A fire in Philadelphia killed 12 people, including 9 children. Was cramped housing partly to blame?

Nine children were among the 12 people killed when a fire ripped through an overcrowded row home in Philadelphia’s Fairmount section that apparently had no working smoke detectors, according to fire officials.

Three sisters and several of their children lost their lives January 5 in Philadelphia’s deadliest single fire in more than a century, officials said. The blaze was the deadliest fire at a U.S. residential apartment building since 2017, when 13 people died in an apartment in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association. That fire started after a 3-year-old boy was playing with stove burners.

At least two people were hospitalized, and some others managed to escape from the three-story brick duplex owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, the city’s public housing agency and the state’s largest landlord.

Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel said a Christmas tree ignited by a lighter is believed to have started the fire that torched the rowhome.

Fires involving Christmas trees are much more likely to be fatal than other types of house fires, according to the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit safety group, reports the Associated Press. A live tree that has dried out can be fully engulfed within 15 or 20 seconds.

“These can get very, very big very, very fast if these trees are drying out,” said Isaac Leventon, a fire research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “At the end of the day, a dry tree can represent upwards of 10 or 20 pounds of wood.”

While officials may determine that a child playing with a lighter near a Christmas tree as the official cause of the fire, the conditions that led to the fire should be investigated and larger social questions should be asked. 

Craig Murphy, first deputy fire commissioner said none of the four smoke alarms appeared to be working in the home. How is this possible? Who is responsible for making sure the alarms are working?

Philadelphia Housing Authority officials said the alarms had been inspected annually, and at least two were replaced in 2020, with batteries replaced in the others at that time. They said the last inspection was in May 2021. Smoke detectors were working at that time, officials said.

If the public housing officials’ statements are accurate, why weren't the smoke alarms working at the time of the fire?

This tragedy also raises larger questions about the desperate and deadly social economic conditions of poor people who live in Philadelphia, the poorest of the 10 largest cities in the United States, according to the latest U.S. Census report.   

Firefighters found that 18 people had been inside the four-bedroom public housing unit, triple the number of people who had moved in a decade earlier. 

In 2021, there were 14 people living in the upstairs four-bedroom apartment, according to Kelvin Jeremiah, the housing authority’s president and CEO. Six family members had moved there a decade ago, and the family had grown substantially since then, adding eight children, he said.

PHA “does not evict people because they have children,” Jeremiah said, responding to reporters' questions about whether the house was big enough for so many people.

“This was an intact family who chose to live together. We don’t kick out our family members ... who might not have other suitable housing options,” he said.

“All of us at PHA are shaken,” he said.

“The question of family size is one that perhaps, frankly, you guys don’t understand,” Jeremiah said to reporters, according to the New York Times. “I grew up similarly, in a unit with 16 people. It’s intergenerational. It’s a question, perhaps, that resonates particularly with Black and brown communities.”

Claudia D. Solari, a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said that children who grow up in overcrowded homes have more health and behavior problems. Arguing that an overcrowded apartment is better than homelessness is like trying to decide the lesser of two evils, Solari said. “They are both evil.”

The victims of the deadly fire in Philadelphia lived in a neighborhood better than many low-income families. They lived in “scattered site” Section 8 public housing which allows poorer families to live in gentrified neighborhoods, like Fairmount, they could otherwise not afford. Fairmount was once a working-class section of Philadelphia that has experienced several waves of gentrification. The median sales price of a home in Fairmount is about $400,000.

However, upkeep is a challenge of the scattered site housing in Philadelphia, where houses are on average nearly a century old, said Kevin C. Gillen, a senior research fellow at the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University.

“This is older housing in need of substantial rehabilitation,” said John Kromer, who was the city’s director of housing from 1992 to 2001 and briefly served as the interim chief of the housing authority. “Without enough funding to support a program like that, I think it’s inevitable that problems will occur.”

While housing costs in Philadelphia are not nearly as high as those in cities like New York and San Francisco, a safe and affordable place to live is still difficult to obtain for tens of thousands of the city’s residents. In Philadelphia, nearly a quarter of the city’s population is below the poverty line; among families headed by single mothers, like the victims in the recent fire, the number rises to 42 percent.

Officials say the waiting list for public housing has been closed since 2013, except for older people and those with disabilities. The list for Section 8 vouchers for federal rent subsidies has been closed for even longer. According to a 2016 assessment of housing needs in the city, Philadelphia is supplying less than 12 percent of the publicly supported housing needed for its low-income households.

“Incomes are really low and the housing stock is really, really, really limited,” said Dina Schlossberg, executive director of Regional Housing Legal Services in Pennsylvania. “What is the standard we accept as a norm in our society for people who don’t have a lot of money and need a place to live?”

This leaves limited options for a low-income family. The scarcity of subsidized housing has led to desperate families taking in relatives to live together in cramped housing.

“Households do everything they can to remain housed,” said Vincent Reina, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. “They make dire trade-offs: trading off on food, health care and other basic needs.”

The fire that raged through the public housing unit in Philadelphia revealed that too many families living in cramped conditions have few options, with thousands waiting for subsidized housing.

In a statement at a night vigil, relatives said the matriarch of their family had lost three daughters and nine grandchildren in the blaze. The daughters were identified as Rosalee McDonald, Virginia Thomas and Quinsha White. There were two survivors, the family said. 

“Rosalee believed that it wasn’t safe,” Caleb Jones, a child therapist who worked with two of the children, said of a mother who died in the fire.

“With several people crowded into each bedroom, the family had wanted to move to a larger home for years, Jones said. But with 40,000 households already on the waiting list for public housing in Philadelphia, they had little choice.”

Irv Randolph is an award-winning journalist. For more opinions on politics, race and current affairs go to TheRandolphReport@substack.com. If you like this column please share it.