Faith leaders called for housing affordability and a repeal of the city’s business tax cuts last week during a series of press conferences in neighborhoods across the city including the Northwest.

Five of the press conferences hosted by POWER Interfaith, a multiracial and multifaith social justice organization, were in Germantown and Mt. Airy. POWER Interfaith’s goal is to pressure City Council into intensifying efforts to address the current housing affordability crisis Philadelphia residents are facing.

Faith leaders specifically focused on City Council’s June 12 decision to gradually reduce Business Income and Receipt Tax (BIRT), citing potential harm to the city’s working class and most vulnerable residents.

The BIRT tax is the third-largest source of tax revenue for the city, paid for by business owners or companies engaged in for-profit activity within the City of Philadelphia. The tax is not levied on residents who are not business owners.

“Cutting business taxes is estimated to cost the city $2.8 billion over 12 years, removing significant dollars from the city budget and forcing residents to shoulder more of the burden,” Jayson Massey, a member of Germantown Friends Meeting, said at a press conference Saturday outside Germantown High School.

He added, “We are here today in front of the former Germantown High School to show the crisis of affordable housing in Germantown, and also to show that the loss of Germantown High School did not result in usable, safe, and affordable housing for the residents here in Germantown. This neighborhood, with a median income of only $45,727, does not need luxury apartments.”

The high school building, which closed in 2013, has been converted into an apartment complex called The Annex at Germantown, where rents begin at $1,050 for studio apartments, according to rent.com.

Along with Germantown and Greene Street Friends Meeting, Northwest faith groups and congregations joining the initiative to lobby for affordable housing include St.Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, Faith Chapel, Face to Face Germantown, Mishkan Shalom synagogue, First United Methodist Church of Germantown (FUMCOG), Second Baptist Church of Germantown, and Unitarian Universalists of Mt. Airy.

On Wednesday, Nov. 12, FUMCOG co-hosted one of the press conferences, with their senior pastor, the Rev. Alisa Lasater Wailoo, speaking on the issue of affordability.

“When I arrived here about three years ago, I would say we got about two calls a week for folks in need. We’re now getting about a dozen calls a week, easily,” Wailoo said. “We get calls from young mothers. And it’s not just calls, members of our church, we have seniors who don’t know if they’re going to be able to turn on their heat. We have veterans who wonder about their medical bills. And we have working folks of every race, every gender, every orientation, and background that are struggling.”

At Saturday’s press conference in front of Germantown High School, several speakers and attendees joined the group of faith and civic leaders including City Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke and Seth Anderson-Oberman, who ran against Councilmember Cindy Bass in 2023.

O’Rourke, along with fellow Working Families Party City Councilmember Kendra Brooks, opposed the decision to phase out the BIRT tax.

“There are very few issues that are as constant as the cost of housing and the terms on which you secure it,” O’Rourke said. “The city’s widest housing gap is the shortage of almost 65,000 units, affordable and available to those with the lowest incomes. That’s a problem.”

He then discussed what he described as a weakness in Mayor Cherelle Parker’s housing plan.

“The mayor’s plan for housing, which I have said, and I will say again, does have its fair share of bright spots … But something a number of my colleagues and I have raised was the importance of codifying that most of the plan’s funding goes towards those making the least. Codifying it, not just stating an intention but writing that intent into the letter of the law,” O’Rourke said. “The administration flatly refused to do this a couple of times.”

He added, “We know there’s no housing gap for luxury apartments. You see them all over the place, and they’re good and empty … Everyone further up the income scale has a unit that’s available to them, though it may not be their dream apartment. It may not be the exact thing that they’re looking for; it may not hit all of their preferences. It may not be the perfect setup, but they can’t afford it. With this in mind, I simply don’t see why we aren’t being clear about working for those who simply don’t have an option that they can afford.”

Kadi Ashby, the president of the Alden Park Tenants Association, shared her experience as a tenant. When she organized the tenants group early this year, Ashby and her neighbors fought for better maintenance and responsiveness from their building’s management company.

After months of organizing, she received an email from property management denying her a lease renewal, without providing a reason.

“I am left unable to afford to move. I’m unable to find a comparable apartment in my neighborhood, and it’s possible that this will force me out of my community, the community that, through all of this, has shown me overwhelming support,” Ashby said. ‘We need all of our city council members to commit to fighting gentrification and the corporate landlords taking over our neighborhoods.”

One goal of O’Rourke’s office has been to push for better protections for renters, including a bill that would require “good cause” for denying a lease renewal. This effort would protect tenants who attempted to organize from retaliation.

Anderson-Oberman, who is currently the executive director of the advocacy group Reclaim Philadelphia, ran on a progressive platform, narrowly losing to Bass in the 2023 Democratic primary. On Saturday, he discussed his own family’s struggle with affordability and the actions he believes the city must take to address the housing crisis.

“The private sector alone, the so-called free market, is never going to solve this crisis. If the private sector were going to build deeply affordable housing for working-class families, they would have done it already,” Anderson-Oberman said. “That’s why our government — city, state, and federal — must step in and build the housing that we actually need. We need public investment. We need government-funded social housing that is mixed-income and permanently affordable.”

Work ahead

On Feb. 1, Power Interfaith will host a Citywide Affordability Summit, inviting City Councilmembers to speak with faith leaders, advocates, and residents about a long-term solution to the shortage of affordable housing and other affordability issues.

Reflecting on the week of press conferences, Meg Cruz, the Northwest organizer for POWER Interfaith, told the Local, “I think it was a super powerful week of action where we saw over 20 of our congregations who were represented at these different press conferences. We had everyday people speaking out about how the affordability crisis impacted them and what the implications of this loss of [BIRT] funding would be like.”

She added, “This is a crisis that is really escalating at a scale that is impossible for people to withstand within their own means, and the decision to eliminate business taxes makes that worse.”

Tommy Tucker can be reached at Tommy@Chestnuthilllocal.com.