|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
October 10-16, 2002 city beat If You Level It, Will They Come?
Not necessarily, say developers who want to rehab buildings near Temple University. Jonathan Weiss watches as a demolition worker stabs through the roof of 1519 Oxford St., causing debris and dust to shower down onto the rubble below. “This house was totally salvageable,” he says as he walks past the townhouse, two blocks west of Temple University in North Philadelphia. When Jonathan Weiss says a building is salvageable, he knows what he's talking about. As a real estate developer and preservationist, he has renovated 17 historic buildings in the vicinity of Temple University since starting his business, Templetown Realty, six years ago. Most of the buildings Weiss has rehabbed were vacant before he purchased them. Catering to Temple undergrads, Weiss charges modest rents, averaging about $400 a month per person. While his properties have stunning Victorian facades, Weiss does the interiors up in a style he calls "basic but nice." The house at 1519 Oxford is around the corner from Weiss' real estate office. While 1519 Oxford is certainly not the first century-old building in North Philadelphia to be leveled by the city, it could be a harbinger of things to come. The pace of demolitions is expected to speed up because the neighborhood west of Temple University has been targeted by the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI). Mayor Street's signature urban revitalization program calls for demolishing large swaths of blighted housing to make way for private developers.
NTI officials like Redevelopment Authority Executive Director Herb Wetzel aren't entirely sure what the neighborhood will look like post-NTI. "We'll probably be assembling a lot of vacant land up there but banking it for development, that has yet to be determined," he says. From his work in the neighborhood, Weiss is confident that the Temple area has the potential to transform itself into a vibrant mixed-income community if its Victorian housing stock were to be rehabilitated. "I don't know if it will ever be like what happened at University City, but it could definitely move in that direction," he says. One positive sign is that demand for student housing in the neighborhood is rising. Angry Temple students protested in April 2000, decrying administration plans to house them in apartments on the Ben Franklin Parkway and City Avenue. They preferred living in the heart of North Philadelphia to these upscale addresses. During the protest, 200 Temple students blocked traffic on Broad Street for an hour. Temple University Vice President Bill Bergman, who handles real estate matters, concedes that even with the new dorms and private housing that have been added to the market in the last two years, there's more demand for nearby student housing than can be met. The boom in student housing is evident from the sparkling, renovated warehouse next to the Temple University regional rail station. Center City real estate developer Ron Caplan opened the development, called the Kardon Building, in August. Despite rental rates starting at $1,050 a month for a studio, the 186-unit building is 90 percent leased. More than 30 new units will be added before the start of next semester in an adjoining warehouse building currently under renovation. But how will the rapid changes in the neighborhood be taken into account in the city's plans for the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative? In August, as Mayor Street and district Councilman Darrell Clarke were cutting the ribbon on the Kardon Building, inspectors from the Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) were walking the streets of the neighborhood west of Broad, tagging every vacant building with orange violation stickers. In the past, L&I tagged only buildings that they considered to be dangerous, but under NTI, they have been ordered to tag any building that is vacant. Of the 7,500 properties L&I inspected, 500 were cited. L&I sent letters to the owners of tagged buildings notifying them that their buildings were "unsafe" or "imminently dangerous." The letters informed owners that they must either repair their buildings or demolish them. If the landlords failed to take action, the letters said, the city would do it for them, demolishing the building and then billing the owner. The goal of NTI demolitions is to create large parcels of land that can be bid out to developers who will build modern housing with suburban-style amenities. In place of the townhouses of North Philadelphia, NTI planners envision single-family homes with garages and lawns. But Jonathan Weiss and Ron Caplan have found that there is a market for housing near Temple University -- and what that market demands is not lawns and picket fences but renovation of existing housing into charming brownstone apartments or trendy warehouse lofts. This squares with historic preservationists' criticisms of NTI. John Gallery, who heads the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, has been a voice in the wilderness arguing for the importance of historic preservation in Strawberry Mansion, the city's most blighted neighborhood and the first target for NTI. But he argues that even those who disagree with him on the viability of historic preservation in Strawberry Mansion should take preservation seriously near Temple University. Temple, he says, is a "potential economic generator" that could spur the revitalization of the neighborhood. But by all accounts, the man who will make the final decision over what gets knocked down -- district Councilman Darrell Clarke -- is not interested in historic preservation. "The reality is that given the condition of the properties in my district, the rehabilitation costs associated with a house... is prohibitive," Clarke says. "It's not cost-effective to spend $250,000 to rehab a building and then sell it for $50,000." Jewell Williams, who represents the same district in the statehouse but has no direct power over NTI, is more sympathetic to historic preservation. Still, he acknowledges the tension between preserving historic buildings and creating decent housing for constituents who need it. "Do you spend $200,000 rehabbing a brownstone or do you create five houses?" he asks. But Williams sees the potential for students to help preserve the historic housing in the neighborhood. He mentions that many senior citizens can't afford to maintain their three-story brownstones and that renting out a room or two to students could help. Williams also notes that construction in general is very expensive in the city because "Philadelphia is a union town and we're covered by the Davis-Bacon Act," which requires that work on government projects be done at the prevailing union wage. Without directly criticizing the mayor, Williams' comments hint at what many are quietly saying about NTI: that the mayor should have won concessions from the construction unions on their residential construction rates before embarking on NTI. But the mayor has little incentive to spar with the building trades unions since their backing pushed him over the top in his razor-thin election victory. And as the mayor's closest ally in City Council, Darrell Clarke is probably the least likely person in Philadelphia to present an alternative vision for the mayor's pet program, NTI. Even if Clarke had the inclination, it wouldn't make political sense for him to cater to the student population of his district since young people are rarely registered to vote in the district where they go to school, if at all. Clarke sees the key role of NTI as helping the neighborhood "connect the dots," the dots being a patchwork of subsidized housing developments. Thus far this fall, the centerpiece of Councilman Clarke's legislative agenda has been a measure to protect low-income homeowners from property tax increases. Clarke refers to this piece of legislation proudly as "my anti-gentrification bill." According to Jonathan Weiss, there is some anti-gentrification sentiment among longtime neighborhood people. An elderly resident of one of the blocks he's done work on complained to Weiss that his student tenants host loud parties. Weiss responded that the brownstone he fixed up used to be a crack house. "At least when it was a crack house it was quiet," was the response. Despite the active real estate market, little commercial development has taken root in the area. Students still have to head up to the Pathmark by the North Philadelphia train station to do their grocery shopping. Weiss says he has told friends who own bars in the suburbs that there is great opportunity near Temple for nightspots, but he says none of them are interested in doing business in North Philly after dark. So could the neighborhood surrounding Temple University really become the next University City? When asked what the long-term vision was for this section of Philadelphia, NTI officials at the City Planning Commission suggested contacting the Redevelopment Authority. When Redevelopment Authority Executive Director Herb Wetzel was asked the same question, he suggested contacting the City Planning Commission. When the situation was explained to him, Wetzel chuckled and then cracked a joke about his vision for the neighborhood: "If they don't have one, I don't have one." 
-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
