Today West Philadelphia bears one particular descriptor: gentrified. In rapidly changing neighborhoods like Old City, minority residents often suffered the brunt of such measures. By 1990, that figure had fallen to 20 percent. 2. But neither was it entirely unwelcome. In many cases, this results in the demise of historically and culturally valuable communal institutions. This new fourstory building will have 21 apartment units, and Penn Family Medicine University City will move into the first floor office space from its building a few doors down at 4623 Spruce St. After the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation purchased the property around Dock Street in 1959, many of the remaining merchants moved to the Food Distribution Center in South Philadelphia. Much of Spring Gardens Puerto Rican community decamped for neighborhoods farther north and east of Center City after their demands for affordable housing went unmet. TL;DR a "queer-friendly" inclusive coffee shop in West Philly is being destroyed by its ultra woke queer BIPOC employees. She admits that initially she and most other residents were not involved. Especially since, as Ella puts it, theres a kind of feedback loop of gentrifiers complain[ing] about gentrification without acknowledging that they're complicit., When asked what Penn owes to the communities it inhabits, Phil talks for a while before pausing to take a deep breath: It just owes them their space.. Affluent homesteaders also continued to rehabilitate row houses in neighborhoods closer to the urban core. Annabelle Williams is a sophomore in Wharton from Chester Springs, PA, studying Management and Marketing. To achieve the transformation of the area, the City Planning Commission called for the elimination of blighted late nineteenth-century buildings and retail establishments. Smith, Neil. Penns Civic House sponsored an urban studies class (URBS 178) on universitycommunity relations that addresses the schools difficult history with its surroundings. He is the co-host and producer of the podcast Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. The apartments had modern amenities and views unavailable to people who purchased a historic row house in Society Hill. In East Mount Airy there are a lot of bars, coffee shops, and parks. When he returned to the house where his mother and stepfather lived on 3643 Market Street, the neighborhood had changed. Methodology & Disclaimers For the first of three mapping layers, the city's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) used . Business owners opened smaller boutiques, restaurants, and bars that catered to youthful adults who preferred to live within walking distance of dining and other diversions. Southwark, located just south of Society Hill, was transformed into a middle-class district by the efforts of individual homesteaders and, later, real estate developers. In particular, the western stretch of this arearebranded as Graduate Hospitalsaw a dramatic influx of young, white, well-off residents, drawn by its proximity to tony Rittenhouse Square and easy accessibility to the University of Pennsylvania. I was deeply saddened. This building became a commercial property in the 1980s and later a pharmacy for Society Hill residents. Anderson, Elijah. As the smoke rose from 6221 Osage Avenue, Philadelphia residents watched through their windows or television screens in a state of stunned disbelief. Ella suggests that gentrifiers in West Philly, including Penn students, have a huge responsibility to really engage with their neighbors, old and new, and to work to make sure the neighborhood isnt pushing more people out.. In 1977, against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Penn, the University of Pennsylvanias Real Estate Development Office called the Powelton Village Development Agency (PVDA) to a meeting. Many of these working-class immigrants were employed in restaurant and domestic servicesa sector that grew along with Philadelphias affluent urban class. To assist working-class residents near Southwark who could not afford the increased costs of living in the newly gentrified neighborhood, the Philadelphia Housing Authority in the late 1960s built three apartment buildings, named the Southwark Plaza, along Washington Avenue between Third and Fifth Streets. But tensions rose as young, mostly white, suburban-raised Temple students began to move in. By the 20th century, Penn had established itself as the most wellendowed entity in West Philadelphia and maintained an uneasy symbiosis with the community. Churches and synagogues, relics of the neighborhoods immigrant past, were converted to market-rate lofts. Neighborhood shoppers were not drawn to the modern building design and its variety of restaurants and specialty shops. For years, the extant Black, Polish, and Jewish communities had mobilized to thwart the plan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Urban Renewal & Gentrification Marker. Penn also offers incentives for its faculty to reside in nearby West Philadelphia. Or does it help low-income communities? National food writers raved about South Streets burgeoning selection of gourmet restaurants, where diners could enjoy soft-shell crab tempura or salmon with sorrel beurre blanc. As the 2000s wore on, the revitalization of residential neighborhoods became the cornerstone of Philadelphias revivaleven as the city struggled to temper gentrifications most harmful consequences. Sign up for Prisms newsletter to get first access to news and analysis that makes you thinkand act. And while that goal might have seemed outlandish to many in the winter of 2021, it seems quite possible now. As more artists and young professional moved into the neighborhood, the Manayunk Development Corporation created a mixture of public programming to cater to the new audience. A minus. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. Some residents and leaders in Philadelphia are upset - the University of Pennsylvania's investments in policing and a local school have made parts of the city . He envisioned a redevelopment of the citys waterfronts, a midway closed to automobiles on Chestnut Street, and a tram that would take visitors over the Schuylkill River into Fairmount Park, site of the successful 1876 Centennial. Other gentrifying cities experimented with inclusionary zoning, which ensured new projects would include a percentage of affordable units. As part of the renewal project for Society Hill that began in 1957, three 30-story residential buildings, the Society Hill Towers, were the tallest of the construction projects and provided 720 apartments designed to attract middle-class residents. In the same period, tax credits helped spur commercial revivals in other historic neighborhoods. The gentrification of University City, or "Penntrification," forces Philadelphia's already vulnerable Black population out of their homes and brings white families and students into their former neighborhoods. In the 1970s, these investors sought to differentiate the area from the rest of South Philadelphia by renaming it Queen Village.. Revitalization efforts across the city included redeveloping older factories for new purposes. Older Penn alums may never have ventured West of 41st Street Penn students now regularly grab drinks at Local 44 at 43rd St. and Spruce or brunch at The Farmacy at 44th. Eastwick is, as he says, super residential, replete with rowhomes and momandpop shops. Ultimately, this partnership succeeded in defeating the proposed expressway. Residents say Magill has ducked meeting requests for months. By May 20, 2016. Constructed at Third and New Streets in 1902, in the 1920s Wilbur & Sons had to remove a section of the building to make room for construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). Listeners are encouraged to wrestle with questions like, "What is the impact of racist practices like redlining and gentrification on the inhabitants of the area? The concept of gentrification is a muddled one. The Gothic brick building at 47th Street that used to house West Philadelphia High School has been repurposed into West Lofts, whose marketrate apartments run from $995 for a studio to $2430 for a threebedroom. This move brought with it an influx of capital and incentives for real-estate developers to create housing for well-endowed students. This image from 1914 shows the Fish Market building, an enclosed warehouse that sold fresh fish from dozens of merchants. Penn is still displacing people, plain and simple, Casey Lynch (C 18), who has been involved with the Netter Center for four years, said. By 2010, only about 5 percent of Queen Village residents were African American. While there are many other residents and organizers involved in the coalition at this pointincluding over 50 organizations listed as allies on their websiteAlexander and Johnson represent a core aspect of the struggle: a tight relationship between militant housing activists and fiercely committed residents fighting for their community and for the ability to defend their homes from the profiteering motive of the property owner. In 2014, Philadelphia City Council enacted the Longtime Owner Occupants Program (LOOP). Census data, when adjusted for inflation, indicates a massive jump in Philadelphia property valuesan average increase 213% since 2000. But as she saw how the situation impacted more vulnerable people in the Townhomes, Alexander decided to get involved. Some residents burned trash inside their apartments for heat, or left it inside broken elevator shafts or outside the apartment buildings. After decades of slow economic decline from the loss of industrial mills and manufacturing plants, Philadelphia officials offered tax incentives to small businesses and property owners in Manayunk during the 1980s to spur redevelopment and bring more middle-class residents into the area. These land seizures, coupled with the 1963 construction of the University City Science Center, fractured the community. The Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, under President Paul Steinke, often crosses paths with Penn and Drexel. Penn, USciences, the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, Presbyterian Hospital, and Drexel formed the West Philadelphia Corporation (WPC) in 1959 and began to condemn buildings across Black Bottom. As these anchor institutions continued to attract thousands of young, highly-educated residents to Philadelphia, previously disinvested neighborhoodsfrom Spruce Hill, near the University of Pennsylvania,and Washington Square West, which adjoined Jefferson and Pennsylvania Hospitalssaw increases in population and property values. Their city had just bombed its own people. Sterling Johnson, an organizer with Philadelphia Housing Action, recalls a small meeting last fall with Gerald Sid Bolling from the Black Bottom Tribe that included some residents. In buying up properties in the Black Bottom en masse and then having landlords evict longtime residents, they made space for the nowprimarily commercial development on Market Street. As the nearby blocks of Queen Village saw large investments from city organizations to restore houses and raise property values, Southwark Plaza apartment buildings had broken elevators, limited electricity, and a trash-filled landscape. As would become common in subsequent renewal projects, a coalition of public organizations, local and federal governments, and private investors worked together to remake Society Hill. However, gentrification and racialized displacement have intensified in recent years as Penn has continued targeted investments. Pei designed the towers to incorporate floor-to-ceiling windows along the exterior wall of each apartment, giving occupants expansive views of Philadelphia or the Delaware River. But for existing communities facing the gentrification of their neighborhood, those dreams of revival were dampened by fears of displacement. 1. She recalls that the value of her parents house appreciated 400% in the time they lived in Philly. In the West Philadelphia area around Mantua, gentrification is a constant, looming concern. The disruptions of convocation and the BIA meeting and Bishop Barbers gathering all led to a response from a university representative deflecting and downplaying Penns involvement in the sale. By 1960, the surrounding suburbs were more populous than Philadelphia itself. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Seemingly overnight, gastropubs and vintage clothing stores appeared along Girard Avenue, Fishtowns commercial corridor. Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City. The candy making there gave way to residential development. This image from 1973 shows the house while the interior was still under construction. The comments are hilarious as they're self aware . Southwarks fortunes had begun to fade after World War II. In 1970, the neighborhood was nearly 50 percent Black. Business owners constructed warehouses along Dock Creek in the late 1600s so ships could unload food, materials, and other products efficiently. Penns expansion originally centered on Locust Walk. One 1978 study estimated that real estate taxes in Queen Village had increased almost 300 percent since the start of the decade. The rapid influx of wealthier homebuyers triggered alarming demographic changes. The area of the Dock Street Market in Society Hill was a place of commerce for more than two centuries before it was demolished in 1959 to allow construction of the residential Society Hill Towers. What good are HBCUs if they mirror the anti-Blackness of the US? West Philadelphia's population shifted from majority-white to majority-black between 1950 and 1960. Hunter, Marcus Anthony. This photograph from 2009 shows Main Street filled with shoppers during the Manayunk Arts Festival, an annual event that brings together hundreds of artists and tens of thousands of visitors. Refurbished Victorian houses, lofts created from abandoned manufacturing buildings, and newly constructed townhouses provided a variety of living possibilities that reflected Manayunk's history as an industrial outpost of Philadelphia. (WHYY, December 18, 2013), Mapping gentrification in Philly by tracking permits (WHYY, February 21, 2014), 'Challenges and opportunities' of gentrification discussed at weekend forum in Germantown (WHYY, April 28, 2014), Selling gentrification to neighbors of the old West Philadelphia High School building (WHYY, June 19, 2014), Gentrifying Philadelphia (WHYY, June 8, 2015), Point Breeze neighbors, beer garden developer at 'lagerheads' over collision of old and new (WHYY, July 23, 2015), Path out of gentrifying Philly neighborhoods just as likely to lead up as down, study finds (WHYY, October 15, 2105), Philadelphia City Council votes to extend 'gentrification protection' program (WHYY, March 18, 2016), Veteran says military gave him the strength to stand up to gentrification (WHYY, August 29, 2016), Philadelphia's disappearing low-cost rental housing revealed in Fed gentrification study (PlanPhilly, December 21, 2016), Exploring the past, future of Philly neighborhoods during annual Jane's Walk (WHYY, May 6, 2017), West Philly gentrification means upheaval for these longtime residents (WHYY, May 11, 2017), Pop-up exhibit in Philly's Kensington neighborhood puts focus on gentrification (WHYY, June 6, 2017), Uncertain future as Puerto Rican community faces gentrification in Norris Square (Al Dia via WHYY, December 16, 2019), Central Philadelphia Development Corporation, The City that Might Have Been: Edmund Bacon's Philadelphia (PhillyHistory.org), Philadelphia's Changing Neighborhoods: Gentrification and other shifts since 2000 (Pew Charitable Trusts), Manayunk: A Place to Drink (PhillyHistory.org), The Problems and the Promise: Gentrification in Philadelphia (Philly.com), 50 Years of Gentrification: A Timeline (NextCity.org, December 2014), Redevelopment & Preservation (Philadelphia: The Great Experiment), Form, Design, and the City (1962) (Philadelphia Department of Records), Renewal and Gentrification in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: The Great Experiment), Dock Street's Transformation Into Society Hill (Philadelphia: The Great Experiment), Uprooting Philadelphians (Philadelphia: The Great Experiment), Urban Renewal (Philadelphia: The Great Experiment), How Gentrification Can Affect Your Credit Score (Next City, October 23, 2015), Gentrification without Displacement (Philadelphia Coalition for Affordable Places, Spring 2015), These 5 Neighborhood Maps Show Roots of Gentrification (Next City), Three Maps that Explain Gentrification in Philadelphia (Plan Philly). A 2016 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that the city has lost roughly 20,000 lowcost rental units (rent and utilities under $750) since 2000. By mid-century, it had fallen into disrepair and infamyacquiring a sinister nickname, the Bloody Fifth Ward. Nevertheless, Bacon hoped that middle-class buyers would be tempted there by the promise of newly refurbished colonial-era row homes. Pictured here years before his appointment as Executive Director of the Philadelphia Housing Association, Edmund Bacon is sometimes referred to as The Father of Modern Philadelphia. Born in the Philadelphia suburbs in 1910, he studied architecture at Cornell University and introduced a plan for a new civic center for Philadelphia as part of his senior thesis. Its one of the few places where folks who are on public housing vouchers can still access things like public transportation, a public library, medical care, markets, local stores, and other essential amenities with relative ease, said Davids. Penns status as the largest employer in Philadelphia, its large endowment and the socioeconomic position of its students and staff complicates its existence in West Philadelphia. He recalls that, before much of the neighborhood was displaced, there were around 5,000 residents who cared about each other. Many of the Bottoms residents have gathered for a reunion in Fairmount Park every year since the mid1970s. (The late stage, at least for San Francisco, with its affordable housing crisis, isn't so desirable . These actions lasted for months and were eventually settled through an agreement by Philadelphia Housing Authority and the City of Philadelphia to hand over 50 vacant publicly owned houses to a community land trust. In 2013, there were still 4,000 buildings and over 10,000 lots sitting empty in Lower Northeast Philadelphia. Her father, David Comberg, teaches in the School of Design at Penn, but the family initially moved to the area for his job at UArts. W.E.B. That demonstrated to other residents that fighting back could be effective. Restoring the citys historic housing stock, Bacon reasoned, would encourage upper-income residents to move back to the citythereby stabilizing its dwindling tax base and upgrading real estate values. The land finally came under redevelopment after the Toll Brothers purchased the land in 2013 to construct condominiums. Opened in 1973, NewMarket was constructed in the middle of the block bounded by Front, Lombard, Pine, and Second Streets, which left some row houses around the block standing, like the one in the background of this 1978 image of the shopping center. Johnson attended the meeting along with his collaborator Wiley Cunningham, folks from Police Free Penn, a police abolitionist student organization from the University of Pennsylvania, and members of Penn Housing 4 All. Who has it, who doesnt, and where its spent. . Residents of neighborhoods undergoing the most rapid changes watched as their longstanding social networks evaporated. In 1970, the neighborhood had only 90 housing units; by 1990, it had 1,665. West Philly gentrification means upheaval for these longtime residents. In effect, Penn undermined its own efforts to serve its proximate community, by replacing residents with more of their own. I think for now Eastwicks outside of [Penns] reach, Phil said wryly. [citation needed] Nicetown-Tioga saw a brief spurt of urban gentrification in the early to mid-2000s. DuBois seminal 1899 work of urban sociology, The Philadelphia Negro, catalogued the lives and labors of those living in the predominantly African-American Seventh Warda narrow rectangular strip that spanned the southern edge of Center City Philadelphia, from the Schuylkill River on the west to Sixth Street on the east. Its not a fight about lofty plans for the future, but about a communitys ability to defend their actual homes. Galvanized around a struggle to defend the University City Townhomes, a 70-unit housing complex that has operated under a Section 8 project-based subsidy program for the last 40 years. Across the Delaware River, Camden, New Jersey, still awaited significant revitalization. Developers met the demand, refashioning old factories into spacious lofts. For example, when the university partnered with the school district to fund Penn Alexander Elementary in 2001, 57% of the students in its catchment area were African American; as of 2021, Black students represented less than 17% of the student body. Tracing Philadelphia and its environs since colonial times, Jeffrey Lin finds the same factors propelling neighborhood transformation today. The top three means of transportation people in West Philadelphia use to get to work are: car, bus or trolley bus and walking. Gentrification & Moving People Concluding Remarks References Philadelphia continues to have some of the highest rates of poverty in the United States. In doing so, it prompted the mass displacement of the neighborhoods poorer residents. With the rapid loss of human and monetary resources in the central city and the expansion of wealthier, primarily white suburbs, the stage had been set for gentrification in Greater Philadelphia. On South Street, the Theatre of the Living Arts put on avant-garde works under artistic director Andre Gregory. And gentrification is only now beginning to take root north of Girard Avenue, in some of the most heavily disinvested and pockmarked North Philadelphia neighborhoods (Sharswood, Brewerytown, Strawberry Mansion, Fairhill.). Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries. One afternoon in 2017, a friend sent me a picture of New Light Beulah Baptist Church being demolished. Studies have linked gentrification to a number of health problems for longterm neighborhood residents. Gentrification is nothing new, Fed economist Jeffrey Lin suggests in his paper, " Understanding Gentrification's Causes. The Plans effects were keenly felt in the Black Bottom, a primarily black and disadvantaged neighborhood that earned its name from its place at the bottom of West Philadelphia (from 32nd Street to 40th Street between Lancaster Ave and University Ave). At the peak of the housing bubble in 2008, the 19140 ZIP Code, which contains roughly Hunting Park and Nicetown-Tioga . ofGreaterPhiladelphia. Wilbur & Sons, a chocolate company established in 1884, was once a setting for the mixing and molding of chocolate candies. Theres a magic in that. A few generations ago, though, this was not the case.. To many Philadelphians, neighborhood renewal represented the best hope for the citys revitalization. San Francisco, it seems, is in a later stage of its gentrification timeline than Philadelphia. From 1997 to 2007, the median price of a single-family home rose from $86,000 to $275,000. During the 1980s, demand for these apartments exploded, and developers scrambled to meet it. Real estate prices soon reflected this surge in demand. This was the childhood church of Marian Anderson, a world-famous Black singer from South Philadelphia. Gentrification is generally good. His latest publication is Closer to Heaven: Race and Diversity in Suburban America, which will appear in the Journal of Urban History in 2015. This house on the corner of Second and Lombard Streets used building materials typically used in adjacent row houses, such as brick and concrete, but applied a modernist design to give the building its distinctive look. At first, so-called streetcar suburbs allowed the gentry to retreat to the leafy streets of Cedar Park and Upper Darby. Real estate prices skyrocketed, too; an abandoned row house that might have sold for $300 in the 1960s now commanded up to $30,000. At 78.5 percent African American in 1990, the neighborhood was less than one-third Black by 2014. After World War II, suburbanization exploded. You can see large areas gentrifying in Center City and University City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Manayunk, a working-class mill district along the Schuylkill River to the northwest of Center City, was one such area. In the 2000s, the effects of gentrification began to spill over into other neighborhoods adjacent to Center City. Phyllis Dennis (C 76), then a PVDA employee, recalls the meeting, saying that Penns representatives brought in a massive map covered in blue and red pins, which represented planned university development both on and offcampus. After serving in the United States Navy during WWII, Bacon joined the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and became the executive director of the committee in 1949. Gentrifying tracts experienced the second highest average violent crime rate between 2014 and 2019 at 13.4 per 100 residents, while non-gentrifiable tractsmostly middle- to upper-income and predominantly whitehad the lowest average violent crime rate over the six-year period at 6.7 per 100 residents. 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