{"id":12035,"date":"2025-06-24T23:53:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T23:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/12035\/"},"modified":"2025-06-24T23:53:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T23:53:09","slug":"phillys-new-housing-plan-expected-to-help-minority-developers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/12035\/","title":{"rendered":"Philly\u2019s new housing plan expected to help minority developers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Along the way, they also receive one-on-one counseling on their businesses, connect with mentors and learn about avenues for accessing the kind of capital minority developers often struggle to secure. The city-backed Philadelphia Accelerator Fund<\/a> works closely with the program.\n<\/p>\n

The goal is to prepare working developers to deliver on contracts to build and sell brand new properties on city-owned parcels held by the Philadelphia Land Bank<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cGoing from one or two units of housing or maybe doing rehab work to ground up new construction, which is a very different type of construction. High risk, high threshold for approvals on the financial side, also higher level of expectation,\u201d said Angel Rodriguez, executive director of the land bank.\n<\/p>\n

To date, the program has trained 23 developers over two cohorts. Many of them were selected through referrals from the Black Squirrel Collective<\/a> or the Urban Developers Association<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

Bright co-founded Seamless Pros with his best friend Khalief Evans. The two grew up together in West Oak Lane.\n <\/p>\n

\"SeamlessSeamless Professionals developers Anthony Bright (right) Khalief Evans (center) and his brother Khaleel Evans (left) grew up together in the West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia and now are developing housing together. (Kimberly Paynter\/WHYY)<\/p>\n

Before going through the Minority Developer Program, their company mostly did hundreds of renovation and carpentry projects. The outfit now has contracts to build 25 Turn the Key homes in parts of West and North Philadelphia.\n<\/p>\n

And they want to become \u201cprime players\u201d in the affordable housing space. Evans said he finally feels like they are finally in a position to do that.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very challenging just obtaining the financing needed in order to get the developments done. With the city offering the land at a very economical rate, in addition to assisting you through the pre-development phase in order to get approved with the permits, it has been instrumental in getting us to this point ,\u201d Evans said.\n<\/p>\n

For Bright, the program has helped level the playing field, providing knowledge that would have been \u201cvirtually impossible\u201d to obtain without guidance.\n<\/p>\n

The training was also an eye-opener, he said, particularly when it comes to the politics of building on city-owned land.\n<\/p>\n

Getting parcels out of the land bank, for example, requires legislation from a district councilmember, meaning developers often rely on relationships with lawmakers to get to construction.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cDealing with everyone and their own personalities, winning people over, and getting them to believe in you, is a task. It\u2019s not like you just put in an application, and you\u2019re in the minority developer program and things are just smooth sailing. No, it\u2019s a mixture of everything clicking on high cylinders,\u201d Bright said.\n<\/p>\n

The company hopes to break ground this summer on their first Turn the Key developments.
\n\"AA Seamless Professionals development in progress on Diamond Street in North Philadelphia. (Kimberly Paynter\/WHYY)\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Along the way, they also receive one-on-one counseling on their businesses, connect with mentors and learn about avenues…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[12772,5229,12773,1448,2830,1311,12771,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-12035","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-mayor-cherelle-parker","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-minorities","11":"tag-pa","12":"tag-pennsylvania","13":"tag-philadelphia","14":"tag-planphilly","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114741039071951484","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}