Too often, the conversation about housing in Philadelphia seems to be missing something. We’ve noticed it. Maybe you have too.

Some of us first noticed this at a press conference held by senior tenants whose landlord left them without heat in the dead of winter. No press showed up.

Others of us noticed it after a long, testy day at City Hall where tenants packed the room for a hearing on landmark renters rights legislation. This time the press did show up. But the coverage failed to mention that the advocate for “small landlords” quoted as a sensible voice is a notorious member of the landlord bar, whose law firm shapes the city’s eviction ecosystem and whose eviction mill business model would be materially threatened by the proposed tenant protections.

And still others of us noticed it in the discourse around the Mayor’s new housing plan, where — as in so many housing debates before it — the conversation was framed, from the beginning, narrowly around supply and production , as if that were the whole of the crisis. Fishing for headlines, the Mayor promised “30,000 new units of affordable housing” on the campaign trail in May 2024. By inauguration, that promise morphed into “a plan to build or repair 30,000 homes of any kind.” To date, fewer than 1,000 of the promised units have been completed despite an $800 million bond measure and promises of another $1.2 billion in public land handouts.

More troubling than the missed target is the premise beneath it: the Mayor has embraced a politically convenient diagnosis of the housing crisis that keeps attention fixed on producing units rather than housing people affordably. In doing so, the administration reproduces a market-centered consensus that serves powerful interests remarkably well, while pushing the harder questions of affordability, stability, displacement, ownership, and public investment to the margins.

These blind spots are connected by a “housing crisis” discourse that is about “buildings rather than people” – that is, about “abstractions, in numbers, in interchangeable ‘units,’ and not about people, or about power,” as LA Tenants Union founder Tracy Rosenthal has put it. When we don’t hear from tenants, we’re less likely to ask who owns the housing, who profits from it, who makes the decisions, and who stands to lose when tenants win.

Our city deserves a better, more complete narrative. We deserve a discourse capable of seeing Philadelphia as it actually is: a place where human beings live, and where power is constantly being contested. It’s a city founded on Quaker ideals of equality, whose original grid of tiny, narrow rowhomes made working-class homeownership possible on a scale unmatched by any other American city. It’s also the city where W.E.B. Du Bois conducted The Philadelphia Negro, the first major sociological study to document how Black residents were systematically confined to the city’s worst housing — a pattern that would later harden into redlining. That is Philadelphia: a place where housing has always been both a vector of subjugation and a source of opportunity, a site of both exclusion and democracy, often on the very same block.

To this day, Philadelphia’s housing crisis remains complex. Sure, it’s about insufficient supply and affordability: the city is short 65,000 rental units affordable to its lowest-income residents, and we’re on the verge of losing thousands of subsidized units citywide. But it’s also so much more than a numbers problem. The housing stock is increasingly controlled by out-of-state investors and local slumlords who fight to extract as much profit as possible from working renters while neglecting repairs and basic maintenance work. The result is an ongoing habitability crisis that disproportionately traps Black tenants in substandard housing.

Thankfully, across the city, tenants, organizers, advocates, lawyers, policy workers, and public officials are experimenting with ways to make housing more affordable, keep people in their homes, and hold landlords accountable for uninhabitable conditions and retaliation. From the UC Townhomes to Brith Sholom, from Camp Chloe to the Occupy PHA movement, from the Safe Healthy Homes campaign to ambitious plans from the Mayor’s Office and the Philadelphia Housing Authority, people are testing models for tenant organizing, collective bargaining, public ownership, housing preservation, and landlord accountability.

There are stories that need to be told about these projects. Stories of ambitious, courageous, creative, and imperfect projects. If we don’t tell them, this movement will continue to be hamstrung as terrain is ceded to landlord talking points dressed up as common sense, and developer interests dressed up as economic necessity.

That’s why we’re launching the People’s Housing Lab. It’s a Philadelphia- and tenant-centered publication, built by volunteer researchers, writers, organizers, lawyers, policy workers, academics, and activists who call this city home. We want to dig into how power actually shapes the housing market, push back on the myths that prop up dominant housing policy, and put tenants at the center of the story, instead of the investors profiting off them.

We’ll write about supply, yes, but also profit, distribution, access, and control. We’ll cover zoning and finance alongside tenant organizing, eviction defense, social housing, and the limits of market-rate development. Our goal is to be a place tenants, policymakers, and organizers can turn to for deep analysis that is rigorous about data and deeply skeptical of policy diagnoses and solutions that conveniently cater to the interests of the powerful.

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here.

P.S. If you’re wondering who Phyllis is…they’re the little guy next to the “B” of “LAB” above.

P.P.S. Tell a friend. And e-mail us at hello@peopleshousinglab.org if there’s something you’d like to write about ;)

Philadelphia is our focus and our home. This is a platform and publication for Philadelphians, by Philadelphians. We will share stories about Philadelphia tenants, the Philadelphia rental market, and Philadelphia housing policy debates. We will consider how federal housing policy will impact Philadelphia specifically and comparatively study housing-related policies, practices, and experimentation elsewhere, analyzing how such programs might play out here.

2. Housing Is a Human Right

Housing is a fundamental human right. We should evaluate public policy based on whether it expands access to safe, stable, dignified housing for all residents, especially those most at risk of displacement and homelessness. Policy choices should prioritize human stability.

We believe that shelter is a social good before it is an investment vehicle. We support policies that prioritize housing as a place to live first, not primarily as an asset to trade.

3. Evidence Matters and So Do Its Sources

We are committed to evidence-based housing policy. We also believe evidence must be interrogated: Who funded the research? What assumptions underpin the model? What data is missing? What outcomes are being measured, and for whom?

Even data-driven policy is not neutral. Good housing analysis requires methodological rigor, transparency, and an honest accounting of power.

4. Policy Means More Than Law

We believe that “policy” stretches beyond the passage of legislation. Policy includes the allocation of resources, the implementation and enforcement of legislation, and institutional culture. When we talk about policy, we are talking about the long arc from idea to lasting impact.

5. Increasing Supply Alone Will Not Fix the Housing Market

Expanding housing supply is essential to long-term affordability. We agree that zoning reform and growing the pool of available housing are important aspects of addressing rising rents in our city.

However, supply interventions alone cannot completely solve housing instability. Without tenant protections, anti-displacement tools, public investment, and attention to ownership structures and price-gouging, expanding supply can coexist with deepening inequality. A serious housing agenda must address production, affordability, preservation, and power simultaneously.

6. Public Capacity Is a Policy Choice

A budget is a reflection of our shared values, and we can choose to prioritize our spending differently. We endeavor to grapple with real resource constraints (land, labor, materials, administrative capacity, the impacts of federal austerity) while rejecting artificial scarcity narratives that prevent public investment in deeply affordable housing.

7. Residents Must Be the Protagonists

Housing justice is achieved through collective action, including tenant organizing, cooperative ownership, community land trusts, and democratic governance. We believe durable solutions emerge when residents have voice, agency, and shared ownership in shaping our city.

Are you in? Subscribe, send to your friends, and send us a pitch that aligns with these principles.

Pitch submissions at any time via e-mail to hello@peopleshousinglab.org. Submission emails must include:

• Name of author(s) (or person pitching)

• Topic of submission, including at minimum a short summary of the article, and potential sources (data, primary documents, interview subjects, etc.)

• Any requests for editorial support or collaboration, if applicable.