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| 18 Apr 2026 | |
| Written by Robyn Savacool | |
| Advocacy |
| Housing Committee |
Sixty Years of Showing Up: Abigail Pankey, Reverend Moore, and the Long Work of Housing Mantua
There is a particular kind of patience required to build affordable housing in Philadelphia. Not the passive kind — not waiting, not hoping — but the active, grinding, get-back-up-and-try-again kind. The kind that outlasts discouragement, bureaucracy, skeptical neighbors, and the slow churn of government funding cycles. The kind that takes decades.
In the Mantua neighborhood of West Philadelphia, that patience has a history. It runs through the living room of Abigail Pankey, through the empty lot near Second Mount Zion Baptist Church, through community meetings and many years of paperwork. It runs, in other words, through people who decided that the neighborhood they loved was worth the long haul.
A Living Room on 39th and Folsom
In 1965, Abigail Pankey opened her home on 39th and Folsom Streets to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was in Philadelphia for the "Freedom Now" tour, and before he marched down to 40th and Lancaster, Pankey made lunch for King and his entourage, while about 300 neighborhood onlookers crowded outside her brick rowhouse.
That detail — that the movement passed through her living room — says something about who Abigail Pankey was in Mantua. She wasn't a bystander to history. She was one of its local architects.
Pankey was a leader of the Mantua Housing Committee and co-founder of the Philadelphia Anti-Poverty Coalition (Women's Community Revitalization Project, Abigail Pankey Apartments announcement, March 2026). She understood housing not as an abstraction or a policy problem, but as the foundation of everything else a community needs: safety, stability, the ability to stay.
Anti-Poverty Coalition – Abigail Pankey in back row, sitting third from the right
She is gone now, but her legacy has not stopped evolving. This spring the Women's Community Revitalization Project (WCRP) opened the Abigail Pankey Apartments during Women's History Month, providing 32 permanently affordable units at N 38th & Brown Streets in Mantua, housing women in her name and spirit. The apartments are 100% affordable to families making no more than 60% of area median income. The land itself was sourced through the Philadelphia Land Bank in collaboration with Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier and financing was secured through the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency (PHFA) using Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (Lorissa Luciani, Executive Director of WCRP).
Abigail Pankey's Family vising the Abigail Pankey Apartments in March 2026
Pankey's legacy continues to run deep throughout Philadelphia as three women in her family are actively carrying her work forward: Her granddaughter, Evan Spencer is a project manager at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Justice, committed to research and advocacy that uplifts Black communities in West Philadelphia. Her daughter, Marian Pankey, who was present as a teenager when King came through their home in 1965, became a teacher in the city, and Veronica Pankey, Abigail's other daughter, sits on WCRP's Housing Committee today — present at the table as the organization works to ensure that Mantua's future includes the people who built it (Lorissa Luciani, Executive Director of WCRP).
Just steps from where Pankey once lived, organized, and hosted a movement, the neighborhood now has an affordable housing development that bears her name.
An Empty Lot and a Calling
When Reverend James Moore Sr. arrived at Second Mount Zion Baptist Church in 1986, he noticed the vacant land nearby. The lot sat unused, overgrown, a gap in the streetscape of a neighborhood that already had too many gaps. For years, he thought about what could fill it.
"I saw that empty spot," he recalls. "I believe that, as God would have it, we are to be fruitful and multiply in all areas — that does not mean just in humanity, but we are to be fruitful with the land, and good stewards of the land." (Interview with Reverend James Moore Sr., 2026)
His first instinct was a church and life center. But when he turned to the community — guided by what he calls a "ministry driven by needs" — housing rose to the top of the list. Affordable housing for older adults was what Mantua needed most. And so that became the mission.
Reverend Moore grew up in Sylvania, Georgia, a small farming town, and came north to Philadelphia in 1972 to find work in technology — first at Philco Ford, then at Narco Avionics, where he spent twelve years working on digital equipment for aircraft. He brought with him a set of values forged in a close-knit agrarian community: fellowship, consistency, patience, and the belief that you speak to your neighbors when you pass them on the street. Philadelphia was a different world, but those values didn't change. They just found new ground.
"Anybody who focuses and can stay focused will always accomplish what they set out to do," he says. "And I know how to be patient. Patience does not mean that I'm not doing anything. Patience means that I'm just working at it until it happens."
He worked at it for years. He formed a CDC, assembled a team, and navigated the process that every affordable housing developer in Philadelphia knows well: the coalition-building, the political relationships, the funding applications, the waiting. Former Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell helped point him in the right direction, and five years of formal development later — and decades of dreaming before that — Reverend James Moore Senior, Triangle Village opened its doors.
Reverend Moore speaking at the Ribbon Cutting of his namesake building
Jamie Gautheir (Left) and Senator Vincent Hughes stand behind Rev. Moore
Triangle Village is a 40-unit, three-story affordable housing development for older adults at North 37th Street and Mantua Avenue, developed by Elon Affordable Housing, LLC in partnership with Second Mount Zion Baptist Church. Financing was secured through the PHFA using Low-Income Housing Tax Credits; construction began in January 2024 and the ceremonial groundbreaking was held in May of that year.
What It Actually Takes
The story of the Abigail Pankey Apartments and Reverend James Moore Senior Triangle Village is also, quietly, a story about how hard it is to build affordable housing in Philadelphia — and how much we ask of the people who try.
The primary financing mechanism for affordable housing across the country is the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC — a federal program that converts tax credits into private equity investment. For Triangle Village, that process attracted $11.7 million in equity from Hudson Housing Capital and Citizens Bank (Francis Vargas, President of Elon Affordable Housing). This example shows it is the most powerful tool the affordable housing sector has but it is also extraordinarily complex.
Groundbreaking of Reverend James Moore Senior, Triangle Village
Left to Right: De'Wayne Drummond, Darren Simpson, Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, Reverend Moore, Senator Vincent Hughes, Robin Weissmann (ED & CEO of PHFA), Representative Dwight Evans, Francis Vargas (President of Elon Affordable Housing), Aren Platt (Deputy Mayor)
To access LIHTC, a developer must navigate a competitive application process administered by the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, assemble a financing stack that typically involves multiple public and private sources, secure political relationships at every level of government, and demonstrate organizational capacity — all before a single shovel breaks ground. For a faith community like Second Mount Zion, the answer was partnership: Reverend Moore joined forces with Elon Affordable Housing, LLC, a seasoned affordable housing developer, bringing together deep community roots and the technical expertise that LIHTC demands. It is a model that points the way for other congregations and neighborhood organizations that have the vision and the relationships but need an experienced partner to navigate the financing.
"There is so much bureaucracy you have to go through," Reverend Moore says, "that most churches are not prepared to do it."
WCRP took a different but equally intentional path. As an experienced nonprofit developer, WCRP had the capacity to lead the Abigail Pankey Apartments project internally — but only because of years of work building trust and genuine partnership in the community before a single application was filed. WCRP's process begins long before blueprints: their Organizing and Advocacy Team canvasses the neighborhood, maps community assets, identifies local leaders, and maintains an ongoing database of residents who have expressed a need for affordable housing. Through door knocking, one-on-one meetings, community gatherings, and flyer distributions, WCRP ensures that communities have real control over how development happens (Lorissa Luciani, Executive Director of WCRP).
Abigail Pankey Apartments rendering
For the Abigail Pankey Apartments, that process meant early and sustained engagement with the Mantua Civic Association, Mount Vernon CDC, the Mantua Urban Peace Garden, and other local leaders and residents — conversations that began before the project was even conceived and that continue today. Community members identified through that process are brought onto WCRP's Advocacy Committee, which supports the development of leadership skills among people impacted by housing injustice. There are Mantua community members who sit not only on the Advocacy Committee, but on WCRP's Housing Committee itself (Lorissa Luciani, Executive Director of WCRP).
WCRP also holds all its projects in a Community Justice Land Trust, ensuring that affordability is not just a feature of a single funding cycle, but a permanent commitment. And the commitment to residents doesn't end at move-in: WCRP provides supportive services to tenants in all 32 units, acting as resource brokers and drawing on a model the organization has refined since 1992.
The timeline for both projects reflects the true difficulty of this work. From the moment a community organization identifies a need to the moment a tenant receives keys, five to ten years is not unusual. The vision for both the Abigail Pankey Apartments and Triangle Village took longer. And that timeline isn't abstract — it represents years during which families and older adults in Mantua went without stable, affordable housing designed with them in mind.
Two different models, the same underlying truth: building affordable housing that is genuinely rooted in a community requires either bringing in the right partners or becoming the kind of organization that has earned the community's trust over years. Neither path is quick. Both are necessary.
A Neighborhood in Flux
Mantua is changing — and the data tells a stark story. The northern part of Philadelphia's 19104 zip code has some of the highest rates of vacant parcels in the city — around 25 percent. In response, the neighborhood has received four major federal and philanthropic designations — a HUD Choice Neighborhood, a LISC Sustainable Community, a Promise Zone, and an Opportunity Zone — reflecting both its persistent challenges and the concentrated investment flowing in.That investment, while bringing resources, has also accelerated pressure on longtime residents. A market study conducted as part of WCRP's application to PHFA found that household incomes above $150,000 in Mantua's primary market area grew by more than 1,800 percent between 2000 and 2022, while households earning $35,000 or less declined by nearly 14 percent over the same period — and are projected to continue shrinking (WCRP's Development Synopsis to PHFA).
Reverend Moore feels that pressure acutely. "I see this community continuing to change," he says. "I see more gentrification. This may be the next Society Hill." He pauses. "That's how fast it's changing." He is not naïve about what that means. "There will be no middle ground," he says. "It's going to be one end or the other end. And that's what bothers me. That's why I work as hard as I do — to make sure that folk are able to stay in the community."
The Abigail Pankey Apartments and Triangle Village are part of that work. Both sit within walking distance of the McMichael Elementary School and the Miles Mack Playground, and across the street from the Mantua Urban Peace Garden — a reminder that affordable housing is never just about a roof, but about the full fabric of a neighborhood's life. The Mantua Civic Association, Mount Vernon CDC, and other local organizations have been engaged in the conversation about the neighborhood's future from the beginning — not as afterthoughts, but as co-architects of what comes next.
Taken together, these projects and organizations represent something intentional: a cluster of permanently affordable housing and community anchors holding ground in a neighborhood that gentrification could otherwise sweep clean.
Reverend James Moore Senior Triangle Village Rendering
The word Reverend Moore keeps returning to is fellowship. It is the value he brought from Georgia that Philadelphia couldn't shake loose. And increasingly, it describes what is being built in this corner of Mantua — not just housing, but a place where people can remain neighbors.
A Moment to Build On
Philadelphia is in the midst of its most ambitious housing push in recent memory. Mayor Cherelle Parker's Housing Opportunities Made Easy — the H.O.M.E. initiative — is a $2 billion plan to build and preserve 30,000 units of housing across the city, described by Parker as "the largest single investment in housing in Philadelphia history." City Council approved an $800 million bond to fund it, with the first $400 million to be issued in fiscal year 2026.
Part of what makes the H.O.M.E. initiative significant for communities like Mantua is its emphasis on streamlining the processes that have long made affordable housing development so difficult. Mayor Parker's plan calls for reforming land use procedures, cleaning up city zoning codes, and expediting the Land Bank's ability to bring publicly owned land into productive use — the same Land Bank that made the Abigail Pankey Apartments and Triangle Village sites possible. Francis Vargas, President of Elon Affordable Housing, puts it plainly: “Setting aside land bank parcels for affordable housing is good policy.” For faith-based developers and small nonprofits that want to provide more affordable housing in their communities, those changes could matter enormously — not by eliminating the complexity of affordable housing finance, but by reducing the unnecessary friction layered on top of it.
Reverend Moore notes the shift in the city's posture with cautious optimism. "Mayor Parker gives us more hope when it comes down to dealing with the community and housing," he says.
There is also room to think more ambitiously about the tools themselves. Other states have found ways to increase the power of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit by layering state-level credits on top of the federal program, reducing financing gaps and making deals easier to close. Pennsylvania has a state Housing Tax Credit program, but advocates have long argued for its expansion. State Senator Vincent Hughes, who attended the Triangle Village groundbreaking, has pointed to the scale of opportunity: 'We have a $14 billion surplus in Pennsylvania. If we invest those dollars back into the people of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, we can do more for affordable housing…Free those dollars to free our community'
Increasing the value of credits available in high-need communities like Mantua or creating expedited application pathways for community-rooted developers, could help close the gap between the scale of the need and the pace of production.
Senator Vincent Hughes speaking at the Rev. James Moore Senior Triangle Village Groundbreaking
Left: Jamie Gauthier, Right: Reverend Moore and Darren Simpson
Showing Up
Sixty years separate Abigail Pankey's work on the Mantua Housing Committee from the opening of her namesake apartment building and Reverend James Moore Senior Triangle Village across the street. In that span: a city transformed, a neighborhood battered and beginning to rebuild, and a quiet, stubborn insistence by a handful of people that the community was worth fighting for.
Reverend Moore was in Georgia for most of Pankey's years of organizing. He didn't know her. But he is, unmistakably, her heir — not by lineage, but by commitment. Both understood housing as an act of love for a place and its people. Both navigated systems that were not built with them in mind. Both kept going anyway.
At Triangle Village, the tenants seem to be very happy, Reverend Moore reports. The community room is being used for Second Mount Zion Baptist Church meetings and Phase 2 is being planned. Across the street, residents are moving into Abigail Pankey apartments and the community garden grows.
In Mantua, sixty years of showing up is starting to look like something.
Abigail Pankey
Triangle Village was developed by Elon Affordable Housing, LLC in partnership with the Second Mount Zion Baptist Church and opened in the summer of 2025. The Abigail Pankey Apartments were developed by the Women's Community Revitalization Project (WCRP) and opened in March 2026. Both projects were supported with financing from the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency (PHFA) and the City of Philadelphia.
CBP Architects was the Architect for Triangle Village and CICADA Architecture was the architect for Abigail Pankey Apartments. Domus Construction was the general contractor for both buildings.
Written by Robyn Savacool, an architect at CBP Architects. Research and drafting were assisted by Claude, AI (Anthropic). All reporting, interviews, and editorial decisions are the author's own.
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