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Would PHA rather auction a house than sell it to the grandmother and caretaker who's been squatting there for 12 years?
Tomorrow, the Philadelphia Housing Authority is set to host a second auction of its surplus inventory of vacant properties around the city - mostly vacant, that is: One, the house on the 3400 block of N. Marshall, has been occupied for twelve years, by Mildred Camacho and her family.
Would PHA rather auction a house than sell it to the grandmother and caretaker who's been squatting there for 12 years?
Tomorrow, the Philadelphia Housing Authority is set to host a second auction of its surplus inventory of vacant properties around the city — mostly vacant, that is: One, the house on the 3400 block of N. Marshall, has been occupied for twelve years, by Mildred Camacho and her family.
Camacho is, technically speaking, a squatter — she moved, with her four children, into the house in 1999 and has been there ever since, investing considerable dollars in fixing it up. She's not asking to keep the house for free: Camacho simply wants PHA to remove the house from its auction and sell it directly to her rather than put her at risk of being displaced by the highest bidder.
The office of Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez, which has intervened on Camacho's behalf, has asked PHA to do just that — pull the house from tomorrow's auction. But, according to Sanchez' office, Community Development director Michael Johns has indicated the agency will not."
"Mildred Camacho's case is an example of when the bureacracy cannot think out of the box," says Sanchez. "She took a vacant PHA (which would have been demolished by now) and invested thousands of dollars. She is willing to buy it, and PHA is treating her like an illegal squatter."
Camacho herself says the house was little more than a shell when she moved her family in:"This was an abandoned crack house — I put everything in here, the water pipes, the heating, everything," Camacho told CP today.
Camacho now lives the house with her daughter, three granddaughters, her mother, who has dementia, and her brother, who has Downs Syndrome. She says she found out her house was going to be up for auction by accident — and that PHA hadn't sent her so much as a piece of mail.
(PHA has not yet provided any official response to several calls and emails from CP; we'll update this post with any comment).
Updated: PHA provided the following comment:
PHA has the largest inventory of scattered site properties of any housing authority in the country with more than 7,100 throughout the city. Approximately 4,000 of them are occupied by PHA renters. Among the remaining approximately 2,000, some properties have been vacant for years while others have been occupied illegally, as is the case with 3431 N. Marshall. Unfortunately, this family has resided illegally in this property and unlike legal renters or homeowners, they have not paid rent or water for years. While many families have had to sacrifice during these tough economic times, this family has lived rent-free for 11 years. The family is welcome to attend the auction and bid on the PHA property. If they make a successful bid and buy the property, they can legally reside there.
This isn't the first the PHA has heard about Camacho. PHA officials have known she and her family were living there since 1999, according to a KYW news article from that year, which says that "the agency had scheduled the eviction ... but when police officers arrived, neighbors blocked the event by staging a protest."
Ironically enough, today saw the kicking off of what may be the Occupy movement's newest chapter when Occupy Wall Street activists and Occupy chapters elsewhere declared today their intention to occupy vacant homes and hand them over to homeless families. And several of the members of Camp Liberty — the group of former Occupy Philly homeless who wound up underneath an I-95 overpass, are, according to a friend, currently shacking up in an abandoned building themselves.
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