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City Council Hearings announced on Councilman Clarke’s Deeply Flawed
Inclusionary Housing Proposal
Join With Us To Tell
Council To Do The Right Thing
And Vote NO
on Clarke’s Bill.
Wednesday November
28th at 11:00am
Room 400 City Hall
Click here for more
information about the Clarke bill and for
a comparison of the PCHJ bill with the
Clarke bill
Why Inclusionary Housing?
Ride up and down the
streets of Philadelphia today, and almost everywhere you will see
something extraordinary, housing construction and rehabilitation.
The housing market in the next great American city, Philadelphia, is
being revived and rejuvenated.
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In the past 10 years, there has been
a nearly 500% increase in building permits
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In the past 8 years, 12,000 new
market rate units of housing were produced in Center City and
adjacent neighborhoods – with an average price of $350,000.
More on our development boom
But alongside
our housing boom, we in Philadelphia are facing a housing crisis.
While those with upper middle and high incomes have an extraordinary
range of housing choices available to them; people in poverty and with
low incomes are finding it increasingly more difficult to find
affordable housing.
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One out of every five
households in our city is low-income and pays more than they can
afford for housing
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Low-income renters or
homeowner almost always pay more than 50% of their income on housing
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There are approximately 60,000 fewer
affordable housing units in our City than are needed for low-income
people.
More on our housing crisis.
Inclusionary Housing is
a public policy that can help provide housing for everyone in
Philadelphia. The basic idea of Inclusionary Housing is
simple and straightforward. Developers are receiving help from the city,
in the form of the tax abatements, zoning change and sometimes other
support. We propose that developers who receive tax abatements and
other benefits from the city should help provide affordable
housing. They should be required to set aside some percentage of the
housing units they develop for affordable housing either at the site of their
market rate development or at an adjacent site or they should put funds
into a fund to provide new or rehab existing affordable housing for
people with low and moderate incomes.
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