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Land bank advocates getting restless and looking for allies
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
Land bank advocates getting restless and looking for allies
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Last week, a coalition of community groups, housing advocates, and would-be urban farmers met to state their case for access to vacant land to 1st District Councilman Mark Squilla.
The event was hosted by the "Campaign to take back Vacant Land," a coalition being led by the Women's Community Revitalization Project, a developer of low-income and affordable housing, and which has teamed up with various groups in and around eastern North Philly to lobby for the creation of a citywide "land bank," that would be run by an independent board.
The group (you can usually tell them by their yellow t-shirts) has been lobbying, hounding, and nudging for the creation of such a land bank for over a year. Early this year, 7th District Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez co-introduced a bill that would create such a land bank.
They also asked Councilman Squilla to support amendments they've proposed to the Sanchez bill that would impose various requirements, including mandatory ratios of land sold for private commercial use versus nonprofit and community benefit uses and other specifics that would empower community groups and nonprofits (like, for example, the group fighting for this amendment).
Part of the political backdrop of this movement is a large-scale stall on the part of the Nutter administration over comprehensive policies to deal with the city's massive inventory of vacant land. In an effort to straighten up a then-disheveled Redevelopment Authority, curb the possibility of corruption and favoritism, and create a process to give ordinary citizens better access to the tens of thousands of properties held by a half-dozen different agencies, the Nutter administration largely curtailed the disposition of city-owned vacant land for the past four years — except for "market rate" sales, which are often prohibitively expensive, especially for uses like urban farms and affordable housing projects.
The administration has promised to unveil a new "font door," managed by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, that would ideally make getting vacant land easier. They're also expected to unveil a new plan for selling (or giving away) vacant land for uses other than market-rate private development.
But that plan has been a long time coming, and still hasn't materialized.
In the meantime, vacant land advocates are turning to an also-impatient City Council for solutions. Councilman Squilla told the crowd last week that he was working with Councilwoman Sanchez and others to take action. 5th District Councilman and Council President Darrell Clarke, whose district encompasses a great deal of vacant land, as does Sanchez' district, has also entered the fray with a proposal for "redevelopment districts" that would allow for land to be sold at discounted rates.
So far, there's nothing to say that the administration and Council can't meet halfway — but if they don't, and soon, the possibility grows that one or the other will take action first. And if the past year of administration delays is an indication, Council is getting restless.
My enthusiasm for the Land Bank bill has died. It died when I saw that they wanted an unnamed arbitrary trigger to force 50% of all land bank sales to go to nothing to non-profits. Many non-profits cannot survive on their own fundraising in Philadelphia so they beg nonstop for government funding, funding that is RISKY because it comes and goes when politics changes with the season. Is that any better than sustainable market rate housing? Most of the MQS bill pays quite a heft to non-profits and those taxpayers who have poured equity into their homes and raised families in them are completely sidelined by the land bank bill, plus it preserves Pay To Pay and does nothing to stop bad actors from approaching the land bank because most of the language restrictions intende to keep bad people from buying City-owned land can be easily circumvented.— EastChestnut
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