{"id":142602,"date":"2026-03-19T10:10:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T10:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/142602\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T10:10:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T10:10:06","slug":"philadelphia-rentals-tenants-racing-to-save-affordable-units","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/142602\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia rentals: Tenants racing to save affordable units"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>                                                                                                                                                                                                                        A grassroots movement<\/p>\n<p>As that work continues, OnePA is planning a series of public actions aimed at convincing the city to invest in these properties. There will be rallies, visits to City Hall and likely a large town hall event in May.\n<\/p>\n<p>The group has previously gone door to door to engage with every Neighborhood Restorations tenant. More recently, they\u2019ve started holding informational meetings to educate residents about their rights and to potentially mobilize them around the potential sale.\n<\/p>\n<p>Braxton said tenants and homeowners are deeply concerned about the prospect of these properties \u2014 mostly a mix of single-family homes, duplexes and triplexes \u2014 going to a buyer who wants to turn them market-rate. Most, if not all, of these renters would be unable to stay if that happened, forcing them to relocate.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese aren\u2019t just transient folks that are coming and going. They are part of these neighborhoods,\u201d Braxton said.\n  <\/p>\n<p>The average tenancy for these renters is roughly 11 years, according to Neighborhood Restorations.\n<\/p>\n<p>Their monthly rents are price-restricted, affordable to households earning between 20% to 60% of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.phila.gov\/departments\/division-of-housing-and-community-development\/about\/income-guidelines\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">area median income<\/a>. That translates to between $23,880 and $95,520 for a family of four.\n<\/p>\n<p>Fredrica Lightfoot lives in a duplex near <a href=\"https:\/\/whyy.org\/articles\/philadelphia-single-family-homes-corporate-landlords\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Cobbs Creek<\/a> with her 29-year-old son. While her experience hasn\u2019t been perfect, the retiree said, particularly when it comes to response times for maintenance requests, her apartment was a \u201cbreath of fresh air\u201d compared to her last rental in South Philadelphia, where the landlord refused to make needed repairs.\n<\/p>\n<p>When she moved in six years ago, the unit was essentially new. The whole building had been renovated following a fire.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou take the good with the bad, and you kind of flow with it,\u201d said Lightfoot, who pays about $1,000 in rent each month.\n<\/p>\n<p>She lives on a fixed income, relying on monthly Social Security and disability checks. She said she\u2019s joining the fight to preserve these homes because she doesn\u2019t want her or other tenants to lose their housing simply because they are low-income. She\u2019s also been displaced before and doesn\u2019t want to go through it again.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s very devastating to have to regroup all over again,\u201d Lightfoot said. \u201cJust leave on a good note, and try to keep the properties affordable.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>To Carlos Boothe, who lives nearby in a building for older adults, the city owes it to him and his neighbors to buy Levin\u2019s units, keep them permanently affordable and avoid mass displacement.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you have 3,000 extra people coming into the marketplace that\u2019s already overcrowded and there are not enough places for the people that are looking \u2026 that\u2019s going to make things extremely difficult,\u201d Boothe said.\n        <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A grassroots movement As that work continues, OnePA is planning a series of public actions aimed at convincing&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[65225,69,71,70,2312],"class_list":["post-142602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-neighborhood-development","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-planphilly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}