PHA Video 1
Storyboard Text
- What's Occupy PHA's beef with the Phialdelphia Housing Authority? Well. There's a lot of things.
- But in this video we're gonna focus on the way that PHA uses programs that are meant to help poor people...
- Housing Vouncher
- To displace poor people
- Student Housing!1BR $1,200/month
- PHA's entire mission in life is to provide quality, stable housing for low-income residents of Philadelphia. They describe part of what they do as: "integrate lower-income and minority families into mainstream society"But Philadelphia is majority-minority , and about a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line. So it's pretty clear what they mean by "mainstream society."But beyond their racist web copy, how good of a job is PHA actually doing?
- But what is the PHA? What does it actually do?
- Well, there are currently over 40,000 people on the waiting list to get into a PHA home. The expected average waiting time is 13 years, which is so long that the PHA actually closed the waiting list several years ago. In other words, if you need public housing in Philadelphia, you can't even apply for it right now.
- The PHA is the Philadelphia Housing Authority. It's a public agency-- so it's part of the local government. But as they put it ON THEIR OWN WEBSITE:"Although we are a public agency, we operate in many ways like a private property management company. We employ the best practices of the private real estate industry." In other words, just like the private real estate industry, they care more about turning a profit than actually housing people.
- The PHA is run by CEO and president Kelvin Jeremiah who makes over $300,000 per year. Significantly more than the city's mayor makes!
- Wait. But if there are 40,000 people on the waiting list and 40,000 vacant properties, isn't that kind of a pretty simple math problem to solve?
- Meanwhile, the city and PHA own over 40,000 properties within the city that are currently sitting vacant.
- 40,000-40,0000
- Yes. But only if you're actually interested in solving Philadelphia's affordable housing crisis.But the PHA is not interested in that. Instead, they are interested in turning profits (just like private real estate developers). But the PHA has a tool private developers don't have: Federal dollars and HUD programs like RAD.
- HUD (the federal department of Housing and Urban Development) created RAD (which stands for Rental Assistance Demonstration) under President Obama.RAD is a tool for local housing authorities like PHA to partner with non-profit organizations in order to get the money they need to cover the cost of public housing, since there is literally never enough money in the federal budget to maintain and operate all of the public housing in the US.
- PHA
- Project HOME
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- In order to enter into one of these public-private partnerships, the PHA has to "convert" a property to RAD. Meaning, it is taken out of the regular public housing stock and with the permission of HUD, becomes a RAD property. To make sure everything's above board and that housing authorities aren't doing anything shady, HUD has strict rules and restrictions about what can happen to a property once it is converted to RAD.However, by misusing RAD and combining it with other HUD policies, PHA gets around these rules. And the result is less housing for poor families in Phialdelphia. Here's how they do it:
- First, they identify a property they want to sell off for a profit. These properties are generally in "up and coming" neighborhoods. That's real estate developer speak for low-income communities of color being targeted for gentrification. If there's someone living in the home, that's okay! PHA sends in one of their in-house inspectors, who determines that the house is in serious need of repairs. So much so that the people living there must move out so the house can be fixed. PHA sends them off to live somewhere else-- often in an entirely different neighborhood.
- Then, once the house is vacant, they determine it's "not viable"-- meaning it's not worth fixing and should just be knocked down. Often, homes deemed not viable are in fact only in need of very minor repairs. But repairing homes isn't profitable for the PHA.
- Once the home is deemed not viable, PHA gets permission from HUD to convert the property to RAD.Once it's converted to RAD, PHA takes the money HUD gave them to maintain that house, and gives it to one of its partner organizations like Project HOME. Project HOME then uses that HUD money to provide low-income housing, but on its own terms.
- Project HOME provides only single-occupancy units and submits its residents to random drug tests, and only allows cohabitation by documented married couples. While this is considered "permanent housing" it is not what most people think of when they think of a way they plan to live forever.
- Meanwhile, Project HOME now has pocketed all of the HUD money that had originally been paying for that row-home that they kicked the family out of and deemed not-viable. And so PHA is now sitting on an empty house that they're not getting any HUD money for. So what do they do?
- They sell it. And they can do that because there were no tenants living in the home when it was converted to RAD, PHA can sell the property, instead of keeping it as affordable housing, which would be required by HUD otherwise.
- They sell the home to a private real estate developer like OWL Spaces, which specializes in "luxury student housing."OWL Spaces pays the city for the lot, knocks down the home, and builds cheaply constructed single-occupancy apartments specifically marketed to students.
- So now, we have a ton of single-occupancy units run by Project HOME. They are affordable, but are only for specific populations. And they come with strict rules if you want to be able to stay there. And we have a ton of single-occupancy units marketed specifically to students and priced at market or above market rate. In both cases, we have wealthy white(??) people who don't live in the neighborhood determining who the homes are for, and therefore who the neighborhood is for. That's Todd Joseph of OWL Spaces and Sister Mary Scullion of Project HOME.
- We don't have a home where a low-income mother can raise her children. What we don't have is a stable neighborhood where kids and adults can develop strong personal relationships with a community that is built over time. We don't have a quality, brick building typical of the city's historic architecture, built to stand for hundreds of years.
- Low-income families have been systematically driven out and replaced by students. When this process happens over and over and over again, the neighborhood fundamentally changes. Businesses that served the families in the neighborhood go out of business. Commercial rents go up and the leases go to businesses that cater to students and new residents.
- Properties get reassessed, which raises the property tax for long-time residents (not for those in new luxury dwellings, though, cuz Abatement-- but that's another video). This further drives out those on a fixed-income.
- Whether you call it redevelopment, gentrification, displacement or settler colonialism, the result is the same:Low-income people, primarily Black and brown, have fewer and fewer, affordable places to live in the city. Meanwhile, the PHA continues to enrich itself through the sale of homes that should be housing the 40,000 people on their waiting list.
- Image Attributions: (https://pixabay.com/en/us-capitol-building-washington-dc-826991/) - dcandau - License: Free for Commercial Use / No Attribution Required (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0)
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- https://pixabay.com/en/us-capitol-building-washington-dc-826991/ - dcandau - (Licens Free for Commercial Use / No Attribution Required (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0) )
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