It’s been a busy few weeks for Mayor Parker’s H.O.M.E. plan rollout, with an all-day hearing in City Council last week, the release of the administration’s proposed spending plan, and a preview of their likely legislative agenda.

It’s still early, but there is increasing daylight between what originated during the 2023 campaign as a housing production agenda — with the aim of building 30,000 new affordable homes in four years — and the current plan’s focus instead on repair and preservation of existing properties.

The current plan, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, has a goal of creating 13,500 new housing units, and preserving 16,500 homes, with an even split between rental and owner-occupied housing.

The Parker administration proposes to accomplish this with $800 million in bond spending; administrative process changes and more staff to speed housing reviews; and legislative changes to zoning and tax policies to incentivize more building.

So far, though, the proposed spending plan has little in it about building new houses. In its current iteration, the top spending categories are: affordable housing preservation, Turn the Key, the Basic Systems Repair Program, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit project gap financing, paying delinquent back rent, the new One Philly Mortgage product, and the Philly First Home mortgage program. Around 38 programs are slated for funding increases in total, with many of those increases receiving only a few million dollars more per year.

We’ve seen first-hand locally how some members of City Council have been earnestly persuaded to change their tune on big thorny issues like Vision Zero, and residents who want to see more action on housing too can look to the emerging realignment there for helpful lessons.

Conversely, only about 27 percent of the bond spending would be used directly to build new houses, with most of that funding proposed for the Turn the Key program ( $112 million); gap financing for Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) projects (about $80 million); and $26 million for the PHL Accelerator Fund, which provides flexible financing for mixed-income affordable housing.

For context, that level of Turn the Key funding — which supports middle income for-sale homes on City-owned lots — will support the construction of about 500 more homes under that program. The LIHTC gap financing is capped at $3 million per project, so if most projects apply for the maximum, that works out to just 26 buildings.

Is this the best way to spend the bond money if the goal is producing a lot more housing? Whatever your feelings about that, it certainly puts a lot more pressure on zoning and land use legislation as the load-bearing policy for the 13,500 new units the plan calls for.

Enter land use politics

Some programs can scale up quickly with more funding, while others like Turn the Key can take a long time, in large part due to City Council’s erratic approach to how land is disbursed and housing approved through the Land Bank, which was formed to efficiently sell unused and vacant public land to developers, residents and communities.

The Turn the Key program sits at the intersection of the bond spending and land use politics. According to one source at the City, the Parker administration would need to spend the bond funds within about 2 to 3 years from when the money hits the City’s bank account, but Councilmembers haven’t demonstrated a willingness to move public property through the Land Bank at nearly the pace required to make that happen.

At the Council hearing this week, several members expressed skepticism about the Parker administration’s proposal to make Land Bank transactions more efficient by pre-clearing both a list of city properties for housing and a list of pre-approved developers, while giving City Council and community groups a say at the front-end of the process. One of the Land Bank’s big institutional failures owes to its dual governance by City Council and the Land Bank board, and in particular, City Council District members’ tendency to change their minds about supporting projects at the tail end of the process, often due to local objections.

It’s still early, but there is increasing daylight between what originated during the 2023 campaign as a housing production agenda — with the aim of building 30,000 new affordable homes in four years — and the current plan’s focus instead on repair and preservation of existing properties.

Additional concerns from Council centered around the income bands of people eligible for different programs, tensions between building fast and public engagement, concerns about the bond financing details and the city’s ability to spend the money quickly enough, and the diversity of the developers and workers building the homes.

Concerns from developers and trade unions mirror many of these same points, and there was also some shock among building industry players at the relatively small share of the funding going toward new housing construction, compared to the spending on home preservation and homeowner and tenant support. As The Inquirer reported last week:

Construction groups have also expressed concerns that the policies included in the mayor’s plan would not do enough to spur new construction, while some Council members have questioned whether the plan’s price tag is too high, and whether its reliance on debt will be overly cumbersome for future city leaders.

With $112 million for Turn The Key needing to be spent within two years, it’s clear that the business-as-usual approach won’t be up to the task, which has consequences for both the success of the H.O.M.E. plan and the city’s fiduciary obligations. But the piecemeal approach has a lot of defenders, with some District Councilmembers sticking up for the unwritten tradition of councilmanic prerogative that allows them to control what gets built in their neighborhoods.

From The Inquirer:

Parker undoubtedly hoped that plan would be a middle ground between Council fully ceding its powers over city land sales and the status quo, where sales often move slowly primarily because lawmakers have to be involved in every transaction.

Some Council members appear unconvinced that anything needs to change when it comes to how the city handles zoning decisions and real estate transactions.

“People shouldn’t have to have things in the neighborhood that they don’t want,” said Councilmember Cindy Bass, who represents the 8th District, which includes parts of Northwest and North Philadelphia. “And so I feel like this is sort of like rolling around on it … like saying, ‘We know what’s best for you.’”

It should be obvious why “people shouldn’t have to have things in the neighborhood that they don’t want” could never work as a general principle applied to every single housing proposal, and the good news is that it mostly doesn’t.

Most housing in the city is permitted through a by-right administrative process with no neighborhood meeting required. In a minority of cases where someone is seeking an exception to the rules, that person may apply for a zoning variance, which gives the City Councilmember and neighborhood groups more negotiating leverage.

The big problem with elected officials using the sentiments expressed at neighborhood zoning meetings as a weather vane for public opinion on housing is that most normal people don’t participate in zoning politics at all. But every neighborhood has a relative handful of people who treat it like a sport, and their views are typically more housing-skeptical than the public at large. People who are motivated to show up to the rec center at 7pm on a Tuesday night to argue about setbacks and roof decks shouldn’t be mistaken for “the community” — in most cases, “the community” overwhelmingly elected to stay home and cook dinner.

At the heart of it all, this is a collective action problem where every individual might prefer that the housing go someplace else, but because city government wants housing to be widely available, we mostly don’t give near neighbors a veto over it.

The housing debate we need

The exact agenda for H.O.M.E.-related legislation is still vague, but in another city document released recently, the Parker administration proposed some helpful changes to zoning that would allow more mid-rise buildings close to transit stations, more two-family homes, parking reforms, and more small-lot infill buildings. These are the types of changes that could get us closer to the administration’s 13,500-unit target, but they’ll require cooperation and buy-in from some Council members who usually like to decide things project by project.

On an imaginary Earth 2, our Bizarro City Council members would be asking the administration for more planning funds and analytical support to help them rezone their districts to accommodate more housing in the places that make the most sense. Or they might be thinking about the typical building types that already exist in their districts, and working backward from those to try to make similar ones buildable by-right.

At the heart of it all, this is a collective action problem where every individual might prefer that the housing go someplace else, but because city government wants housing to be widely available, we mostly don’t give near neighbors a veto over it.

The Parker administration’s earlier suggestion that they would work with Council members on design guidelines for their districts was a good notion for how to handle this proactively, rather than reactively, but the reactive approach has a real constituency, at great cost to the city’s general affordability.

Zooming out, with each progression so far, the H.O.M.E. plan has seemed to move further away from the original goal of a housing production plan, with the bulk of the pro-supply agenda increasingly depending on some dicey politics in City Council. It’s the housing debate Philadelphia needs in this moment, and it’s a real test of our elected leaders’ political skills and their commitment to a better quality of life for city residents.

It’s easy to be cynical about this, but there are some good reasons for optimism too. Pro-housing reforms have had a solid track record recently in city and state governments all across America. And after Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 election, Democrats in particular have been doing a lot of public soul-searching about how the high cost of living and general dysfunction in the places they govern have been pushing urban voters to the right.

We’ve seen first-hand locally how some members of City Council have been earnestly persuaded to change their tune on big thorny issues like Vision Zero, and residents who want to see more action on housing too can look to the emerging realignment there for helpful lessons. Our city government can still tackle hard problems, and we should expect nothing less from our elected leaders.

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