Developer Ori Feibush and his employees now make up one-third of a Graduate Hospital neighborhood board

For almost as long as Morgan Rodriguez has lived in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood, she’s been civically engaged in her community.

First on her condo board, then as a volunteer for organizations that support local parks, and eventually on the board of the nonprofit South of South Neighborhood Association (SOSNA), where she was elected chair in November.

But this latest role raised some eyebrows, because she is part of a group of SOSNA board members affiliated with OCF Realty, a real estate company based on the edge of the neighborhood. Rodriguez works there as a real estate agent.

After November’s election, a third of SOSNA’s 15-member board is now OCF-affiliated, including the vice chair and treasurer. One of the new members is the company’s owner, Ori Feibush, who has developed extensively in this neighborhood on the border of Center City and South Philadelphia.

It is highly unusual for a real estate company to have such a large presence on the board of a registered community organization (RCO), the official designation for neighborhood groups that developers are required to deal with for zoning matters.

“We should not have people on the board that have a conflict of interest,” said Linda Evans, a SOSNA board member who bought her house on Christian Street in 1998. “Why is a well-known developer on a volunteer RCO in one of the hottest areas in real estate development? What’s the payoff?”

The city does not monitor potential conflicts of interest on RCO boards or limit who can be on them. And SOSNA’s bylaws allow for members who either live or work within the organization’s boundaries.

Evans said that even if no OCF Realty projects come before the board, she fears members of the company will form a voting bloc that will side with development interests over the interests of neighbors.

Feibush himself dismisses the idea that there’s anything in these board seats for his company. OCF employees have been on SOSNA’s board before, he said, and have made up a majority on the boards of parent groups for local public schools.

“I’ve been before SOSNA many times over the last 15 years, and I’ve never had the zoning committee vote against me in 15 years,” he said. “Who needs to take something over? We employ people that live in the neighborhood and care about their community: That’s it.”

Rodriguez, too, sees concerns as misplaced. And she notes that none of the OCF-affiliated members sit on the group’s zoning committee, which is where SOSNA interacts with developers on their projects. That’s where a conflict of interest would be most likely to arise.

“People are overestimating the power that SOSNA has,” Rodriguez said, “and it should very well be noted that if there is ever a conflict of interest, those people will recuse themselves.”

The governance of RCOs has been top of mind for municipal policymakers in recent months. One of the last acts of recently retired City Council President Darrell L. Clarke was an attempt to get the city to provide legal protections for these organizations.

But critics have long argued that these publicly sanctioned groups have too little oversight to be provided a municipally paid legal backstop. Although the city government officially recognizes RCOs, it has little real say in their governance, and the rules regulating them are loose. Some RCOs are composed of one or two neighborhood activists with no real constituency. Others are Republican or Democratic political wards.

“The city planning commission is not staffed up enough to do really rigorous checking of who the members of our RCOs are,” said Gary Jastrzab , who led the Philadelphia Planning Commission when the designation was created in 2012.

“It’s a rare incidence for that to be happening, where multiple people would be working for a local real estate organization that also develops in the same neighborhood,” Jastrzab said. “That [the OCF-affiliated presence on SOSNA’s board] sounds like a real ethical problem.”

It’s not unusual for real estate companies and neighborhood groups to have antagonistic relationships. But this part of Philadelphia has seen a particularly combustible development environment over the last 15 years, as neighborhoods on both sides of Washington Avenue west of Broad Street saw substantial amounts of new construction for the first time in generations.

OCF played a huge role in the transformation of Point Breeze, on the south side of Washington Avenue, and the neighborhood to the north that became known as Graduate Hospital.

Recent Census data show that area now has the second-highest median income in Philadelphia. Graduate Hospital also saw a dramatic demographic shift in the last 30 years, shifting from vast majority Black to majority white.

At this point, the neighborhood is mostly built out. There are few empty lots or former industrial sites left to develop.

“The zoning committee does get a handful of cases like ‘we want to add a third story’ or ‘we want to add a roof deck’ type of situations,” Rodriguez said. “In the years previous, you’ve had many large projects come through zoning.”

In those earlier years, Feibush became a prominent figure not just in these neighborhoods, but also throughout the city for both his development projects and for headline-making clashes with some community groups and local politicians. He has threatened to sue residents. He even ran against district Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson in 2015, which also raised questions about potential conflicts of interest if he had won.

SOSNA and Feibush have had a contentious relationship in the past, too. In 2022, Feibush threatened to sue the organization after his requests for the vote counts for the 2021 board election were denied.

That history is part of why some residents have reacted strongly to the recent election of Feibush; Jon Adler, vice president of investments at OCF Realty; and Liz Scott, a real estate agent at the company.

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Their terms end in 2026. They joined board members Melanie Gerchberg and Rodriguez, who are both agents at OCF Realty. (Also on the board is Rodriguez’s husband, developer Stephen Rodriguez.)

“We make our neighborhood great, keep it clean, keep it green, put on events, make it a great space for everyone to live,” Rodriguez said, emphasizing again that no OCF employees handle zoning issues. “Maybe people don’t understand what the board is versus what the zoning committee is.”

But Jastrzab, formerly of the planning commission, says that board members can still have influence within an organization even if they don’t sit on the zoning committee.

For neighborhood critics, the OCF-affiliated presence also is a question of optics. It does nothing to solve what Evans called SOSNA’s “public relations” problem among longtime neighbors who don’t feel like they have a say in what happens in the neighborhood.

Evans said she joined the board to look out for the interests of her neighbors. She denies accusations that she’s antidevelopment but said construction shouldn’t have a negative impact on current residents.

She and others say there should have been more transparency about the new board members’ jobs.

In October, Keisha Usher-Martin, former SOSNA board vice chair and current alternate member of the organization’s zoning committee, pointed out nominees’ affiliation with OCF Realty in a post in a Southwest Center City Facebook group. She included photos she pulled from the company’s website. Liz Scott, an OCF agent on SOSNA’s board and administrator of the Facebook group, told Usher-Martin the post made people feel unsafe and removed it.

“My issue is the lack of diversity of thought and interests,” said Usher-Martin, who has lived in the neighborhood for 16 years and was on the SOSNA board from 2020 to 2023.

Usher-Martin, who emigrated from Belize, said she joined the board to add diversity in a neighborhood where many older Black community members have left and to get remaining Black residents more involved in SOSNA’s work.

“My focus is all about making sure the people who built this community are still present, still have a voice, are engaged in the process,” Usher-Martin said.

A few residents of the neighborhood and a former SOSNA board member said they were worried about the extent of real estate industry influence on the board but were afraid of speaking out.

“When you have money, when you have power, you can intimidate others,” Evans said.

But Rodriguez said the presence of OCF-affiliated board members is nothing sinister. It’s just about civically minded neighborhood residents who want to do right by their neighborhood, she said.

“I’m not doing this for the purpose of trying to be involved in any type of real estate-related decisions,” said Rodriguez. “These are people that are doing really good things in the community, and they happen to be the people that run and the people that the community voted for.”