The Housing Crisis In Philadelphia

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.

• One out of every five households in our city is low-income and pays more than they can afford for housing
• Incomes of low-income households have gone down in the past 30 years while housing prices have gone up
• Low-income renters or homeowner almost always pay more than 50% of their income on housing
• A family living in the Philadelphia area would have to earn nearly $38,000 a year to afford rent on a modest 2-bedroom apartment
• There are approximately 60,000 fewer affordable housing units in our City than are needed for low-income people.
• There are 150,000 people with physical disabilities in Philadelphia but only about 2,500 fully wheelchair accessible houses in the City.
• There’s been an increase in homelessness. Each night, nearly 4,000 people sleep in homeless shelters – an increase from a year ago
• At the rate we are producing affordable housing in Philadelphia, we will solve the problem in over 100 years.

It is bad enough that housing is so expensive. What is worse is that people are being pushed from their homes and neighborhoods. Long before we were the next great city, we were a city of neighborhoods. Today, however, new development is creating skyrocketing rents, rapidly increasing home values, and the heavy burden of ever larger tax bills. People are being forced out of their neighborhoods and young adults can’t afford the neighborhood where their families have lived for generations.

It is unjust and unfair for those who lived through the bad times in their neighborhoods to be pushed out just as the good times are beginning.

Click here to find out how Inculsionary Housing can address our housing crisis.