Sunday, October 26, 2014

Is Chester Housing Authority the city's best landlord?

This property on Rt. 291 is fast
becoming the symbol of Chester's
desperate times. Photo: Paul Gargagliano. 
Jake Blumgart wrote a chilling story of a Chester resident and his struggles obtaining decent housing in Chester. The story can be found on the Next City website. Below are a few excerpts from the long article. If I get enough comments requesting the entire article, I'll print it. 

  • Chester is what is known, in real estate industry jargon, as a “weak market city.” The phrase means what it sounds like. The city is poor and its economy stagnant. The median home sale price in Chester in 2012 was $20,000, compared to $69,350 in nearby Wilmington and $98,000 in Philadelphia. Fewer than half of Chester’s working-age adults are employed, and a third of the population is living at or below the poverty line. In a city where median rent is $790, 51.5 percent of households pay 35 percent or more of their income to their landlords.

  • In 2012, there were 667 home sales in the city, but only 33 were purchased with a mortgage. (Investors generally finance their purchases through other means, so comparing mortgages to total sales is a reliable way to measure owner-occupancy.) Nationally about half of home sales are completed without a mortgage, but in Chester the proportion is nearer to one mortgage for every 20 sales. 

  • “In Chester, [the term] slumlord has to be used very selectively to maintain the value of the word,”...

  • Many of the landlords he comes into contact with aren’t bad people, he says, they are simply unprepared to provide housing for an incredibly high-need population. 

  • With very little property tax revenue coming in to City Hall, the single city inspector charged with making sure properties meet code regulations is stretched thin.

  • Everything changes for those low-income renters who manage to make it on the Chester Housing Authority rolls. The CHA serves 2,366 families, about 8,000 people. More than half of these households — 1,566 families — receive Section 8 vouchers, which don’t have to be used within city limits but often are.

  • In an age when innovation and entrepreneurship are the buzzwords that get cities’ attention, it’s easy to overlook the power of well-run legacy public agencies like housing authorities. Yet in Chester, no one developer has done as much to improve the city as the CHA has. Higher-profile projects such as PPL Park, the soccer stadium for the Philadelphia Union (supported by $77 million in public subsidies), that was supposed to “change the face of Chester forever,” in the words of then-governor Ed Rendell, have done far less for the city’s residents.

  • Cities like Chester are, after all, the reason government got involved in the housing market in the first place. “In most cities at most times, public housing provides a better alternative than private-sector housing in poor neighborhoods,” writes Edward Goetz in New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Policy. But federal the government long ago abandoned the idea of building more project-based public housing, and today even its cheaper alternatives, like Section 8 vouchers and low-income housing tax credits, are stunted by Congress.

11 comments:

  1. As a person who owns over 20 properties not including businesses, a person who have tried to get bank financing for houses including vacant business bldg. only to be redlined, is a situation to be addressed. Jake should ask the major banks, why won't they finance in Chester and he'd find his answer to be risk. Major banks still find Chester risky to invest in even with all factors of the requestor have been complied with as far home residential financing goes. So, we seek hard money or our personal funds to purchased homes in Chester. Jake needs a part two to that article. Thanks!

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    1. I've heard the same story from a successful business owner who tried to get financing for a property next door to the one he's currently operating out of. He resigned to funding it on his own after bank rejections. Unfortunately, the building will sit vacant until he gathers up enough funds.

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  2. Please post whole article so I don't have to subscribe....Thanks

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    1. I didn't subscribe but someone sent me the article. I will share it in it's entirety.

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  3. Please print the entire article. Residents of the City of Chester who don't, need to pay more attention to the value of home ownership. I understand that a great many of us don't have the means to purchase properties without employment, but we must become visionary in our understanding and desire to own our places of residence. We must prepare for opportunities when they arise, without homeowners our communities crumble and the vultures (slumlords) pick over our carcusses. Thank you for your enlightenment on our behalf. Keep up the good work!!!

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    1. I recently did a project for the Chester Housing Authority requiring me to interview several residents living in CHA developments and several people who don't. Opinions vary but I gained a new perspective of the value of public housing. After CHA publishes the piece they used the interviews for, I may share my perspective in a post.

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  4. I would like to see the entire article

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    1. OK. No one has said not to. After reading it they may wish they did. It'll be up shortly.

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  5. You may not have known that many of the public housing units in Chester were developed by private sector developers who also manage them, not the CHA.

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  6. The problem with public housing is it leaves the tax burden on the homeowners and businesses, just think if those 8,000 residences were gererating taxes

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    1. You can argue that rental properties create the same burden. A renter doesn't pay real estate tax either.

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