Having experienced the city’s tangled land ownership, patchy records and hazy bureaucracy in their efforts to preserve threatened gardens, urban agriculture advocates had hoped the creation of a Land Bank would streamline the process in a way that would speed garden preservation in the face of rapid gentrification. Beginning around 2010, housing developers, community groups, urban agriculture advocates and others interested in Philadelphia’s land disposition process began organizing to pass a land banking policy. Two coalitions formed: the Land Bank Alliance , made up of design, construction, community development and realtor industry associations, the environmental advocacy group PennFuture, Regional Housing Legal Services, the Sustainable Business Network, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia. Another group, the Coalition to Take Back Vacant Land , was led by a North Philadelphia community organization called the Women’s Community Revitalization Project and included numerous faith, community development, social justice, urban agriculture, and labor organizations. While the LBA was constituted of entities more closely associated with the typical centers of power in growth coalitions, 4×4 flood tray the breadth of constituencies sharing a common goal in this effort highlights how widely shared urban growth goals tend to be, despite the uneven share in returns on growth .
The LBA and the CTBVL worked toward the same goal of establishing a land bank that would consolidate the city’s vacant property holdings and streamline its disposition process. According to development professionals interviewed who were active in each of the groups, the LBA emphasized insider strategies to advocate for the land bank in private meetings with elected officials, while the CTBVL used an outsider strategy by mobilizing large numbers of people to pressure key decision makers—in this case the members of city council who would put forth and vote on the Land Bank bill. Characteristic of their respective organizational orientations, PHS participated in the LBA while Soil Generation participated in the CTBVL. While the interests of their member organizations were slightly different, both coalitions framed the need for a land bank in essentially the same way, amplifying a narrative that PHS had been constructing for decades. As PHS contracted to green vacant lots throughout the city in the 1990s, they developed and helped disseminate arguments for the city to invest more in urban greening. They collaborated with local researchers and the Pew Charitable Trusts to produce Urban Vacant Land: Issues and Recommendations, a 1995 report that highlighted their successes in greening vacant lots and also stressed the need for city agencies to “simplify and depoliticize the acquisition process by establishing public policy that supports the transfer of city-owned vacant land into community or private ownership” . Reiterating these findings, PHS’s 2000 Managing Vacant Land report advocated for the creation of an “Office of Vacant Land Management” within the Redevelopment Authority , and the 2002 Reclaiming Vacant Lots report was published as a technical manual for anyone looking to repurpose vacant lots that highlighted the work that PHS had already accomplished in collaboration with community groups across the city .
Through these reports and other communications at the time, PHS framed the city’s vacant lots as public problems that could become assets if community groups and developers faced fewer barriers to access and ownership. Similarly, in 2010, one of PHS’s collaborators in the Land Bank Alliance, the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, commissioned a report that found the city was spending $20 million a year to maintain vacant lots, while losing $2 million annually in uncollected property taxes as the blighted lots dragged down overall property values by an estimated $3.6 billion. Prominent voices from both the housing and greening constituencies highlighted the same issues, framing vacant lots as an economic drag that could be lifted through government reorganization. Both of the land bank coalitions argued that with 40,000 vacant lots around the city, some could be preserved as gardens and open spaces while others could be developed into housing at various price points. The abundance of vacant property made possible a shared vision among groups who might otherwise have been competitors, but who instead were all in agreement that the city’s process for land disposition was too slow and uncoordinated. The details of who would acquire what land did not need to be worked out until the Land Bank bill was passed. While lamenting the apathy in Philadelphia’s cynical civic conventions, this reporter simultaneously echoes the framing of the vacant lot problem that PHS was disseminating for years through its research collaborations: land left unused was a source of crime and depreciation, but this trend could be reversed through better maintenance that would simultaneously discourage crime, increase property values, and build a sense of community ownership among those in the neighborhood. This vision—the potential for people to see their neighborhoods improve and appreciate while realizing the uses they wanted—is part of what brought so many residents out to the Land Bank bill hearings.
But this vision, like the breadth of the coalitions supporting the land bank effort, elided the contradiction in increasing property values and building a sense of ownership for the existing community. At the end of 2013, Philadelphia City Council passed the Land Bank bill, and Mayor Kenney signed it into law in January 2014. The bill established the Philadelphia Land Bank, which was given the charge of consolidating land held by other city agencies “with due speed and diligence” and making it available to the public “through a unified, predictable, and transparent” disposition process. The Land Bank is explicitly permitted to sell land below market value if the property is to be used for community benefit, defined to include “affordable or mixed-income housing… economic development that creates jobs for community residents; community facilities that provide needed services to residents; side and rear-yards; innovation in design and sustainability; urban agriculture; [and] community open space”. The bill sets out the structure of the Land Bank Board, and in addition to the charge of land acquisition and disposition, the law requires the agency to 1) maintain and make publicly available a map of all properties available for sale; 2) post notices and take public comments on proposed sales; 3) submit an annual strategic plan with neighborhood-level needs assessments, market analysis, and mapping of vacant lots along with five-year goals for acquisition and disposition; 4) hold a public hearing before adopting its annual strategic plan;and 5) keep track of whether properties sold below fair-market value are put to the use for which they were sold. In proposing its five-year goals every year, the Land Bank is supposed to align these goals with the city’s Comprehensive Plan and also to “encourage equitable redevelopment” by defining targets for the various community benefits—including urban agriculture. Critically, the bill does not provide dedicated funding for the Land Bank to fulfill these numerous required functions, hydroponic tray but it does allow for flexible financing and explicitly states that the agency can use the money from selling properties in order to fund its operations. In the process specified for the Land Bank to sell properties, a resolution by City Council is still required for each transaction. The passage of the Land Bank bill was celebrated as a victory by Philadelphia’s urban agriculture advocates, but they were quickly disillusioned and confronted anew with the strong political-economic headwinds in the city. Given Philadelphia’s tight budget, council members did not robustly fund the agency; instead they allocated only $500,000 for the agency’s first year . Without a budget big enough to provide for its sprawling mandate, the Land Bank was slow to get up and running and even slower to respond to the many Expressions of Interest submitted by community groups seeking to buy land. Because the City of Philadelphia is an under-resourced organization operating in a financialized environment, where its fiscal balance sheet has a huge impact on the ability to secure funding that may be needed to keep city services running, the City is unwilling to forgive tax liens in order to make land more accessible to community groups. Thus, residents and nonprofit organizations that would put land to use improving life for low-income people are faced with high cost barriers and intense competition from well-financed developers. In the political campaign mobilized to create the Philadelphia Land Bank, problem framing placed a strong emphasis on the financial drawbacks of the city’s large number of vacant lots, and the resulting Land Bank policy was designed in a way that worked to address the vacant lot problem as framed. Urban agriculture advocates, affordable housing developers, churches and community groups got behind the Land Bank bill because it created a pathway for them to obtain land cheaply for community benefit. However, since the Land Bank needed to generate revenue to fund its own operations and was not empowered to zero out tax debt, the new agency worked to facilitate a great deal more market-rate development and fewer community-controlled land uses than many in the coalition were expecting. On the one hand, hindsight may suggest that the social movement framing around financial efficiency was flawed; on the other hand, this framing was effective because it resonated so well with council members and a public concerned about the city’s dire economic condition.
The Land Bank bill got passed as written, whereas anything more explicitly prioritizing use-value over than exchange-value would have had less support. In this sense, the political-economic realities in Philadelphia constrained the possibilities for enacting a truly transformative Land Bank bill.The 2019 draft report reflects many of the concerns that interviewees expressed about the Land Bank’s efficacy, and it seems to indicate the agency is working to improve its function. Compared to the 2015 and 2017 strategic plans, the 2019 draft plan provides far more precise reporting about the ownership of vacant lots across the city, and unlike the previous plans, the 2019 document reports the actual numbers and types of transactions that the Land Bank has completed. These changes suggest that the agency has begun, albeit slowly, to address key political elements of the vacant lot problem in Philadelphia . The Land Bank also published new policies for its land disposition process in 2020, which help clarify what an Expression of Interest does, how fast the agency will respond to them, and how different kinds of requests are evaluated. The 2019 draft strategic plan and 2020 disposition policies both demonstrate how the urban agriculture movement continues to influence land use planning in Philadelphia. Toward the end of 2019, the City made another major change to its land use planning in response to organized political pressure and mounting public scrutiny. For years, a Vacant Property Review Committee that was created by City Council had exercised an additional layer of control over land sales . In the initial process of deliberating the Land Bank bill, Council President Darrell Clarke insisted that the VPRC—along with City Council—would continue to have a say in each land disposition transaction . Then this unelected committee was implicated in Kenyatta Johnson’s eyebrow-raising land deals, while simultaneously being targeted as unnecessary by campaigners for the more streamlined Land Bank process. In response to the increased scrutiny of the VPRC and ongoing public pressure for a standardized process, in 2019 City Council passed a bill to eliminate the VPRC and consolidate the Land Bank, the Redevelopment Authority, and the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation into one entity. Eliminating the VPRC was hailed as a way to reduce corruption and standardize land disposition into the more transparent process that the Land Bank had established . With the Land Bank and the Redevelopment Authority consolidated under PHDC and now answering to one executive, in theory they may coordinate land transactions with less friction. However, the PHDC is a private nonprofit corporation rather than a government agency; this means decisions at the highest level of the consolidated organization are exempt from some public transparency requirements. Normal government operations were disrupted during the pandemic, so it remains to be seen whether this new organizational structure is more responsive, transparent, and/or effective. Furthermore, additional changes to the Land Bank may not satisfy critics continuing to call for more disposition to community groups. As part of the 2020 disposition policies, new standards have been set up which allow for a non-competitive bidding process if applicants propose to use parcels for housing development where at least 51% of units will be affordable .