With negotiations underway for Mayor Parker’s Mission 30,000 initiative to build and preserve 30,000 homes in Philadelphia, one particular City program is primed to have its heyday: The Land Bank. Established by City Council in 2012, the Land Bank was intended to speed up and ease the process of selling acres of city land to developers to build much-needed moderately-priced homes, alongside community uses like gardens and public spaces.
But the Land Bank has proven to be a disappointment because of Philadelphia’s unwritten tradition of councilmanic prerogative — where District Council members defer to one another reciprocally on land use questions in their districts. This means that, in practice, one district Councilmember gets to decide unilaterally whether an application to buy or develop a City property receives a response or is ignored. And rather tragically, the Land Bank’s processes often further obscure this dynamic, rather than bringing more transparency and clarity to the city’s decision-making.
This is having real consequences for the speed at which developers can build new houses. To wit: There are dozens of potential homes sitting in limbo that were approved by the Land Bank board, but have gotten stuck in Council, or even had their approvals rescinded due to Council opposition. With efforts to create more housing ramping up this year, it is worth asking: Are City Councilmembers willing to release more land to more builders so we can get more housing already?
A laudable goal … if we can pull it off
At an appearance last year, Mayor Parker said she wanted to see “Turn the Key on steroids” in reference to the quasi-governmental Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation (PHDC)’s popular program that leverages City-owned land for price-restricted workforce housing.
Established in 2021 by an act of City Council, Turn the Key has been a big success at increasing the rate of city land disposition compared to the plodding pace of prior years, and has been a modest success from a housing supply standpoint, with a little over 100 homes built and sold since the program’s inception. According to February’s board minutes, 822 housing units have been approved for development so far under the program, with 400 currently under construction.
Stepping up the pace of workforce housing construction on city land is a laudable goal, considering the city’s bulging stockpile of properties — still over 4,000 in total — but some political realism is in order. Without further changes to the laws and policies governing City Council and Land Bank Board approvals, acquisition of City land will remain a moving target, constraining the prospective pool of interested builders and funders.
To achieve Mayor Parker’s goals for new housing production overall, there’s really no substitute for electing Council members who support building more housing and want to do the right thing for current and future residents.
Despite improvements since 2019, the process is still a migraine for would-be program users thanks to an opaque decision-making process with excessive discretion, multiple veto points, and the absence of clear priorities.
These programs made some initial headway by solving a political problem — Councilmembers seemed to want more control over who would be eligible to buy homes built on City land, as well as who the builders would be. Turn the Key started out prioritizing City workers for its homes, which are capped at $280,000, with City funds from the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative providing additional assistance to first-time home buyers through grants and mortgage buydowns. The average income of a Turn the Key home buyer is $45,000 (around 50 percent of the Area Median Income), which is affordable for City workers like administrative support staff, sanitation workers, bus drivers and social workers.
Council has also wanted to see more non-White developers dealt in on these opportunities, and there is now a small cottage industry of training and mentorship programs from nonprofits and City government itself. Their graduates and trainees often pursue Land Bank properties and Turn the Key projects as a first stop in their career journeys, since the City effectively subsidizes land sales as part of these deals.
Those changes have led to more members, most notably former-Council President Darrell Clarke and current Council President Kenyatta Johnson, shifting their approach from a more skeptical stance on City land housing deals, to becoming some of the more prolific champions of them.
It’s important to applaud this progress while also recognizing that the “Turn the Key on steroids” vision is still a long way off, and unlikely to happen under the current mix of laws and policies.
“The [land] uncertainty makes it particularly difficult for the smaller, mainly Black and brown-owned firms that we try and support to do affordable housing development in the city.” — David Langlieb, Philadelphia Accelerator Fund
The biggest dysfunction driver is the state law that requires a vote of the municipal legislature to sell any City-owned property. While this makes some sense from a good government anti-corruption standpoint, the interplay with Philadelphia’s political culture turns that law’s good intentions on their head.
Without going into the whole history of the various attempts to make the City’s land disposition process more rule-based and less capricious over the years, the general thrust of these efforts has been to try and move the “will they / won’t they” question to the front end of the process, rather than have applicants waste their time and money on pre-development costs, only to have the Councilmember refuse to move it forward at the end.
The legislation establishing the Turn the Key program and the 51 / 49 program before it allows builders to apply for no-bid City land deals if 51 percent of the units are affordable at 80 to 120 percent AMI. It established checklists of criteria that compliant projects need to have, as a way to make the review process more rule-based and less opinion-driven. Sadly, not much has changed in that regard.
When the Land Bank considers housing proposals, they either put out a request for proposals for properties they want developed, or they receive unsolicited proposals from builders for Turn the Key and mixed-income projects. If an RFP, they’ve almost certainly gotten the support from the Councilmember first. Likewise, for an unsolicited proposal to make its way onto the Land Bank board’s agenda, there needs to be an early signal the Councilmember is supportive before they’ll proceed.
Homes in limbo
The Land Bank board is the only one in the city where the appointment power is split half-and-half between the mayor and City Council, further limiting the mayor’s influence over these issues. Under Mayor Parker’s term so far, the Parker board appointees have moved in a more pro-housing direction on average than the board under Mayor Kenney. But the Board under both Mayors has used their own discretion more than intended under more objective criteria spelled out in the Turn the Key and 51 / 49 laws.
The Board is supposed to ask questions related to the builder’s experience and qualifications, along with basic details about the project. What’s been happening instead is that some board members treat this like a zoning hearing, where every detail of the project from floor plans to price points — even if compliant with the law — is under scrutiny, and projects can be tabled or rejected for reasons having nothing to do with their compliance with the official policies.
Even worse, some members of Council will change their minds partway into the process, sometimes in response to neighbor complaints, and there have been multiple occasions where the Land Bank Board approves a Turn the Key project, but the Councilmember refuses to introduce the ordinance at the end of the process. That’s what happened with some recent proposals in the 3rd and 5th Districts that were delayed or rejected.
Zooming out, it’s easy to see how the City’s process is inflicting death by a thousand cuts to the city’s own housing efforts.
“The uncertainty makes it particularly difficult for the smaller, mainly Black and Brown-owned firms that we try and support to do affordable housing development in the city,” says David Langlieb, Executive Director of the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund, which was formed by city housing leaders to increase access to housing development capital for historically disadvantaged groups. “Most understandably do not want to invest their cash in a process that takes several months and may result in opposition from the district councilperson even if the application is perfect.”
There are currently dozens of homes sitting in limbo that were approved by the Land Bank board, but are stuck in Council. The last few weeks provided two examples of this phenomenon.
In the 3rd District, a proposal for three single-family homes in Kingsessing — two priced for workforce housing, one market-rate — was tabled by the board after it came under scrutiny from near neighbors, the 3rd Ward leader and former state representative Ron Waters, Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, and House Speaker Joanna McClinton. Some of the concerns raised included the location of the one required community meeting, which was held unusually far away from the proposed project, and the size and affordability of the homes (Gauthier wanted the homes to cost less, while Speaker McClinton wanted the homes to be larger.)
The applicant, Calvin Schofield, was approved for a loan from the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund and a senior lender, but can’t get the funding until he has site control. The Land Bank board delayed the project while another community meeting is being scheduled.
In the 5th District, Riverwards Group submitted a mixed-income scattered-site proposal for 43 single-family homes that had support from RCO leaders and received a unanimous vote of the Land Bank board. No community members testified against the proposal at the Land Bank board meeting. Nonetheless, Councilmember Jeffrey Young Jr. declined to introduce a resolution, and last week the Land Bank board rescinded their resolution approving the project. Mo Rushdy of Riverwards Group declined a request for comment.
Another proposal for five Turn the Key homes on scattered sites in Allegheny West in the 5th District last year was rescinded after the Land Bank board approved it, but Councilmember Young wouldn’t introduce a resolution. The applicant was a community developer and a member of the Black Squirrel Collective developer training program.
It isn’t that there are no valid reasons why someone might take issue with any particular property or housing proposal, and as often as not, the concerns are coming from an idealistic place. Zooming out though, it’s easy to see how the City’s process is inflicting death by a thousand cuts to the city’s own housing efforts.
The purpose of a system is what it does, and what our current system does is hamper and delay the public sector’s ability to provide housing using entirely its own assets. It’s a genuinely absurd situation, especially given the frequency with which the word “crisis” is invoked by City leaders concerned about housing quality and availability.
What can we do?
As with many city issues involving councilmanic prerogative, solutions to this problem are elusive due to the unwritten nature of that tradition. While it may be worth exploring state legislative changes to remove the requirement for a City Council vote on land disposition, and relocate that power fully within the executive branch, that same language is in the Philadelphia City Charter too. And even if both laws were amended, it’s far from guaranteed that our City government — deeply influenced by the politics of neighborhood deference on housing issues — wouldn’t still voluntarily opt for a painstaking process of community consultation with deference to District Council members’ views.
Still, there is room to maneuver even within today’s legal confines. It’s possible, for instance, that the Land Bank board may be overstepping its discretion to deny projects that are fully compliant with the checklists City Council passed when they established Turn the Key, which could be subject to a lawsuit from a motivated applicant one day. The Land Bank staff can do more to educate board members about these risks, and take steps to make the review hearings more legalistic and less like a popularity contest.
By denying projects that are legally compliant, but disfavored by Council, the Land Bank board is doing Councilmembers’ dirty work for them, needlessly obscuring who is actually to blame for the denials and delays. It would be better for the board to approve all compliant projects, and let hundreds of approved applications pile up on Council’s doorstep while the mayoral administration and other political actors apply public pressure to pass the necessary resolutions.
Ultimately, to achieve Mayor Parker’s goals for the Land Bank, and for new housing production overall, there’s really no substitute for electing Councilmembers who support building more housing and want to do the right thing for current and future residents’ material living standards by vocally championing the successful Turn the Key program, and using their powers to speed things up, rather than slow down or block needed housing.
Jon Geeting is the director of engagement at Philadelphia 3.0, a political action committee that supports efforts to reform and modernize City Hall.
THE CITIZEN’S LONGSTANDING COVERAGE OF THE LAND BANK