Octavia Hill Association

The Octavia Hill Association was incorporated in 1896 to improve working class housing conditions through the sympathetic management of dwellings which it purchased and renovated. The Association's activities were modeled after the work in London of Octavia Hill, with whom one of its founders, Helen Parrish, had studied. The founders wished to demonstrate that the housing business and charitable works could be successfully combined. They wanted to manage clean, sanitary, safe houses for their black and immigrant tenants and make a profit at the same time; their motto being "Philanthropy and Four Percent." The Association bought rundown properties, usually row houses, improved them and rented them to persons they thought could maintain them. It also managed houses for other owners, and eventually built a limited number of houses under the aegis of the Model Homes Company. By 1916 the Association owned or managed over four hundred houses. The Octavia Hill Association's major period as a growing and pioneering reform organization ended in the 1920s, largely as a result of financial pressures (the stockholders wanted their four percent) and changes in the housing market.

A key feature of the Associations's work from the beginning was the "Friendly Rent Collector" who was to insure regular payments, inspect the premises, and instruct the tenants in cleanliness, sanitation and good housekeeping. In its early years the Association's efforts led to block cleanups, new kindergartens and playgrounds in the area of its most intensive work, the Southwark black and immigrant neighborhood stretching from Lombard Street to Washington Avenue, and Seventh Street to Front Street. It also had properties in Germantown, Kensington and Manayunk. The Association worked with neighborhood agencies, lobbied in Harrisburg for various housing bills, and participated in the drafting of the Philadelphia Housing Code (passed 1913). In 1909 it took the initiative in organizing the Housing Association of Delaware Valley.