Philadelphia Housing Authority seeks takers for vacant properties

In 2004, Sister Mary Scullion wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Housing Authority, asking for help. Could her nonprofit acquire two of the agency's boarded-up homes in the 2100 block of North 28th Street?

Empty for years, the North Philadelphia houses would be part of a block-wide project to fix vacant homes for resale to low-income families.

For seven years, Project HOME, which helps homeless people with services and housing, waited for a decision.

And waited.

"We never knew where we stood with PHA," Scullion said.

Now she does.

In an about-face noted by many groups in the city that develop affordable housing, PHA has put out the welcome mat, asking whether they could use any of the properties in the agency's vast inventory of vacant land.

PHA owns about 3,300 vacant houses and lots and last year got approval from the federal housing agency to dispose of about a third of them.

Michael P. Kelly, PHA's new administrator, said the authority wanted to make better use of its idle property and work with others to improve blocks where a boarded-up PHA house may stand out like a "broken tooth."

"Philadelphia is a city with a great track record of nonprofit capacity for rebuilding neighborhoods," Kelly said.

In addition to reaching out to nonprofit developers, Kelly said PHA would sell houses or lots to the public at the market rate. In a month or so, it will post the locations of 1,275 available properties on a vacant-land website maintained by the Redevelopment Authority.

"Clearly, the nonprofit development community is more closely linked to our mission and the folks we want to serve, but that's not to say the private sector can't participate as well," he said.

PHA is still working out the details. Among those is a requirement for a "reverter provision," aimed at preventing speculators from buying and holding land, or trying to quickly "flip" properties for profit, Kelly said. In other words, "If you're doing the wrong thing, we can take back the property," he said.

Ed Covington, the RDA's executive director, said including PHA's properties on a consolidated city list was "more than a symbolic move."

He said it marked an important step for coordinating how the city manages vacant land. City agencies and PHA account for a third of Philadelphia's 40,000 vacant properties, according to data compiled last year by Econsult Corp.

"I could dance over this," said Bridget Collins, a city deputy managing director who works on vacant-land issues.