Housing Funding in Philadelphia: Evaluating the Impact of Public Spending

This brief offers policymakers and other stakeholders a framework for understanding the return on investment, or ROI, connected with public sector spending on different housing programs in Philadelphia. It serves as a companion to our November 2023 report: “Housing Funding in Philadelphia: The Sources and Uses of Public Dollars,” which details all of the funds administered by three local public sector entities for housing activities and the decision making processes for allocating those funds.

As described in that report, policymakers have to make hard decisions about how to allocate public resources. The city’s housing needs are great and multi-faceted, the resources available to address them are limited, and the share of those resources over which local officials have control is constrained. This framework is just one tool to guide decision making within a complicated budget and policy environment. The simplest concept of an ROI is the financial return an investment ultimately yields. Adapting an ROI framework to the world of social programs, like housing, is a more complex proposition.

In this document, we lay out a multi-dimensional ROI framework and apply it to a selected set of housing programs. Each program, to a varying degree, augments local funding with federal and/or state resources, and some also leverage private market dollars, to achieve their goal(s). For each, we provide a general estimate of the related need and the per-unit public sector spending for the activity, but we do not put dollar amounts on the returns. We outline program outputs and describe the ways each housing activity aligns with five high-level housing goals.