PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Philadelphia Housing Authority is set to turn over seven rehabbed houses to the Community Land Trust, the organization that grew out of last year’s encampment on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
The property transfer, scheduled for Tuesday, fulfills a promise made when the encampment ended.
Encampment organizers agreed to fold up their tents in October 2020, when the city and PHA promised to turn over 50 vacant houses within six months.
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That turned out to be an unrealistic timeline. Organizers first had to form a trust to accept the houses.
PHA president Kelvin Jeremiah said his agency had to make this first group habitable.
"These are not units that could simply be walked in and lived in immediately, so we’ve done these seven with PHA funds and donated union labor," said Jeremiah. He added that the agency worked with the trust to make the first group of houses a model for how to handle the rest of the properties that will be eventually turned over.
"We provided them with training, with capacity building, property management, non-profit management," Jeremiah said.
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"We had approximately 20 encampment participants going through our workforce development center."
The city also agreed to construct tiny house villages. Those are in the design and financing phases, slated for West Philadelphia and the Northeast. The city also agreed to start a rapid rehousing program that Office of Homeless Services director Liz Hersh has deemed a success.
"It's really been great for a lot of people that don’t do well in shelters or don’t want to go into shelter, and the retention rates are amazing, well above 90%," said Hersh, who said in retrospect, the encampment was an important moment for the city.
"it brought a whole new level of awareness about homelessness to people who I don’t really think had thought about it, and some good solutions have come out of it so I think it was an important moment."
