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The Philadelphia Housing Authority has broken ground on a $27 million, 63-unit apartment building for seniors in the Sharswood section of North Philadelphia, one of the last major pieces of a neighborhood revitalization campaign that has absorbed roughly $750 million over more than a decade.
The project, to be named the Dwight Evans Senior Residences after the retiring congressman, will deliver one-bedroom apartments to residents 62 and older at deeply subsidized rents, with a quarter of the homes reserved for people with disabilities or histories of homelessness.
Construction at 20th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue is expected to take 15 to 18 months. Frankel Enterprises is developing the building with Philadelphia Housing Authority capital dollars and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.
The groundbreaking, reported by WHYY, lands as the authority's sweeping Sharswood-Blumberg transformation plan moves into its final phase, capping an effort that remade one of the city's most distressed public housing footprints.
For housing authorities watching the end of the Choice Neighborhoods era, the Philadelphia project offers a late example of the model's core idea: pair demolition of distressed high-rises with mixed-income replacement housing, senior housing, and neighborhood amenities funded by layered public and private sources.
The Dwight Evans Senior Residences will rise on land the housing authority previously acquired through eminent domain, at the corner of 20th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue. All 63 apartments are one-bedrooms restricted to applicants aged 62 and older.
Rents will be heavily subsidized: tenants will pay up to 30 percent of their adjusted monthly income, with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development covering the remainder. That structure follows the standard public housing and project-based assistance formula, keeping the units within reach of seniors living on fixed Social Security incomes.
About a quarter of the units will be set aside for individuals who have a disability or have experienced homelessness, PHA President Kelvin Jeremiah said at Monday's groundbreaking ceremony. Roughly a dozen units will be ADA-accessible or equipped for residents with hearing and visual impairments.
The property will also offer on-site services, including transportation assistance and an adult day care program, a recognition that senior housing without services often fails the residents it is meant to stabilize.
"Today, we are celebrating a legacy while creating a place where our seniors can age comfortably and with peace of mind," Jeremiah said during the ceremony.
Frankel Enterprises is developing the $27 million project using public funding that includes PHA capital dollars and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, the combination that has financed most of the authority's new construction in the neighborhood. The tax credit equity, according to the authority, will keep the units affordable for decades.
The financing stack mirrors the approach PHA has used across the Sharswood effort since the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency awarded the first phase of the Blumberg redevelopment a 9 percent tax credit in 2014, an award the agency said would raise $12.6 million in private investment and cover 60 percent of that phase's cost.
For developers and syndicators, the project is another data point in a consistent Philadelphia pattern: the housing authority contributes land and capital, the state allocates competitive credits, and private partners build and manage. That structure has allowed PHA to keep producing units even as federal capital fund appropriations have stagnated nationally.
The building will carry the name of U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans, who is set to retire in January after a decade in Congress. Before his election to the House, Evans spent nearly 40 years as a state legislator in Harrisburg, where he chaired the powerful House Appropriations Committee and helped steer millions of dollars to Philadelphia projects.
"It is a collective effort that this is happening," Evans said at the groundbreaking. "We have some very challenging times coming, but we can do it as long as we stay focused and determined to make a difference."
Naming senior housing after a retiring appropriator is a familiar tradition in the industry, and in this case an apt one: the tax credit and HUD funding streams that financed the building are exactly the programs Evans spent a career defending in state and federal budget fights.
The senior building is one of the authority's remaining projects in Sharswood, where PHA has invested roughly $750 million in a revitalization effort now winding down after more than a decade of construction.
The campaign traces to 2013, when PHA and 23 partners received a $500,000 Choice Neighborhoods planning grant from HUD to develop a transformation plan for the Blumberg public housing site and the surrounding neighborhood. The plan that followed was built on the Choice model's three pillars: housing, people, and neighborhoods.
On the housing side, the authority demolished the Blumberg family high-rises and 15 low-rise buildings, rehabilitated the Blumberg senior high-rise, and planned more than 1,200 new residential units, including 420 affordable and market-rate homeownership opportunities. The neighborhood strategy called for more than 200,000 square feet of mixed-use development, a revitalized Ridge Avenue commercial corridor, a new K-8 public school on the former Reynolds School site, and new recreational fields and community gardens.
The people pillar funded comprehensive supportive services, workforce training, adult education, and health and wellness programming, the components federal evaluators have long argued distinguish Choice Neighborhoods from earlier, bricks-only redevelopment programs.
Philadelphia is one of HUD's most decorated Choice Neighborhoods cities. The city's Division of Housing and Community Development counts three Choice Neighborhoods implementation grants and four planning grants awarded to Philadelphia partnerships, with PHA leading the housing and people components.
The decision to build transportation services and an adult day care program into the property reflects where senior housing design has moved over the past decade. Housing authorities and nonprofit developers have increasingly concluded that the cheapest intervention in an aging tenant's life is the one that prevents a crisis, whether that is a missed medical appointment, an undiagnosed condition, or the isolation that accelerates decline. Adult day programs, once treated as an amenity, are now commonly underwritten as core operating costs in service-enriched senior deals.
The one-bedroom, age-62 floor plan also matches the demographic reality of public housing waiting lists, where single elderly applicants consistently make up one of the largest applicant pools. By reserving a quarter of the homes for people with disabilities or experiences of homelessness, PHA is additionally aligning the building with the coordinated entry priorities that HUD has pressed on housing authorities receiving federal homeless assistance.
For managers, buildings of this profile carry predictable operational demands: higher service coordination staffing, accessibility maintenance obligations, and close coordination with the local aging network. The adult day care component in particular requires a licensed operator partner, which typically means a ground-floor commercial or community space commitment built into the design from the start.
The timeline is also notable for what it says about public housing development capacity. From groundbreaking to completion in 15 to 18 months is a pace most private affordable housing developers would recognize as efficient, and it reflects the advantage an authority gains when it already owns the land, has site control through prior acquisition, and brings its own capital contribution to the closing table.
Whether the model survives its own funding environment is the open question. The Choice Neighborhoods program has competed for shrinking appropriations in recent cycles, and the layered financing that closed the Dwight Evans Senior Residences, PHA capital, 9 percent credits, and HUD operating support, is exactly the combination now under pressure in the unresolved FY 2027 federal budget.
Senior housing has become one of the most contested niches in affordable housing finance. The country's oldest baby boomers are turning 80, the senior population is growing faster than any other age group, and fixed-income older renters are among the most rent-burdened households in federal data. Projects restricted to residents 62 and older also move through local approval processes more smoothly than family developments, making them a reliable production vehicle for authorities with remaining land and credits.
The Sharswood project also illustrates how deeply the sector's production pipeline depends on the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. With the capital fund chronically underfunded and new construction costs elevated, PHA's ability to close a $27 million senior building rests on the same credit program Congress expanded in this year's tax legislation, an expansion housing advocates expect to show up in deal volume over the next several funding cycles.
State Sen. Sharif Street framed the groundbreaking in neighborhood terms. "We have to continue to make investments in affordable housing. We have to continue to make sure that people have access," he said. "There are so many people who have grown up, raised families, in this community and can no longer maintain large houses."
Construction is expected to run 15 to 18 months, putting completion in late 2027 or early 2028. When the doors open, the building will stand as one of the final additions to a neighborhood that has been remade block by block since the Blumberg towers came down, and as a reminder that the original Choice Neighborhoods promise, housing plus services plus neighborhood investment, is still being delivered in at least one American city.
The Philadelphia Housing Authority has broken ground on a $27 million, 63-unit apartment building for seniors in the Sharswood section of North Philadelphia, one of the last major pieces of a neighborhood revitalization campaign that has absorbed roughly $750 million over more than a decade.
The project, to be named the Dwight Evans Senior Residences after the retiring congressman, will deliver one-bedroom apartments to residents 62 and older at deeply subsidized rents, with a quarter of the homes reserved for people with disabilities or histories of homelessness.
Construction at 20th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue is expected to take 15 to 18 months. Frankel Enterprises is developing the building with Philadelphia Housing Authority capital dollars and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.
The groundbreaking, reported by WHYY, lands as the authority's sweeping Sharswood-Blumberg transformation plan moves into its final phase, capping an effort that remade one of the city's most distressed public housing footprints.
For housing authorities watching the end of the Choice Neighborhoods era, the Philadelphia project offers a late example of the model's core idea: pair demolition of distressed high-rises with mixed-income replacement housing, senior housing, and neighborhood amenities funded by layered public and private sources.
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