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PRA to sell off vacant city-owned land in Point Breeze
A spokesman for the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority confirmed the agency will be auctioning off as many as 25 city-owned lots (shown on a map below) in Point Breeze.
PRA to sell off vacant city-owned land in Point Breeze
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A spokesman for the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority confirmed that the agency will be auctioning off as many as 25 city-owned lots (shown on a map below) in Point Breeze, the same neighborhood where the city just a few months ago moved to seize other lots for affordable housing development, to the chagrin of some market-rate developers.
"The 'for sale' signs are coming in this week. … As the signs come in they will go up and the properties will go on the web this week and next," Paul Chrystie, spokesman for the PRA and the Office of Housing and Community Development wrote in an e-mail.
So why, after sitting for years, are the lots being sold now? Apparently because of 2nd District Councilman Kenyatta Johnson. At least that's according to his legislative aide, Steve Cobb, who says Johnson's office pushed for the sell-off.
"There's a high level of vacant city-owned lots in Point Breeze. We're trying to get a system in place that is more transparent while getting them off the city's maintenance rolls and into cash-producing properties," said Cobb.
He blamed the "alphabet of city agencies" that own the various municipal properties for making sales so difficult in the past, and said Johnson was using his influence as a councilman to speed up the process. Johnson's office will be pushing additional lots to the PRA for sale in the near future.
"After meeting with the PRA, Councilman Johnson felt that 25 was a manageable number for the first phase, with more phases to follow," said Cobb.
He rejected the notion that Johnson was trying to sell these lots and gearing up other city property for renovation to make up for the blowback from last year's attempt by the city to seize more land in Point Breeze. The city currently owns roughly 311 vacant properties in the neighborhood.
"The councilman never said that [private] development was bad. The goal was to provide a limited number of affordable housing units in the portion of Point Breeze that was rapidly developing. I think [this] fits into that overall goal of having healthy, mixed-income development."
Cobb indicated that, nevertheless, the negative affects of gentrification were taken into consideration, and that the list of lots to be sold was winnowed down by the PRA to address those concerns. "The PRA had to determine that there was a fair amount of affordable housing units within the boundaries that they chose."
Chrystie cautioned that the initial list of properties was preliminary and "a couple of properties have come off."
John Longacre, a high profile developer in the neighborhood, hailed the move as "great news".
"Point Breeze suffers from extreme disinvestment. Half of Point Breeze is nothing but empty lots," he said. "If they are able to mitigate the lots that are being held by government agencies and turn them over to the private sector, that's a great thing."
View PRA Lots for Sale in a full screen map
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