By Rebecca Deegan, Outdoors For All Organizer, Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter
At the end of October, two Philadelphia City Council Committees — the Committee on Housing, Neighborhood Development, and the Homeless and the Committee on Public Property and Public Work — held a joint hearing to discuss the progress of the Land Bank.
In case you didn't know, the Philadelphia Land Bank was created in 2004 to help manage the thousands of abandoned and vacant lots in the city, many of which had been existing in various states of neglect and falling victim to illegal dumping. In short, the city was sitting on, and responsible for, land that was egregiously unsafe for Philadelphians. The Land Bank’s role was to sell this vacant land back to community organizations who could use it for initiatives such as affordable housing and community gardens.
The good news is that, 10 years after its creation, the Land Bank is finally being given some well needed attention by the City Council, who finally allowed the community members to provide feedback on its progress thus far.
The bad news is the grade that the Land Bank received from the communities it was meant to help: from what I heard, a resounding “F”.
70% of community gardens are located in neighborhoods whose residents live at or below poverty line, and half live within BIPOC communities. These are frequently the same communities that face food and healthcare deserts, suffer disproportionately from air pollution, and often see poorer health and quality of life outcomes than residents living in more affluent neighborhoods. Community gardens are a way to combat all these environmental injustices, by empowering communities to foster self-reliance through environmental education, urban farming, and mutual aid of resources. But I learned from the City Council hearing that the city has lost a third of its community gardens in the last 25 years — and that’s including the 10 years since the Land Bank’s inception.
The goal of a Land Bank is to address community needs by putting vacant land back into the hands of communities in a way that improves lives, namely through affordable housing and community gardens.
But, in 10 years, with no strategies in place to ensure transparency in the process, community organizations are alleging that the Land Bank has created worse outcomes for their neighborhoods than they experienced before its inception. Lack of transparency means that organizations who apply for land acquisition experience months, if not years-long wait times, during which they are often completely unable to check on the status of their application. Indeed, even with receipts in hand there is commonly not even a record of an application to be found at all. Meanwhile, non-local developers are quickly snapping up land for cheap, destroying community gardens city-wide that for years had been cared for by communities on their own dime.
As one community representative testified at the hearing, “the road to gentrification and displacement is paved with good intentions”.
The Land Bank has never submitted yearly performance reviews despite it being legally required to do so. The Land Bank’s last strategic plan was in 2017 even though it should be renewed every 3 years. In short, the Land Bank was created with very little measurement to ensure transparency and accountability.
Community organizations from all over the city came out to City Hall on October 30th to express disappointment in the efficacy (or lack thereof) in the Land Bank, but more importantly to provide options for sustainable improvement and measurements for accountability. Such solutions included increased staffing to meet customer service needs, and funding allocation from the City for a new strategic plan with significant community input.
The good news is that the City Council is stepping up to give the Land Bank some attention (albeit 10 years late). But now that communities have put in the time and labor to address their needs, and to offer solutions, will the City actually reverse another empty attempt to “serve the needs of communities” and create an actionable process by which to actually do so? Let’s hope so — or rather, let’s fight to make sure it happens.
This blog was included as part of the December 2024 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!