In spring 2025, with the housing bond, the Mayor and City Council agreed to fast-track 1,000 lots for Turn the Key homes. No list has been published. This is Build Philly Now's: 1,000 homes on 1,045 vacant public lots, in every Council district, ranked by building activity nearby, the strength of the home market, and access to transit and jobs. The map also shows the public sites better suited to apartments and the city blocks where public land is a large share, for larger projects.
Move the sliders to re-rank the Turn the Key list and watch the map change: black rings mark sites your weights add, hollow green circles mark sites they drop. Turn layers on and off in the panel, click a site for its details, and zoom in to see each lot's outline. Click a row in the list below to jump to it.
5,524 lots citywide, after excluding built, licensed, committed, park and garden land.
District 5 holds 43% of the eligible public lots and District 7 another 21%; Districts 6, 9 and 10 have fewer than 50 each. To spread the program across the city, each district first gets its 30 highest-scoring homes (or all it has), and no district takes more than 45% of the list. Without that limit, District 5 would take 537 of the 1,000 homes.
Eligible vacant public lots by owner.
The City, the Land Bank and the Redevelopment Authority hold 84% of the eligible lots; City Council can transfer their land by ordinance. The Housing Authority holds 779 lots, which need federal (HUD) approval to sell. State, federal and transit agencies hold the rest, 80 lots in all.
The bars follow the weights set on the map.
| Rank | Site (address) | Council district | Neighborhood | Homes | Owner | Score |
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Lot size is not what holds the list back. Turn the Key homes stand on lots as narrow as 12 feet and as shallow as 38 feet. The median lot on this list is 15 feet wide. Small public lots that touch other public land are combined into one site.
A site is kept for multifamily housing when a small apartment building fits on it and it sits on a corner, a major street or near a rail station in a strong market. On the 83 smaller of these sites, homes compare as follows:
CMX-2, RM-1 and CMX-2.5 are City zoning districts that allow apartments; figures are the most homes each allows. District 10's public land stays with Turn the Key.
Public land also comes in larger pieces. On 56 city blocks, vacant public land zoned for housing forms 63 contiguous assemblages of at least 10,000 square feet, counting the private vacant lots attached to them: 28.9 acres of public land on 422 lots, concentrated in Eastwick, North Central, Logan and Elmwood. 33 of them are entirely public; 15 more need a deal with only one or two private owners. 20 run along a single blockface, 12 wrap a corner and 21 reach through the block from front to back. 3 sit on blocks that are almost entirely vacant. 12 larger tracts are set aside because the land is mostly trees, mostly unbuildable on aerial review or owned by an agency the City cannot convey by ordinance. These suit a single mixed-income or tax-credit (LIHTC) project better than lot-by-lot homes, though many would need an agreement among several public owners or rezoning; 76 lots on the Turn the Key list sit in 12 of them.
The map draws each assemblage with its public lots shaded and its private vacant lots in gold; the download lists each one's public and private land, blockface, frontage and the private owners a developer would need to deal with.
417 more lots are too small or too shallow for a home, alone or combined with the public lots they touch; they suit side yards for neighbors or larger assemblages with private land. Active community gardens are excluded, and 39 lots beside a garden are held out until garden groups confirm.
Every vacant public lot zoned single-family, plus rowhouse-sized lots zoned RM-1, RM-2 or RMX-3 (multifamily districts): under 20 feet wide and too shallow for a small apartment building. Excluded: lots with a new-construction permit since 2018, a business license or a use permit; lots the Land Bank has already approved or sold; parks; community gardens; and lots already listed as Turn the Key sites. Of 6,588 public lots considered, 1,064 are excluded; the reason for each is in the second download.
Each lot gets a score out of 100: 50% home market strength, 40% building activity nearby, 10% access.
A lot smaller than any Turn the Key home has been built on (12 feet wide, 38 feet deep or 588 square feet) is combined with the public lots it touches and adds one home per 981 square feet, the median Turn the Key lot. A row that never reaches 38 feet deep adds none. Sites over two acres were checked against aerial imagery and count only their buildable share. A site's score is the average of its lots.
Each district first gets its 30 highest-scoring homes, or all it has; the remaining homes go to the highest scores citywide until the list reaches 1,000, with no district above 45% of the homes.
Blocks are the areas enclosed by the City's street centerlines (alleys excluded); each parcel belongs to the block holding its center. Within a block, public vacant land zoned for housing and private vacant land (coded vacant, no new-construction permit since 2018) are joined where lots touch. A connected group is an assemblage when it holds at least 10,000 square feet of public land on two or more parcels; a single large public parcel appears with the apartment sites instead. Each lot's front street is the nearest named street; an assemblage on one street is a single blockface, on two streets that meet at it a corner, and on two streets that do not, a through-block site. Its private owners are the owners of the private vacant lots in it. Blocks at least 75% vacant are near-full, at least 90% full. Park, open-space and right-of-way land is excluded throughout.
Size alone made some large sites look like the best opportunities. A site of at least 100,000 square feet is set aside, and shown faint on the map with the reasons in its details, when it is at least half tree canopy (City 2018 land cover), when aerial review found under half of it buildable, when an owner is not the City, Land Bank, Redevelopment Authority or Housing Authority (the agencies whose land moves by Council ordinance or the HUD process), or when at least half is already built or paved. Set-aside sites stay in the downloads, and the headline totals leave them out. Navy Yard land, which is federal or Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development property, is excluded throughout. Land cover shows trees, water and paving but not use, so the School District's athletic fields, which read as open grass, are caught by the owner test.
City of Philadelphia (OPA property records, L&I permits and licenses, street centerlines, Parks & Recreation), Philadelphia Land Bank and PHDC settlement records and Turn the Key brochures, PHS and Neighborhood Gardens Trust garden lists, Census tracts, Esri World Imagery. Data as of October 1, 2026.
Lot score = 40% building activity + 50% market + 10% access, each on a 0-100 scale. Sites group lots that are combined into one development; "Site" values match across both files.