How Philly can come back from its ‘Godzilla’ moment, according to the city’s departing chief of housing and development

After eight years in office, Deputy Mayor Anne Fadullon — the Kenney administration’s point person for negotiating with City Council on housing and land use policy — officially left city government last week.

Her time in city government coincided with a sustained period of redevelopment that saw Philadelphia lead the region in housing construction. It ended with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, as some of Philadelphia’s progress was reversed, and development continued to blossom in some corners of the city.

But Fadullon leaves her job confident that the city will bounce back. “We’ve got a lot of strengths. We’re in a great location,” she said. “I’m very bullish on Philadelphia.

She is taking some time off and then plans to start her own consulting firm, focused on capacity-building and mentorship in the development industry with an emphasis on affordable housing and community development.

Fadullon spoke to The Inquirer about her tenure. The interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

I used to talk to student groups and say when SimCity first came out that every once and awhile, Godzilla would come and eat your town. The pandemic was our Godzilla.

Our trend lines were looking really great, and then they just flatlined. Now we’re doing that typical Philadelphia thing: We didn’t crash as hard as some cities did, and we’re coming out of it but not at a skyrocketing trajectory.

We’re seeing more folks in the city. … Our tax revenue is coming back. We’re seeing higher [office] occupancy rates. A strong residential population downtown. We have seen tax growth in our neighborhood commercial corridors. All of those things are happening, but some not as quickly as we’d like.

We were really growing somewhat because of birthrate but a lot because of immigration, and that really came to a halt during the pandemic. I think we’ll start to see that pick up. … We’re well positioned for warehouse distribution. Life sciences will come back once the markets have kind of settled down.

In this country, generational wealth often comes from home ownership. So we’ve got some pretty robust home ownership programs. We started our Philly First Home program that provided up to $10,000 or 6%, toward your closing costs, which really opened up the market to a lot of folks. Particularly when we first started that program, the sales market was relatively accessible and affordable, but people didn’t have the savings or the family wealth to be able to get that initial nut in place.

But we have a large portion of our population that’s extremely low income, where home ownership is probably not attainable and may not be the best option for them. It’s a struggle when your roof starts to leak or your water heater goes. When you’re living on the edge, trying to make those repairs on your own may be difficult. We just have to look at the reality of who is our city: We have a lot of very low-income renters. And while we want to support generational wealth and home ownership, we have to keep our eye on our rental population as well.

They’re busy trying to survive. Some of them may have a technological barrier, or language barrier, or are just spending all their time trying to make it from one day to the next. Their voices aren’t heard as often as they should be. Our job in the public sector is we’ve got to take care of everybody the best that we can. Just because someone may not be the loudest voice in the room doesn’t mean that we can ignore their needs.

The elected officials are trying to be responsive to their constituency. Some members of the constituency have louder voices than others. People are focused on what’s going on my block or community and not understanding that we have to consider the city as a whole.

These localized decisions have ramifications throughout the city. If we say we’re going to limit density or development over here, it’s going to impact other areas. That’s not going to be a successful strategy. If you try to limit density in one area that doesn’t mean development goes away, or you’ve stopped demand, you just move it someplace else. Or the demand stays, the supply drops, and housing costs go up.

And we don’t want those policies to successfully limit demand. I’ve been here long enough to know what it’s like to manage a city in decline. I would much rather deal with the issues that come with managing a growing city.

If we didn’t have some growth happening, we would not have a Neighborhood Preservation Initiative. If we had not grown the tax base, we would not be able to support the bond issue for street paving. We would not be able to put additional dollars toward the school district.

But we do need to make sure we’re putting those dollars back into communities. The folks that are seeing that change need to see some benefit so they’re not just feeling like my neighborhood is being overwhelmed by people that don’t look like me and don’t understand the history of my neighborhood.

Things definitely slowed down once the pandemic hit. Hearings can take longer because we’ve got more public participation, and it may take a longer time to explain things online.

We’ve been working closely with the development community to try to assist them in being prepared for their hearing. We do have incidents where there may be X number of cases scheduled for that session, and we get to only get one or two of those cases, because everybody else comes in to ask for a continuance.

So we’re trying to work with folks to say if there’s a problem, please let us know a couple weeks in advance, and we can have someone else take your slot. Because it really does back up the system.

We’re working on making technological improvements that would allow us to have a hybrid environment, because we don’t want to lose the public participation that we’ve been able to get online. But we understand that certain things are facilitated better when they’re in person.

Also, during the pandemic, one of the bills that Council passed is a requirement that all of our meetings be recorded. But we did not have that technology and functionality in all of our various meeting rooms. So that’s something that we are working on. I think probably sometime in 2024 there will start to be a shift toward a more hybrid and not completely virtual.