Chinatown is getting a new affordable apartment building for senior citizens

Philadelphia’s Chinatown is getting a new affordable apartment building for senior citizens in place of one of the moonscape of surface parking lots that line the neighborhood’s eastern edge.

The 51-unit structure is the only vestige of an ambitious development that dates to 2017, which would have placed an office complex for legal aid groups, abundant public space, a hotel, and a large number of market-rate apartments near Ninth and Vine Streets.

But the funds were scarce for that project, especially after the pandemic struck, and the more ambitious plan was called off in 2020. The developer, Pennrose, in consultation with the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. (PCDC), which is a neighborhood advocacy group and developer, and the city Redevelopment Authority, which owns the land, decided to move forward on this portion of the project.

“If we’re not going to do this entire master development, with three buildings on each of the developable parcels, what is the most important feature of this project that we are able to achieve?” said Lindsey Samsi, developer with Pennrose. “And that, obviously, was senior affordable housing.”

Documents made public in advance of a meeting before the city’s advisory Civic Design Review committee show a community room on the ground floor, with a large courtyard, a management suite, and an entrance along Ninth Street. The units will be a mix of studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedrooms at 60% of area median income or about $1,042 a month for a studio apartment.

The site is bounded by Vine Street to the north, Ninth Street to the west, and to the south by a row of two- to three-story buildings with storefronts on the ground floor and apartments above. The building will be kept to five stories tall, partly to ensure that it doesn’t overwhelm its neighbors.

Since the Redevelopment Authority sought requests for proposals in 2017 for this and neighboring lots, PCDC has advocated for the project to have shorter buildings and lower density.

“We want to make sure that this building on Ninth Street fits in with the existing neighborhood context in terms of size, density and height,” said John Chin, executive director of PCDC.

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Pennrose and PCDC were originally on opposite sides of the bidding in 2017, but now Chin’s organization is a minority partner in the deal, with a 1% stake in the building. PCDC will also provide cultural and language expertise and on-site programming and marketing to seniors in the community.

The development will cost about $23 million, less than half of the pre-pandemic estimate for the building when it was proposed as a 12-story structure with 126 market-rate apartments above the senior housing.

“We’re seeking full zoning approval, and then we hope to close on the financing and break ground early next year,” Samsi said.

The building will have nine surface parking spaces, which require a variance from the Zoning Board of Adjustment. New parking lots are banned in the area, and the site is undergirded with rail tunnels so adding an underground garage isn’t possible.

The site is adjacent to the traffic-choked Vine Street Expressway, which carved Chinatown in two. The city recommends that any building within 1,000 feet of a highway provide air filters of a similar quality to those required of health-care facilities. But the developer is using a weaker filtration system because the building’s HVAC system cannot support the more robust filter due to the site’s space constraints.

“If zoning is supposed to be about protecting residents from industrial uses, how have we gotten to a situation where we’re housing our vulnerable seniors practically on top of I-676, while forbidding multifamily housing in much of the Broad Street Subway corridor in quieter South Philly?” said Daniel Trubman, an activist with Abundant Homes PA.

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But Chin says that Chinatown residents already live with the air particulate pollution. Many of the prospective tenants for the building will probably come from the neighborhood, where they are already exposed to the highway’s noxious side effects.

“We’re used to living here and seniors already living in the immediate area,” Chin said. “These apartments will be a better standard of housing, so they don’t have to walk up and down steps.”

As for the rest of the surface parking lots to the east of the proposed new building, Pennrose has no immediate plans for development.

The remaining parking lots do not abut rowhouses, Samsi noted, although they do neighbor the Race-Vine Station of the Broad-Ridge subway spur. “I do think that the other two developable parcels, which are at Eighth and Vine, and Eighth and Race, lend themselves to more dense uses,” Samsi said.