Philly’s first director of planning and development has resigned. Here’s what she accomplished.

Deputy Mayor Anne Fadullon is leaving her job overseeing planning and development in Philadelphia next month, bringing to a close her tenure as one of the longest-serving members of Jim Kenney’s administration.

Fadullon’s time in city government coincided with a sustained period of redevelopment that saw Philadelphia lead the region in housing construction. She was Kenney’s point person for negotiating with City Council in an administration where the legislative branch dominated housing and land use policy.

Fadullon will continue to serve in her role until Aug. 23, after which the head of the Planning Commission, Eleanor Sharpe, will take over. In January, the new mayor could chose to keep Sharpe or replace her.

Fadullon is Philadelphia’s first director of Planning and Development, a position created at the onset of the Kenney administration with the merger of six previously existing departments into one entity. She entered government from the real estate industry after City Council President Darrell L. Clarke lobbied for her to get the job.

“She’s somebody who, unlike her predecessors, had a strong background in the private real estate market,” said John Kromer, former Mayor Ed Rendell’s director of housing. “She was someone who was accessible and candid about the challenges facing Philadelphia and willing to talk through ideas about how to address those challenges. That’s a radical departure.”

Much of the second half of her tenure was defined by COVID-19. The pandemic forced Fadullon to adapt the quotidian duties of her department to the new circumstances, quickly moving Zoning Board and Historical Commission meetings on to Zoom.

Her department also got a rent-relief program, backed by federal dollars, online much more quickly than most local governments and paired it with an eviction-diversion program that is still in use. The initiative kept tens of thousands of Philadelphians housed and has been praised as a national model.

“I’m very proud of the city’s effort to get our massive rental assistance program up and running so quickly,” Fadullon said in a statement to The Inquirer after the announcement of her resignation. “The combination of the COVID-related shutdown and switching to remote work further complicated this effort. Through incredible teamwork and a can-do attitude, we were able to keep tens of thousands of families in their homes during the most trying of times.”

Before her time in the Kenney administration, Fadullon worked as the director of development for the Dale Corp., a construction management and consulting firm based in Glenside. She also led the Building Industry Association, which advocates for market-rate residential developers, and had been the director of development for the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority under Rendell.

Over the years, she developed a strong relationship with Clarke. He both championed the creation of the Department of Planning and Development and advocated to Mayor-elect Kenney that Fadullon be given stewardship of it.

“I worked with Anne for years both in and out of government [and she] understands the importance of neighborhoods and affordable housing,” Clarke said in a statement about her resignation.

While Kenney largely allowed City Council to steer questions of housing and land use policy, Fadullon was the point person when the administration did wade into these matters. She led the administration’s negotiations over the revisions to the 10-year tax abatement, a controversial development incentive that turbocharged residential construction, and during debates over the creation of Clarke’s construction tax and the myriad housing programs it funded.

Fadullon also got involved in more hyper-local development issues such as negotiations around the closure of the University City Townhomes in West Philadelphia.

“She comes from the construction/developer world, so initially I didn’t know if we would be in line on priorities,” said Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who represents University City. “But she really does care for the cause of safe, accessible, affordable housing in Philadelphia. Even in some of the tough fights — like the townhomes — her heart was in helping us figure that stuff out.”

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she quickly shepherded a powerful rent relief program called PHLRentAssist into existence and used her administrative discretion to break with the conventional wisdom that rent-relief programs should be routed solely through landlords.

According to the city, between May 2020 and January 2023, 46,500 households in Philadelphia received $300 million to keep them in their homes during the pandemic emergency. Although that policy has now ended, the eviction-diversion program — created at the same time — is still in use.

“This work stabilized the rental market and made it Philadelphia’s most successful pandemic relief effort, and it is largely because of the diligence, efficiency, and hard work of this administration and Anne Fadullon,” said Helen Gym, a former mayoral candidate who made eviction prevention one of her signature issues on City Council.

Just before the pandemic struck, Fadullon also backed a separate program — despite pushback from some Council members and other members of the administration — that initiated a cash-transfer program for low-income tenants that beneficiaries could spend in any way they wanted. The program continues and, along with is counterparts, is being studied by the University of Pennsylvania.

“The real issue at hand is that the rental affordability crisis did not end with the pandemic, although the federal funding did,” Fadullon said. “We desperately need flexible federal dollars that we can put to use where they are needed most.”

For observers like Kromer, Fadullon often seemed like the lone top Kenney administration official with much interest in making housing and development a major priority.

It was Clarke who effectively decided when the abatement for new construction would be weakened, Clarke who earmarked $100 million with Councilmember Cherelle Parker for housing-repair programs for low-income homeowners, and Clarke who passed a construction tax to fund his Neighborhood Preservation Initiative.

“Housing policy, in effect, was defaulted to City Council,” said Kromer, “so although Anne Fadullon and her associates were capable people, I didn’t see them being empowered to make policy or implement policy.”

Her imprint on agencies like the Planning Commission is, arguably, less profound partly because the administration’s limited ability to influence how zoning is used with the final say left to district Council members. (Although the city’s first comprehensive plan since the 1950s was completed during Fadullon’s tenure, it hasn’t been touched up in recent years.)

Fadullon, and the Kenney administration more generally, periodically made stands against zoning bills they deemed to be exclusionary — such as an overlay that limited height and density in Society Hill.

“Especially in the last two years. Anne Fadullon had a very tough time because it always comes back to Council,” said Mo Rushdy, a developer with RiverWards Group who is in the BIA leadership. “We don’t have a unified vision we’re all rallying behind. You don’t have the City of Philadelphia, you have 10 different districts with 10 different opinions of development.”

The land bank, which was meant to ease the disposition of city-owned parcels, too, has remained stifled, despite Fadullon’s efforts to get it adequately staffed and budgeted to get more city-owned vacant land into productive use. As a result, its sluggish progress was brought up repeatedly during the mayoral race.

Despite the difficulty of Fadullon’s position, most observers say that she did as well as anyone could have in an administration that was largely focused on other issues.

“She’s a really talented, rare individual who doesn’t need to go into government but does and sees the value and leaves it in a better place than when she started,” said John Grady, former head of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. “She was able to get a lot of things done behind the scenes, without needing to be the one getting credit for it. Especially during COVID … she kept those mechanics of government moving.”