Introducing The Hometown Project
- Ken Rosso
- Jul 3
- 10 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
10 Minute read
Keeping Philly neighborhoods affordable, diverse, and vibrant - for everyone.
My name is Ken Rosso and I'm the Director and Founder of The Hometown Project.
Here's a little about me: I was born and raised in Philadelphia, mostly West-Southwest. I have lived here for over 42 years and been a homeowner in the Garden Court neighborhood of West Philly for the past 18 years. I'm a Jewish-Italian-Danish white cisgender dad of two teens, raised by a community college teacher and a nonprofit fundraiser. I'm a Founding Member and Co-Chair of Kol Tzedek synagogue, located at 5300 Whitby Avenue.
In May 2026, I started the Hometown Project because I love Philadelphia, despite 'it all':
I love the Philly that is livable and affordable, which frees up time to care for our families and neighbors, for making art and music, and strengthening our democracy — despite our City's struggle with poverty.
I love the Philly of diverse, friendly, walkable neighborhoods with great music and food — despite all the trash and decay.
I love the 'vibrant' Philly of progressive ideals, pathbreaking art, Black Joy, immigrant innovation, faith-based activists, and Queer power — despite the segregation of our communities.
I love the Philly with access to regional economic engines of healthcare, higher education, technology, and government — despite the unequal access to economic opportunity.
I love the Philly of a strong (but fraying) cultural and historical fabric — despite the racism and inequality that tear that fabric apart.
And I love being CLOSE to all of it — sharing walls with neighbors in our rowhomes and townhomes and apartments, intimate with people unlike me — despite every pressure to retreat behind our own front doors.
To me, this Philly is a "vibrant" city — close, connected, affordable, diverse, fun, creative and full of possibilities for making a living.
There are a great many thorny challenges that threaten this vision, so where do we start? For me, I knew that Hometown Project should focus on issues of land, homes, and real estate. Disinvestment, governmental inaction, gentrification and racial displacement will be the chief concerns of our work.
We address these challenges by mobilizing people and money. Specifically, we organize the people with the most untapped influence in this fight: homeowners — and especially those of us who are white. Whether we asked for it or even knew it, we have benefited massively from the structural inequalities of our real estate system.
But we also stand to lose a lot if Philly neighborhoods continue to rapidly gentrify, squeezing our own wallets, sanitizing local culture, pushing out Black neighbors, displacing our youth, workers, artists and community leaders.
"Gentrification" is a very complex idea, and I think we've got to be careful in how we use it. But, if you've been to (or lived in!) places like Bed-Stuy and Bushwick in Brooklyn or Shaw and Columbia Heights in D.C., you've experienced some of the most stark examples of unbidden racialized displacement and destruction of Black cultural fabric.
I'm urging you to think — "This is my hometown — is this the future I want for it? Is this what I want for my legacy?"
The Hometown Project helps homeowners stand up for affordable housing, make reparative investments, and support community-controlled real estate. Let's step out of our guilt and step into our power. Let's create Philly neighborhoods that are good for everyone.
The Problem
As the 2026 reports from POWER and Philadelphia Coalition for Affordable Communities (PCAC) showed in grave detail, the cost of housing in Philly is pushing out longtime residents, disproportionately Black folks, and squeezing all of our wallets. Data shows that 30–40% of Philly is 'cost burdened' by housing. Since 2000, the cost of housing has increased 120% while wages in the City have gone up 7%.
Meanwhile, the affordable housing we've got is increasingly under threat. Over 7,500 units of federally subsidized housing — nearly a quarter of Phily's entire subsidized stock — will see their affordability restrictions expire by 2036. That puts nearly 20,000 people at risk of displacement into an increasingly unaffordable housing market — accelerating gentrification in the very neighborhoods where they've built their lives. And this isn't happening evenly across the city: more than a quarter of these expiring properties sit in census tracts where rents, home values, and incomes are all rising faster than the citywide average — the very neighborhoods where gentrification pressure is strongest.
This PCAC table shows the massive impacts of racialized displacement at the neighborhood level:
To address this crisis, those who have more resources must step up to the plate, and this goes especially for households that enjoy white racial privilege.
No matter our class background, white households have inherited the gains of 400 years of racist policy — violently enforced, government-sponsored, and culturally embraced. The Economy League found that the Black-white real estate appreciation gap in Philadelphia amounts to $57 billion since 1950 alone. Since wealth compounds this inequality and connects to income earning potential, things will keep getting worse unless we act.
This is not only a matter of racial justice — it's an economic one. A region that displaces its own workforce, hollows out its neighborhoods, and locks half its people out of wealth-building cannot thrive. Closing this gap is growth strategy, not charity.
Many policies are needed to close the racial wealth gap — reparations at every level of government, fixing Pennsylvania's unconstitutionally inequitable school funding, reforming a criminal legal system that has stripped dignity and wealth from Black communities. All of them matter. But I started the Hometown Project where our leverage is greatest: the power dynamics of real estate wealth.
I initiated the Hometown Project because property, land, and wealth felt so close to our experiences as homeowners in Philly. The good news is that being so near to it gives us significant leverage to make changes.
So, what can the average property owner in Philly do? A lot! Let's look at just the actions that Hometown Project will support homeowners to do:
Advocate for affordable housing for every low- and moderate-income household in Philadelphia.
Invest reparatively — pooling our money and channeling it into Black- and brown-led real estate projects or funds.
Build community ownership — supporting neighborhood trusts that keep homes affordable, stable, and diverse for the long haul.
We know that these actions will support our vision of an affordable, diverse and vibrant community. But, as a friend and Leadership Philadelphia colleague recently asked, "What about people that aren't so altruistic — what's in it for them?" Great question! My answer: There are many benefits of affordable housing that any homeowner can see, feel, and touch every day. Here's 5 of them:
5 Benefits of affordable housing that serve our direct self-interest as homeowners
Affordable housing supports neighborhood stability instead of the boom-and-bust cycle of blight and speculation. If you're planning to stay a while or raise a family here, stability is what protects your investment in community.
Affordable housing supports stable — and sometimes stronger — property values by preventing blight and attracting long-term investment. Counterintuitive, but well documented.
Affordable housing development saves us tax money that would be spent on all the supportive services for people who fall into homelessness.
Affordable housing helps workers live closer to work, which improves services at the institutions (think, schools and restaurants) and civic infrastructure (government) upon which you and your family depend.
Affordable housing strengthens the community around us by freeing up neighbors' time for family care, mutual aid, and civic life — the everyday work democracy depends on. Some projects even incentivize volunteering!
It's evident that well-managed affordable housing is advantageous for the typical Philadelphia homeowner, regardless of one's feelings about real estate injustices.
The Solutions
There are many ways to support affordable housing — on your block and across the city. The Hometown Project focuses on three: advocate, invest, build. Here's what each looks like in practice.
Advocate. We'll equip you to tell the difference between affordable housing development that genuinely serves the neighborhood and projects that only wear the label — and to make the case to your neighbors. And we'll mobilize you for political action alongside the organizations already leading this fight: One PA, PCAC, and POWER, who are pushing the city for the budgets and policies that stop displacement and expand affordable homes. Join us for an action today.
Invest. Reparative investment means moving money in ways that begin to repair what racist policy built. We'll organize these opportunities with the expertise of reparationWorks. A few examples of what this can look like:
Pledging a percentage of your home's equity growth to a legal clinic that untangles property titles for Black families — so they can keep, sell, or borrow against homes that are rightfully theirs.
Making a binding "generational commitment": when you eventually sell your home — or pass it on — a share of the proceeds goes toward affordable housing in the neighborhood. For those of us who've owned here for decades and watched our equity multiply, this is a way to write the neighborhood itself into our legacy. It's also a conversation worth having with our parents about their estates: what if some of that appreciation went back to the blocks that produced it?
Donating property outright to a community-controlled trust that keeps it affordable forever.
Build. We'll help Black- and brown-majority neighborhoods form community-controlled trusts — where residents, not outside investors, decide what happens to the land. This isn't theory: the Kensington Corridor Trust and the Women's Community Revitalization Project and others are already proving the model works in Philadelphia. Our vision is citywide; our starting ground is West and Southwest Philly, where we'll bring together the partners, impact investors, and technical know-how to grow the model.
Urgency
While the dynamics of real estate injustice and gentrification have been in the making for centuries, the need for action and investment is now. This is because of expiring low-income tax credits and a closing 'price window'.
The Neighborhood Restorations homes and expiring tax credits
Across the city, the tax credits that keep affordable housing affordable are expiring for more than 7,500 homes through 2036. In West and Southwest Philly, where I was born and raised, the fight is concentrated on the Neighborhood Restorations portfolio: 925 affordable rental homes — rowhomes, townhomes, and apartment buildings — housing more than 3,000 people across Kingsessing, Cobbs Creek, Haddington, and neighboring blocks. On July 1, 2026, those tax credits began to expire, freeing the owner to start selling the portfolio off in pieces.
One PA's West/Southwest Rising campaign is organizing to convince Mayor Parker and the City to purchase the properties and steward them back into affordability — under new mission-driven owners, or by selling homes back to the residents themselves. If the campaign fails, these homes go to profit-driven developers, pouring fuel on the gentrification fires already burning in these neighborhoods.
As One PA and its allies fight to save these homes, one voice is sorely missing: the tens of thousands of homeowners in higher-income neighborhoods nearby who stand to benefit if this campaign wins. That includes those of us who've been here thirty or forty years and remember what these blocks were before the money arrived — and it includes our kids and our parents, because this fight is about what one generation hands the next. That's you. That's us.
Philly's closing price windows
Besides the tax credits expiring, there's a second clock ticking, and I think that fewer people are watching it. Affordable housing can only be built where land and property are still cheap enough for the numbers to work. In gentrifying neighborhoods, that window is closing fast — and once it closes, it doesn't reopen.
I analyzed verifiable pricing and cost data (with an assist from Claude AI) to map where each neighborhood stands. Three findings:
Kingsessing and Haddington have the widest windows still open — which makes them the highest-leverage places to act in West and Southwest Philly.
Point Breeze has already exited the window — prices there have passed the point where affordable development can pencil out, even with heavy subsidy. This is the cautionary tale: without intervention, every neighborhood on this chart is headed for the same fate.
By 2031, every window is projected to close. And that's a conservative projection assuming 7% annual price growth, when several of these neighborhoods have seen double digits.
Figure: Closing price window for affordable housing
Median home prices vs. affordable-housing thresholds in gentrifying Philadelphia neighborhoods: Three windows remain open. All close by ~2031 at current pace.
Here's the arithmetic behind it. Median household income in most West Philly neighborhoods is under 50% of Area Median Income — about $59,700 for a family of four. At that income, an affordable home can't cost more than roughly $185,000 all-in (lest we ‘cost burden’ residents). Even mission-driven nonprofit developers struggle to hit that number: it typically takes free land from the Land Bank, multiple stacked subsidies, and larger sites than the tiny infill lots that dot our neighborhoods. The city's own Turn the Key homes average $280,000 — with donated land and mortgage subsidy. When land prices rise past a certain point, no amount of good intentions makes the math work.
And because projects take one to three years just to break ground, "acting by 2031" really means acting now.
Final thoughts: The Hometown Project supports livable and lovable neighborhood life
I opened this piece with the Philly I love — the walkable, creative, close-quarters city where we share walls with people unlike ourselves. I've spent 42 years loving it and 18 years as a homeowner inside of it, and here's what those years have taught me: none of it stays by accident. The neighborhoods we love will stay livable, affordable, and diverse because people who had power chose to use it.
Homeowners — especially white homeowners — are holding more of that power than we admit. Our equity grew out of a rigged system. But equity is also leverage, and leverage is a choice: we can hoard it, or we can put it to work building the Philly we say we believe in. And this choice isn't ours alone — it belongs to our parents deciding what their estates will mean, and to neighbors who've held their deeds for forty years. Generational wealth doesn't have to mean feathering our own nests; it can mean leaving the whole block better than we found it. Step out of guilt, and into power.
The Hometown Project is how we do it together:
Advocate. Show up for affordable housing — starting today, by telling Mayor Parker to save the 925 Neighborhood Restorations homes. [Link] Ten thousand homeowner voices would change that campaign overnight. Yours is one of them.
Invest. Put a slice of your good fortune to reparative work — a share of your equity growth, a generational commitment when you sell, or something bolder. We'll show you the options; you pick the size of the step.
Build. Help stand up community-controlled trusts where residents decide what happens to the land. Our vision is citywide; our starting ground is West and Southwest Philly.
The windows of opportunity are closing. The tax credits are expiring now. And in a country where democracy itself feels up for grabs, I feel that the blocks we live on are where we can still, concretely, win!
This is my hometown. If it's yours too — join us.
