One of Philly’s last high-rise public housing sites may be preserved, with nearly 700 units added

The Philadelphia Housing Authority’s redevelopment of the nearly 60-year-old Westpark apartment complex is shaping up to be unique in the recent history of public housing in the city.

In the mid-20th century, the federally backed agency built an array of housing sites centered on high-rise towers. But the tower-in-the-park architectural fashion fell out of style after the 1960s. In recent decades most of the towers have been demolished, and often replaced by townhouse developments.

When the housing authority announced in 2020 that it wanted to put a third of Westpark’s 12-acre site near 44th and Market Streets — including two of its three towers — up for sale, it was widely assumed a similar playbook would be followed.

But the housing authority and its partners, including nationally renowned New York-based L+M Development Partners, seem to have something else in mind. They hope to correct some planning mistakes of old by reconnecting the site to the street grid and building a mixture of housing in between.

And they also want to pursue, as described in an application for state funds, the “redevelopment of the existing towers,” not demolition.

“If they are, in fact, not knocking down two of the towers, then it’s a pretty big departure from what they did [elsewhere],” said Jenna Collins, a lawyer with Community Legal Services who has followed PHA’s plans closely. “I’m surprised to hear they plan to keep all three towers.”

Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) cautioned that the proposal — a collaboration between LMXD, an affiliate of L+M that specializes in mixed income projects, and the New York-based firm M Squared — has not been approved by its board, and details are still subject to change or even wholesale rejection.

The redevelopment proposal totals about 1,000 houses, in place of the 327 units that were in the towers. A spokesperson for LMXD confirmed that the units would come in a combination of low-rise “flats,” refurbished multifamily housing in the towers, and new “ground up” senior housing. LMXD states that 60% of the units will be affordable, although they did not specify how that would be measured.

“Affordable housing is not the same as low-income housing, which is what was in those towers,” Collins said. “Some of what is defined as ‘affordable’ would have been out of reach for me, and I’m an attorney.”

Financing will come from a mixture of tax-exempt bonds, project-based Section 8, and a variety of other sources, including a subsidy from market-rate units on-site.

The LMXD spokesperson said that the low-rise nature of the new construction and the unit count were requirements from PHA and that they would have liked more density and more height.

One of the towers would be for low-income senior housing, as PHA originally intended, but it is not yet clear how the two other high rises would be used.

They are likely to be targeted toward tenants with a mixture of incomes and could include some replacement units that would be affordable to the very-low-income residents who were moved out of the towers. That, too, would be a departure from previous practice: PHA has historically preferred to build new housing for its poorest residents in the form of townhouses.

Westpark’s future appears different from the initial proposal for the sale of the site that in 2020 provoked protest from West Philadelphia Councilmember Jamie Gauthier.

Just six weeks before the pandemic-induced shutdowns, PHA president Kelvin Jeremiah said, “We are looking for the highest and best use, whatever that means to a prospective buyer.”

The towers needed $50 million in repairs — equivalent to the housing authority’s capital budget for a whole year — and the idea was to sell two of them for the money needed to repair the third for senior housing.

Then newly elected, Gauthier used the platform of one of her maiden speeches to Council to denounce a profit-first redevelopment plan.

“Getting deeply involved in the redevelopment of a public housing site is unusual for a councilperson,” said Emily Dowdall, policy director with the Reinvestment Fund’s policy team. “Oftentimes [Council’s] power ends when it comes to PHA, because [the agency] has power over what they can do with its own properties that sits outside any city process.”

But Jeremiah responded to this unusual intervention by inviting Gauthier to sit on a panel that considered the different proposals. The Council member was a strong advocate of the L&M proposal, which she said offered the most new affordable units.

“This is a very large piece of public land. We shouldn’t sell it by right; we should take ownership of it,” Gauthier said in a recent interview. “We selected L&M because they offered the highest amount of affordable housing outside of the one-for-one replacement.”

There were four major proposals. The only one from a local developer was from Philadelphia-based Post Brothers, which planned to replace the units in the towers with affordable condos for current residents and add roughly 1,000 market-rate units on-site. Some stakeholders, including the Westpark tenant representative, favored that idea.

But Gauthier wanted more subsidized units in this corner of West Philadelphia, next to University City’s ever expanding footprint and accompanying housing prices increases.

“We shouldn’t be just replacing the public housing one for one. We also have a responsibility if we were building these other units to make sure that they’re [affordable, too],” Gauthier said. “If we have public land, where we can define a neighborhood, we should take ownership of it.”

LMXD and the housing authority are negotiating the details of the unit count and the affordability mixture. But plans are already in motion in at least one way: The tenants have all been moved out of the towers.