Philadelphia Weekly

Starting in 2001, former Mayor John Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI), buoyed by a bullish housing market, flipped some of Philadelphia's most blighted neighborhoods upside down. According to the program's last published progress report, 224,886 cars were removed, 6,022 demolitions took place and 6,175 affordable housing units were completed. Cottage-style developments sprung up in place of crack houses and tire-strewn lots.

NTI was intended to be Street's legacy.

But now much of the program, built on staggering sums of city bonds, is expiring as the housing market dives into a tailspin. In its wake are accounting problems and a glut of city-owned property the Nutter administration has to figure out how to develop.

With federal aid and tax dollars decreasing, the new administration must squeeze the maximum out of every asset--public and private--for affordable housing, commercial development and job training. They're bracing for famine after years of feast.

"We're back to what money the city usually relies on," says Andrew Altman, deputy mayor for planning and economic development under Nutter. "Three hundred million has been spent on demolition and acquisition, but it's a real resource challenge now. You can't talk a lot about grand plans. You don't want to make false promises. We're going to have to make choices. We're going to have to be very focused."

So what becomes of NTI?

"That," says Haverford College political science professor Steve McGovern, "is the $64,000 question."

If the amount of funding Street poured into neighborhood development was a Cadillac, Nutter is left with the old family car rusting in City Hall's garage. Mayor Street set a standard for grandiosity in community investment.

"NTI resembled strategies based on urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s--programs that had provoked a lot of public opposition, and for good reasons," McGovern explains. "Given the sharp decline in federal subsidies for community development, it was worth trying."

But McGovern can't see how an extension for NTI would've been feasible. "The city could've tried to float more bonds," he says, "but there's just so much debt the city can absorb for housing and community development."

That's not the only problem. In the process of evaluating Mayor Street's NTI legacy, the Nutter administration uncovered causes for concern.

In late May Nutter froze acquisition of new property through NTI. The city now holds large tracts of vacant land in many neighborhoods. Nobody's quite sure of the land's value, and it's suspected there's a $30 to $40 million shortfall in the funds needed for acquisitions already on the books.

Though deputy chief of staff Wendell Pritchett is adamant that no wrongdoing on the part of the Street administration is in any way suspected or implied, NTI acquisitions must now undergo an audit.

Andrew Altman, for one, is concerned about what to do with all the land the city now owns. "It's one thing to acquire land and it's another thing to look at how you're going to dispose of it, what's going to be built."

Altman laments the difficulty of attracting investment in a down market with scarce government incentive.

"Part of the problem is it's hard to get fair market value because you need subsidy. Doing neighborhood development requires resources, especially once it comes to building housing."

Housing is exactly what some of Philly's more blighted neighborhoods demand. Gwendolyn Carter of Tioga United saw NTI replace much of the vacant land in Tioga with mixed-income rental housing, but she believes substantial challenges remain.

"Home ownership goes a long way toward supporting [stability]," Carter says. "We support anything that'll get us out of blight, but we need more home ownership, employment opportunities and educational opportunities."