In order
to keep housing rents
reasonable in its back yard—and maybe do a better job on the upkeep of
those buildings—Penn has entered into the Partnership for Quality Housing
Choices in University City. The University and Fannie Mae, the giant home-mortgage-financing
corporation, have each invested $5 million in the partnership, while the
University of the Sciences (the former Philadelphia College of Pharmacy
and Science) has contributed $1.5 million and First Union National Bank
is providing up to $30 million in mortgage financing. Trammell Crow, the
real-estate management firm, will manage the properties.
“We’ve been active for a number
of months now, and have significant amounts of properties under our control
already,” said Tom Lussenhop, Penn’s managing director of institutional
real estate. “We’re looking at larger, multi-family buildings with 10
units or above—those which tend to be 40-60 years old, which have served
the neighborhood very well for many decades. It’s about preserving, for
the long haul, moderately priced rental housing in the neighborhood. And
our strategy is to ensure that this housing stock is still around 30 years
from now.”
Penn, he added,
“has a real interest in being part of a functioning multi-family housing
market.” While he stressed that the housing is “available to anyone,”
not just students, he said that “student demand may come to about 50 percent
of the market, so it would be natural that a significant number of units
would be occupied by students. But a healthy multi-family market is a
good thing for Penn.”
Lussenhop acknowledged
there has been some “healthy skepticism expressed toward Penn and its
intentions” by some of its neighbors, though most of them have come to
see the benefits, too.
“Every civic
association in University City has a list of buildings that have been
under-maintained and under-managed and in general caused problems in the
neighborhood,” he said. And once they’ve expressed their “suspicions of
hegemony,” he noted, “they say, ‘Gee, will Penn take a look at these buildings
across the street?’”
Penn President
Judith Rodin, who noted that Penn has long been a “significant force in
shaping demand for rental housing in its neighborhoods,” said that the
partnership ensures that the University is now “positioned to strategically
manage this demand for the benefit of the broader community.”
Yvonne Haskins,
Fannie Mae’s senior manager for community development, said that she expected
the partnership to “serve as a model for other communities around the
country who are just as interested as Penn in preserving a community while
moving forward to making it more livable and more viable for a larger,
more diverse group of people.”
