PHA is also an award-winning housing community developer. Such reforms responded effectively to earlier critics, including Catherine Bauer, but they had the disadvantage of reducing the stock of affordable units. Whites in these “transitional” neighborhoods violently fought Rafsky’s plan for scattered, unobtrusive, and integrated low-rise developments, and by the late 1960s the gargantuan and racially-segregated 886-unit Southwark Plaza high rise, and the 510-unit Norman Blumberg tower (1967) attested to the failure of Rafsky’s plan for a more human-scale, integrated public housing.More often, developers negotiated with the Housing Authority to purchase anywhere from 50 to 100 units of “used housing,” rehabilitate them, and for an agreed upon price “turn the key over” to the authority.
ABOUT PHA Established in 1937, PHA is the nation's fourth largest public housing authority. Over the years, however, as needs as well as programs changed, the city and the region struggled to provide safe, decent, and sanitary living quarters when the private market failed to produce suitable alternatives.This promising approach to providing well-designed, European-style, modern housing developments ended when congressional critics, citing costs, rejected Bauer’s “communitarian” approach to low-income housing. Using a “turnkey” or “used housing” approach, the Philadelphia Housing Authority acquired and converted abandoned housing into single-unit, scattered public housing.Connecting Headlines with HistoryClick the images to learn more.Hearings on “troubled” housing authorities, including Philadelphia, in 1998 disclosed mismanagement, dire budgetary problems, and outright corruption in the Philadelphia Housing Authority. The City of Philadelphia has issued Requests for Proposals (RFP) for new Permanent Supportive Housing, Rapid Re-Housing, and Joint Transitional and Rapid Re-Housing projects for households with or without children, including youth ages 18-24, to be included in Philadelphia's 2019 application to HUD for Continuum of Care (CoC) Program funding. It kept its World War II-Lanham Act Warminster Heights project “affordable,” but sold the white-clapboard, barracks-type project to private owners. When in 1954 Camden’s housing chief, Joseph McComb, refused to integrate the city’s all-black projects, the NAACP sued, but to no avail. The program allows public housing authorities to convert U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funding to Section 8 contracts and use private capital to modernize facilities. “You don’t know if these people are sexual predators or not.”Decades after the cash-strapped housing authority began imploding aging towers like Reynolds’ building, PHA is finalizing a plan to redevelop the 56-year-old Fairhill Apartments complex.
By 1960 more than 40 percent of family heads living in the city’s Richard Allen Homes were jobless; more than 23 percent were out of the labor force.
The 1949 Wagner-Ellender-Taft Housing Act, which called for 810,000 units of public housing nationally, revived public housing in Philadelphia. I be like ‘Oh, it ain’t no fire. “It needs to be done,” Reynolds said.“I’m happy,” said Shirley Reynolds, a retired construction worker.Looking out over the next 20 years, repair costs jumped to more than $81 million, equating to more than $300,000 per unit. Through the Annual Contribution Contract and annual payments, Washington underwrote the entire capital cost of public housing projects. PHA can leverage this to seek outside funding on the new developments they plan to build and own. Public housing during the war congealed segregation patterns. The problem stemmed from the 1937 federal housing law. At the same time both project maintenance and management costs rose, draining reserve funds and shattering the operating formula. “I think I’ve been here long enough and put up with other people dirt to deserve my own little nice PHA house.”Help us get to 100% of our membership goal to support the reporters covering our region, the producers bringing you great local programs and the educators who teach all our children.Fairhill apartments in North Philadelphia.