How many abandoned houses and lots are currently in Philadelphia? The short answer — nobody knows.
The most accessible figure on abandoned houses in Philly is based on figures from two decades ago. After reaching out to city officials, Metro was redirected to the Office of Licensing and Inspections who said: “Unfortunately, the Department of L&I doesn’t officially track abandoned and vacant buildings. However, we use the city’s prepared Vacant Property Indicators to determine properties that are likely vacant or abandoned.”
The City’s Vacant Property Indicators are used to identify the “location of properties across Philadelphia that are likely to be a vacant lot or vacant building based on an assessment of City of Philadelphia administrative datasets.”
According to those datasets, there are currently 11,548 vacant lots in Philadelphia and 10,164 vacant buildings.
However, according to a case study published by Columbia University Professor Yiming Ma and advised by Dr. Amy Hillier of the School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania — ‘Vacant Houses In Philadelphia: a case study to visualize and identify policy reform assets’ — as of 2020, there are over 130,000 vacant houses.”
According to 2022 Census Data, there were 760,282 houses in Philadelphia on July 1, 2023. If the figure of 130,000 vacant houses in 2020 were true, it would mean that in 2020 roughly 17% of houses in Philadelphia were vacant.
“The hundred thousand number is incorrect,” explains Philadelphia Housing Authority CEO Kelvin Jeremiah.
Jeremiah said that vacant houses do not fall under the PHA’s purview, however they have “the number of scattered sites that are vacant (and) inhabitable is about 300.”
He expressed his frustration with incorrect reporting of abandoned housing figures. “There was an incorrect story that made its way across the press world where the folks were talking about 40,000 PHA scattered sites. Our entire portfolio is approximately 14,000. There was extra zeros that were added by mistake, not by us, but by that in the initial press story.”
The 40,000 figure was sighted in a New York Times article in 2013 titled ‘Philadelphia Raises Stakes With Plan to Reverse Blight,’ and currently on Philadelphia’s Vacant Lot Program’s home page which reads, “There are approximately 40,000 vacant lots in Philadelphia, and over 74 percent of these vacant lots are privately owned.”
The 40,000 figure on the city’s website is a sharp contrast to the 11,548 figure noted in the L&I dataset.
“If you Google ‘vacant (or) abandoned properties in Philadelphia,’ that story comes right at the top. And it’s been used as a reference in so many other subsequent stories that I just don’t know how to correct that record anymore,” said Jeremiah.
“As a lay person, if I pick up the newspaper at a time when everyone is saying that there is a housing crisis at a time when demand for affordable housing is at heightened levels… As a lay person, I would want somebody to be accountable for that, right? So that’s what caught fire. What caught fire was this guy is not doing his job because he is sitting on all of these units that could easily be fixed and made habitable, to address the unhoused people in this city that are clamoring for homes, who are living on the streets.”
So just how many vacant houses and lots are there in Philadelphia? According to L&I, it’s about 21,700. According to the City’s Vacant Lot Program, there are 40,000 vacant lots. And according to Google, there are 130,000.
So the jury is still out.
‘Housing For All’ is a two-year project in which Metro Philadelphia will investigate the city’s affordable housing crisis. It is made possible by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism’s Philadelphia Local News Sustainability Initiative grant.
