City Budget

With new housing money, comes great responsibility for City Hall

Philadelphia housing advocates say federal housing legislation signed wednesday by President Bush will bring a major influx of funding to help fight the foreclosure crisis in this region. they also say that with new funds come new responsibilities that will test City Hall.

By Bill Hangley

WHYY News, July 31, 2008

Last year, about 6,000 Philadelphia homeowners filed for foreclosure. This year, advocates expect that number to climb to at least 8,000. But Ian Phillips of the group ACORN believes that the new federal housing bill will help both homeowners and the city itself.

"Individual homeowners are going to benefit if they get into these refinanced loans," said Phillips, "but there's also four billion dollars in block grant funds that is going to be allocated to cities like Philadelphia hard hit by this national foreclosure crisis."

Phillips says the block grant dollars will help Philadelphia replace some of the property tax revenue lost on foreclosed homes. The same funding could allow the city to buy up foreclosed properties.

Ira Goldstein is with a nonprofit developer called The Reinvestment Fund. He likes the bill for the most part, but he worries that the city isn't ready to be the landlord of last resort.

"My concern is that cities aren't the best property management organizations," said Goldstein. "Some cities have tried to do this with various degrees of success and failure. The last thing I want to see is the City of Philadelphia becomes landlord to thousands of abandoned properties. We need a really good plan in place."

According to Goldstein, legislators have yet to determine exactly how much new funding the city and state will recieve.