18 relatives in a deadly fire: For some, crowded housing not a choice
PHILADELPHIA — The main thing people noticed about the century-old brick house at 869 N. 23rd St. was all the children, who would spill out noisily every morning into the streets of Fairmount, a comfortable neighborhood just north of the heart of the city.
But after a fire roared through the upstairs apartment Wednesday morning, the hidden reality of the house was laid bare to the world. Firefighters found that 18 people had been inside the four-bedroom public housing unit, triple the number of people who had moved in a decade earlier. And now 12 of them — mothers, sons and daughters of one big, extended family — were dead.
“Rosalee believed that it wasn’t safe,” Caleb Jones, a child therapist who worked with two of the children, said of a mother who died in the fire.
With several people crowded into each bedroom, the family had wanted to move to a larger home for years, Jones said. But with 40,000 households already on the waiting list for public housing in Philadelphia, they had little choice.
“I know it’s a freak accident, a fire,” Jones said. “But them being in that situation was systemic.”
The situation — a growing family forced to crowd ever more tightly into the apartment it already had — is not unique to Philadelphia. Across the country, a crisis in affordable housing has been festering for years, and with the lifting of eviction moratoriums and the dwindling of rental assistance funds offered during the coronavirus pandemic, it is only getting worse.
While Philadelphia’s housing costs are not nearly as high as those in cities like New York and San Francisco, a safe and affordable place to live is still out of reach for tens of thousands of the city’s residents. Nearly one-quarter of its population is below the poverty line; among families headed by single mothers, like the victims in the recent fire, the number rises to 42%.
This has meant a desperate scramble for housing owned or subsidized by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, one of the largest housing authorities in the country, and one that has been steadily building back from a troubled past of corruption and mismanagement. The federally funded and regulated agency owns or supports housing for 80,000 people, although in one of the country’s poorest big cities, this is not nearly enough.
The waiting list for public housing has been closed since 2013, except for older people and those with disabilities. The list for Section 8 vouchers for federal rent subsidies has been closed for even longer. According to a 2016 assessment of housing needs in the city, Philadelphia is supplying less than 12% of the publicly supported housing needed for its low-income households.
”Incomes are really low, and the housing stock is really, really, really limited,” said Dina Schlossberg, executive director of Regional Housing Legal Services in Pennsylvania. “What is the standard we accept as a norm in our society for people who don’t have a lot of money and need a place to live?”
In one sense, those living in the upstairs unit on 23rd Street had been fortunate: They had a place, in a nice neighborhood. The three-story row house was one of the housing authority’s “scattered site” units, properties that it owns and manages but are not part of a traditional public housing complex. More than 4,000 families are living in scattered site properties owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, which owns more such sites than any other U.S. housing authority.
With this kind of public housing, poorer families are able to live in neighborhoods they would otherwise never be able to afford, like Fairmount, a once working-class part of town that has experienced several waves of gentrification. The median sales price of a home there is about $400,000.
A challenge of these scattered sites, however, is upkeep. Houses in Philadelphia are on average nearly a century old, said Kevin Gillen, a senior research fellow at the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University. By the housing authority’s own estimation, the cost of capital repairs on its properties exceeds $1 billion. “This is older housing in need of substantial rehabilitation,” said John Kromer, who was the city’s director of housing from 1992 to 2001 and briefly served as the interim chief of the housing authority. “Without enough funding to support a program like that, I think it’s inevitable that problems will occur.” Still, there are almost no other options for a low-income family, and those who have managed to find subsidized apartments are extremely reluctant to let them go — even if that means becoming desperately cramped as their families grow. “Households do everything they can to remain housed,” said Vincent Reina, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. “They make dire tradeoffs: trading off on food, health care and other basic needs.” When the family moved into the 23rd Street apartment in 2011, according to Kelvin Jeremiah, the CEO of the housing authority, it had needed the bigger space — four bedrooms — that was offered. There were six people on the lease at that time, a number that expanded, by the time of the latest lease, to 14. There were three sisters, Rosalee, Virginia and Quinsha, and a growing number of children, including the quiet Destiny, who was a basketball standout, and Quintien, a mischief-maker who seemed to charm everyone he met. Jones said the children were self-conscious about the house and would not let friends from school come beyond the steps outside. He and his colleagues had become worried about how crowded the apartment was getting, he said, and encouraged them to try to move. Not that there were many options.