Goals of the Healthy Rowhouse Project

The goal of the Healthy Rowhouse is to improve the health of Philadelphians and preserve affordable housing by creating better conditions in thousands of rowhouses each year.

To achieve this goal the Healthy Rowhouse Project seeks to:

1. Create a bold public health and housing policy for Philadelphia that prioritizes the delivery of improvements to rowhouses affordable to lower income residents;
2. Increase the resources available to lower income property owners to improve occupant health and the viability of their properties by ensuring there is a fair balance of public housing dollars between new construction and rehabilitation of existing occupied homes;
3. Establish new viable financing mechanisms to bring home repairs to scale, repairing 5,000 owner- and renter-occupied homes per year. These financing tools will be based upon successful models in other cities and will include deferred loans due upon sale or transfer of the home and low-interest loans;
4. Protect tenants’ legal rights to healthy living conditions and encourage responsible rental practices through a systemic enforcement approach that promotes investment, rather than displacement;
5. Develop capacity within health care and social service providers to identify and refer patients who are harmed by their housing conditions to resources to reduce the health hazards in their homes;
6. Evaluate each Healthy Rowhouse Project program and measure performance outcomes.