Today, City Council released the news that they'll be looking to build 1,500 new units of affordable housing on publicly owned land throughout the city. 1,000 of those units will be rentals, whereas the remainder will be available for sale in price ranges affordable to households with incomes very close to the city's median household income.
A recent report from the Urban Land Institute showed that while there are 117,58 households in Philadelphia that fall into the "extremely Low Income" category, only 43,700 affordable housing units are available to them, leaving 73,878 households without an affordable option.
City Council's plan to create 1,000 new affordable rentals is a laudable step in the right direction, but it will still leave 72,878 households without affordable housing. Still, City Council hopes that the blight-reducing impacts of using city-owned parcels of vacant land (and some blighted buildings that can be rehabilitated) will also spur reinvestment in the neighborhoods where the new affordable housing will be built.
· [CBS Philly]
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