Philadelphia Housing Authority
- What: Public housing agency
- Founded: 1937
- Employees: 1,900
- 2005 Revenue: $350 million
- Units owned: 15,678 (2005)
- Units managed: 14,636 (2005)
- Future goals: Build more mixed-income and mixed-use communities, including the development of small-scale commercial and retail space
Leadership Lessons: Carl Greene
- Age: 49
- Job: Executive director, Philadelphia Housing Authority
- First job: Real estate sales agent
- Ideal leader: Vince Lombardi
- Greatest challenge: Balancing the public purpose objectives of our agency’s mission with decisions that make good business sense
- Hobbies: Exploring new ideas and approaches to life and business through reading, attending sporting events, and jazz concerts
- Quotable: “Our goal is to create balanced communities: a mix of affordable, market-rate, rental, and homeownership. We don’t want people to live in isolated, semi-institutional housing of the past. We want them to live in a really contemporary, integrated community designed by some of the best real estate professionals in the country.”
Big Job
Public housing agencies deal with shrinking funding and aging properties.
Running a large public housing authority has never been easy, but in the past 10 years, such agencies have faced a number of challenges. At the top of the list: managing a housing stock that is both physically and socially obsolete.
Virtually all of the large metropolitan areas in the country are dealing with aging properties that are between 40 and 60 years old, says Sunia Zaterman, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Council of Large Public Housing Authorities.
Replacing such outdated housing is a monumental challenge, especially given significant budget pressures and dwindling federal resources for affordable housing programs. “One of the principal challenges facing housing authority directors is the unpredictability of federal funding,” says Conrad Egan, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based National Housing Conference.
In response to such limited funding, housing authorities such as PHA and others are learning how to creatively mix and match different capital sources to maximize the amount of money available to them.