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Neighbors take case against Front Street development to court
Whether they win or lose, the question remains: Is a Front Street commercial corridor in Kensington even viable, or is it just nostalgic to think so?
Neighbors take case against Front Street development to court
Residents of Kensington and Fishtown had a number of complaints about the plan by the nonprofit Women's Community Revitalization Project to bring 25 units of ultra-low-income housing onto a site that now houses an old (but technically not historic) bank building at Front and Norris streets. It was too dense, they said. There were traffic concerns. And, most of all, there was no ground-floor commercial space on this vulnerable commercial corridor. They voted against the project. WCRP took it to zoning anyway. And zoning approved it.
Now, neighbors are fighting back with an appeal at the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. But whether they win or lose, the question remains: Is a Front Street commercial corridor in Kensington even viable, or is it just nostalgic to think so?
"That district is zoned commercial," says Jordan Rushie, a Fishtown resident and lawyer who filed the appeal on behalf of nearby neighbors Karen Lewis and Carmen Bolden. At least one local civic group has agreed to file an amicus brief in support. "One of the things that really stuck out to the community is a couple blocks from there, there's a lot of vacant land in the area [of East Kensington] that's zoned residential, and in that case I think people would have been OK with putting in low-income housing. It just seemed an odd location to put it in a commercial corridor when there's so much vacant land just blocks away." He adds, "This is a burgeoning business community. The community view was if low-income housing goes right there it's going to hinder that development."
Of course, zoning in many parts of Philly is way outdated, which is why the process of remapping the entire city is well underway. David Fecteau, the city planner who will be working on the district plan covering this area starting next spring, says he's not sure yet whether Front Street will keep its commercial zoning. No market study has been done, but the overabundance of empty retail space may speak volumes. "We do have way too much retail space left over from years ago, because we did lose so much population. But I don't have a sense of whether we have too little retail there to serve the population now," he says.
Options include changing zoning to residential or a mix of commercial and residential, or or creating nodes of consolidated commercial activity along an otherwise residential strip. "We can throw out all the incentives we want to and all the zoning we want to, but in the end if no one is willing to open stores or other types of retail or commercial development, then it's not going to happen," he says.
But one member of the East Kensington Neighborhood Association wrote to CP of the WCRP site: "This corner is an important five-point intersection of major cross-streets. Banks just weren't built everywhere — they were built at important intersections vital to civic life. It is a huge mistake to replace this with housing. We need to revitalize Front Street with active first-floor uses, not closed doors and closed curtains."
WCRP — which picked up the land from the locally powerful Norris Square Civic Assocation, and apparently got the organization's support for the project early on — received backing from Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez, who had only just finished battling the NSCA over the plan for redevelopment of St. Boniface Church complex.
But after WCRP's project was voted down by neighbors, they opted to go door to door rather than returning to the community for a second meeting. WCRP's Paul Aylesworth wrote to local civic groups that the organization was mostly unable to change its plans and "for that reason we do not see the utility of having another community meeting."
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