback and success
Last year officials of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation thought they had achieved a breakthrough when local developer William Wilson agreed to a 10 percent affordable housing set-aside in a 300-unit condominium development planned for a parking lot surrounding a Chinatown subway station. The corporation, which was founded in 1969, is a successor to the Committee for the Advancement and Preservation of the Chinese Community, a group created three years earlier to oppose the first version of the Vine Street Expressway, which would have obliterated the community as it exists today.

Although the meaning of "affordable" was not specified, Chinatown officials praised Wilson for considering the needs of the community, especially since that was not part of his agreement with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority to develop the site.

But by July, the real estate market had cooled enough so that Wilson's company, Synterra Ltd., withdrew. The company said the inclusion of affordable housing was not the reason. Meanhile, PCDC executive director John Chin said he and other community leaders planned to work with the redevelopment authority on a new request for proposals for the site.

Earlier this year, the Chinatown group suffered another setback, when it failed to win affordable housing in another project. In this case, the development group, the Parkway Corporation, headed by Julie Wong, a Chinatown businesswoman, rejected a request to include affordable units in Pearl, a six-story condominium with 90 residential units, 10 retail units, and 120 parking spaces, to be built on the site of a parking lot at Ninth and Arch streets. The developers contended that the cost of the land and market conditions made anything other than market-rate units financially unfeasible.

Chinatown has also seen successes, though. The PCDC has been acquiring land north of the Vine Street Expressway, at the neighborhood's northern boundary, since the early 1990s. It has since built some 225 units of mixed income housing adjacent to the expressway. The prices range from full market rate for for-sale condos to rental units available to holders of Section 8 certificates. All are currently occupied by members of the Chinatown community.

In October, a new charter school, the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures School, opened in a renovated industrial building on Callowhill Street. The school attracts both local residents and children of Asian families who live outside Chinatown. Its chief operations officer, Neeta Patel, says the school, which now has 336 pupils in kindergarten though fifth grade, expects to add a grade each year for three more years.

Ellen Somekawa, executive director of Asian Americans United, acknowledges that finding affordable vacant land for projects like this is becoming increasingly difficult — even in the former commercial and industrial zones north of Vine Street. In fact, her group is now located not in Chinatown but in South Philadelphia.

The land shortage was also brought home last summer, when the PCDC celebrated the implementation of its comprehensive neighborhood plan. One of the honored guests was Pok Yan Lai, a beneficiary of the Chinatown Home Ownership Initiative. The 65-year-old Pok, who emigrated from Hong Kong in 1963, found a house he could afford, a three-bedroom row house that he bought for $115,000, in South Philadelphia's "Chinatown South," an enclave of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodians.

So there is affordable housing in Philadelphia beyond Chinatown and Center City. But Philadelphia prides itself as being a 'city of neighborhoods,' each with a strong identity, often based on ethnicity or race, and residents have traditionally have stayed close to home.  Now, people like Chinatown's Pok Yan Lai are beginning to look for housing beyond their neighborhood borders, a trend that is likely to continue.

Know the facts
"The real barrier is site control," says Denise McGregor Armbrister, executive director of the Wachovia Regional Foundation. The foundation, a charitable arm of the North Carolina-based Wachovia Bank, offers neighborhood planning grants to low-income communities in southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. The reality, she says, is that poor residents of gentrifying urban neighborhoods "can't get control of property because the price is going up even as they are meeting."

In some cases, she adds, just the word that a neighborhood group is planning for affordable housing is enough to attract real estate speculators who gobble up available properties.

Since 1998, the foundation has awarded more than 98 grants totaling more than $34 million in 62 counties to the three states it serves. Those grants have helped communities develop 264 rental units and 373 owner-occupied units of affordable housing.

Armbrister notes that low-income residents are often left out of discussions about urban renewal projects. "Too often," she says, "a neighborhood group decides on a particular project only to find that the municipal government has already earmarked the site for something else."

For that reason, she says, the foundation requires evidence of community involvement before it agrees to make a grant to a neighborhood group. That group must prove that it has built or is building a relationship with municipal officials.

Last June, the foundation gave $100,000 to the two-year-old Francisville Neighborhood Development Corporation. Francisville is a tiny segment of North Philadelphia — west of Broad Street and just north of Fairmount Avenue — that, like Chinatown, has suddenly found itself in the center of a housing boom.

For years, Francisville residents lived with crime and poverty, and with little attention from the city. The neighborhood still showed signs of the urban riots that hit this part of the city in the early 1960s. Now, however, home seekers looking for bargains near the already gentrified Art Museum, Fairmount, and Spring Garden neighborhoods, have discovered Francisville, which is near a station of the Broad Street Subway and just a 20-minute walk from the Center City business district.

In announcing its grant, the Wachovia Regional Foundation noted that 35 percent of the neighborhood's 5,000 residents live in poverty and that 19 percent of its housing is vacant. The grant will give the Francisville group a chance — perhaps its last one — to find a way to preserve the community's diversity in the midst of new development. The grants encourage communities to create comprehensive plans, improve the homes of poor and middle-income residents, and create community centers. They are intended to enable long-term residents to remain and newer residents to become part of a stable community.

The 'new' public housing
The participatory approach advocated by the Wachovia foundation has also produced results elsewhere in Philadelphia.

Ten years ago, the Philadelphia Housing Authority demolished Schuylkill Falls, a vandalized, crime-ridden, high-rise housing project in East Falls, a neighborhood above the Schuylkill River northwest of Center City. The authority replaced the project with a 135-unit low-density town house community it called Falls Ridge.

The authority also signed a contract with the Westrum Development Company, based in suburban Philadelphia, to redevelop another part of the site, a scenic, 16.7-acre hilltop overlooking the river. But that deal led to vociferous complaints by a group of public housing residents and neighborhood supporters about the number of affordable units the development would include.

In February, the developer and the Philadelphia Housing Authority settled on a number. Westrum would be allowed to build 128 market-rate homes, 36 more than originally specified. In return, the company agreed to add $300,000 to its original $2.8 million purchase price and to make six of the additional units affordable to families earning up to $55,000 a year.

Now the housing authority is proceeding to raze high-rise projects elsewhere in the city and to replace them with mixed income communities of two- and three-story town houses. The new developments offer both rental units and for-sale units, the latter available to families with an income of up to $55,000.

The PHA currently has 47 housing projects in the city: 27 are designated as family developments, seven are for families and seniors, and 13 for seniors only. Overall, the PHA houses some 80,000 people. Between 1999 and 2004, the authority redeveloped six large projects, and plans for eight other projects are in the pipeline.

A notable example is the Richard Allen Homes development in North Philadelphia. For years, the project at 11th and Poplar streets served as an example of the failure of traditional public housing. The buildings were readily visible to suburban commuters on SEPTA's (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) key regional rail lines.

Over the last decade, those commuters have seen the project transformed into a town house community with tidy lawns, playgrounds, and such amenities as a community center.

Some observers have criticized the project's suburban styling as being out of place in a big city. Carl Greene, the executive director of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, and Mayor John Street counter by noting that the redevelopment program has led to the revitalization of neighboring areas and has removed much of the stigma from public housing.

Fighting back
Of course, all of these advances are but a small step toward filling the need for affordable housing in Philadelphia, a city where there are about 46,000 names on the housing authority's waiting list for public housing.

What is notable is that residents of neighborhoods being pressured by Center City's real estate boom are now fighting back.

Chinatown is a case in point. Its history can be traced to 1870, but it is only a quarter of the size of the original neighborhood.

Today much of the original Chinatown is occupied by the results of four decades of urban renewal: Independence National Historical Park, Market Street East, the Gallery shopping mall, the commuter rail tunnel linking the old Reading and Pennsylvania Railroad commuter lines, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

In light of that history, redevelopment authorities were surprised in 2000 when Chinatown leaders balked at a proposal to build a new stadium for the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team at 11th and Vine streets. Six months later the idea was dead.

The Phillies ultimately moved to a new park near the old Veterans Stadium in South Philadelphia. The site at 11th and Vine is now occupied by the year-old Chinese Christian Church and its community center.

The lesson was not lost on the community, which is why, despite the lack of enough affordable housing nearby, the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School exists today on Callowhill Street, a magnet for Asians families throughout the city.

"It makes a statement," said Asian Americans United's Helen Gym. "It says, 'We're not moving anywhere.'"

Joseph Slobodzian covers CenterCity for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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