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Archive: December, 2011
Philadelphia magazine certainly aims to please a high-end suburban readership (Top Doctors, Top Dentists, Top Homes! And newsflash: wealthy moms think smoking pot is cool). But they have perhaps never pissed off city-dwellers as much as when they decided to include the Mummers on their “10 Things We Need To Get Rid Of” list—part of December's mind-numbing “List Issue.”
Tomorrow, the Philadelphia Housing Authority is set to host a second auction of its surplus inventory of vacant properties around the city — mostly vacant, that is: One, the house on the 3400 block of N. Marshall, has been occupied for twelve years, by Mildred Camacho and her family.
Camacho is, technically speaking, a squatter — she moved, with her four children, into the house in 1999 and has been there ever since, investing considerable dollars in fixing it up. She's not asking to keep the house for free: Camacho simply wants PHA to remove the house from its auction and sell it directly to her rather than put her at risk of being displaced by the highest bidder.
The office of Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez, which has intervened on Camacho's behalf, has asked PHA to do just that — pull the house from tomorrow's auction. But, according to Sanchez' office, Community Development director Michael Johns has indicated the agency will not."
"Mildred Camacho's case is an example of when the bureacracy cannot think out of the box," says Sanchez. "She took a vacant PHA (which would have been demolished by now) and invested thousands of dollars. She is willing to buy it, and PHA is treating her like an illegal squatter."
Camacho herself says the house was little more than a shell when she moved her family in:"This was an abandoned crack house — I put everything in here, the water pipes, the heating, everything," Camacho told CP today.
Camacho now lives the house with her daughter, three granddaughters, her mother, who has dementia, and her brother, who has Downs Syndrome. She says she found out her house was going to be up for auction by accident — and that PHA hadn't sent her so much as a piece of mail.
(PHA has not yet provided any official response to several calls and emails from CP; we'll update this post with any comment).
Updated: PHA provided the following comment:
PHA has the largest inventory of scattered site properties of any housing authority in the country with more than 7,100 throughout the city. Approximately 4,000 of them are occupied by PHA renters. Among the remaining approximately 2,000, some properties have been vacant for years while others have been occupied illegally, as is the case with 3431 N. Marshall. Unfortunately, this family has resided illegally in this property and unlike legal renters or homeowners, they have not paid rent or water for years. While many families have had to sacrifice during these tough economic times, this family has lived rent-free for 11 years. The family is welcome to attend the auction and bid on the PHA property. If they make a successful bid and buy the property, they can legally reside there.
This isn't the first the PHA has heard about Camacho. PHA officials have known she and her family were living there since 1999, according to a KYW news article from that year, which says that "the agency had scheduled the eviction ... but when police officers arrived, neighbors blocked the event by staging a protest."
Ironically enough, today saw the kicking off of what may be the Occupy movement's newest chapter when Occupy Wall Street activists and Occupy chapters elsewhere declared today their intention to occupy vacant homes and hand them over to homeless families. And several of the members of Camp Liberty — the group of former Occupy Philly homeless who wound up underneath an I-95 overpass, are, according to a friend, currently shacking up in an abandoned building themselves.
A big new industry-backed study landed on the front page of today's Inquirer: “Industry study touts large economic impact of shale-gas drilling.”
But this report, like other industry-backed reports, failed to take into account the environmental impact of fracking — which is, you know, the very issue that makes natural gas drilling is so damn controversial in the first place.
Why? John Larson, vice president of IHS Global Insight and and study's lead author, told the Inquirer that pollution is “not in our area of expertise."
Well that's convenient. The natural gas industry has spent loads of money to buy our state's political process (former Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, who rejected a severance tax on the industry until his last minute in office; and current Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who's been fighting one since). And they've spent heavily on advertising too: all to convince the public that fracking is a “jobs” issue and not an “environmental” issue.
You may not think it now, but Spring Garden Street, with its four lanes of rushing traffic, may have the potential to become one of Philadelphia's most inviting boulevards. At least, that's the theory behind the planned Spring Garden Greenway, a project that re-envisions the road as a multi-use street with green medians or broad leafy sidewalks. Tonight, the public has a chance to weigh in on that vision, at a community meeting run by the Pennsylvania Environmental Council in partnership with the city and neighborhood groups. The meeting begins at 6:30 p.m., at German Society of Philadelphia at 611 Spring Garden St.
While Occupy Philly participants head to Washington, D.C., for rallies on the mall, anti-fracking and environmental advocates are going instead to Dimock, Pa., today for a day of protests, rallies and the delivery of fresh water to residents who say their drinking water was contaminated by shale gas wells."Former Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger promised fresh clean water piped into replace their water, and that hasn't happened for these people with contaminated water — and they just had their water buffalo removed," says Iris Marie Bloom, of Protecting Our Waters.
The town's government has said it will not accept water deliveries, citing liabilities and safety concerns in connection with the delivery of the water from Binghamton, N.Y., as well as studies that show the drinking water is in fact safe. However, individual residents are still expected to be accepting water. There will also be "toxic tours" of Dimock running today. Plus, celebrity and Water Defense founder Mark Ruffalo and Josh Fox, director of Gasland, will be on hand for a 2:30 press conference at the home of residents whose water has been tainted.
This evening, protesters will be attending a hearing for a new compressor station in Montrose, Pa., since fracking protesters now feel their best tactic is, as Bloom says, "to fight compressor stations one by one, since they're not regulatied ast hey should be."
This morning, City Council's rules committee is hearing from the public on the new zoning code, an undertaking that's nearing completion after months of negotiations. The code, developed by the Zoning Code Commission and then tweaked with about 40 amendments from Council, is meant to be more pro-development than the old code was.
Later today, at 2 p.m., Council''s committee on public property will hear from the public on an "ordinance authorizing the Commissioner of Public Property, on behalf of the City, to acquire fee simple title, or a lesser interest in real estate, in parcels of land along the Delaware River and the Kensington & Tacony Trail, for the purpose of incorporating the acquired land into the Kensington & Tacony Trail for public recreation use, under certain terms and conditions.
At 3 p.m., the committee on public safety will hold a public hearing on a resolution "calling for hearings to examine the costs associated with the Philadelphia Prison System by discussing alternatives to current policies, which currently contribute to high prison populations. Explore best practices which will lead to lower prison costs while maintaining public safety."
If you hated the Sixers Hip-Hop, you'll hate what the Sixers are proposing to replace what Dan Stamm aptly calls “the Rat-King-like mascot” even more.
Camp Liberty, the homeless encampment that had been tucked under I-95 in Port Richmond since last week was evicted this morning, by an order from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation enforced by a number of state troopers. The former Occupy Philly members, who moved below the highway after demonstrators were ordered to leave Dilworth Plaza outside City Hall, packed up their things, put them into storage, and dispersed by noon, but Tricia Shore, a member of the Friends Center, which had been advocating for the group, says they're staying unified.
"A few people are in sanctuary at Friends Center at 15th and Cherry, a few people are going to Washington, D.C., with Occupy Philly for a couple days tomorrow as a coalition from Camp Liberty," she said. "A few people are scattered but we're keeping in contact if they have cell phones. So we're keeping the community together, and we're still waiting to hear from Mayor Nutter."
Paul Klemmer, a homeless carpenter — and, it's turned out, eloquent scribe — has written his second open letter detailing the plight and desires of the group of homeless individuals who left Occupy Philly at Dilworth Plaza to seek safe accommodation and who've been camped below an I-95 overpass for nearly a week. (Read his first letter here)
The camp has been issued notice by PennDOT, which owns the area beneath I-95, to leave by 11 AM tomorrow morning. The group does plan to leave — but where they will go, or when, remains to be seen.
Klemmer's letter outlines two options that several people beneath the bridge shared with CP toady: seek temporary shelter inside or outside a church that would agree to host them; or, disappear: and drop beneath the radar of law enforcement officials who've chased them now from three homes.
Here, in its entirety, is Klemmer's most recent letter:
Today we face two closely-related crises. The first very immediate need is that of the 20 or so individuals that trusted the Occupy Movement and Interfaith Community to rescue them from the consequences of the Occupation of City Hall and impending renovation there.
The second crisis, an ongoing one, no less immediate because of the season, is the people of Philadelphia's, and America's, willingness to allow armed men and women to prevent the poor from working together to increase their fortune.
With a nail gun, even a butane-powered one, and some battery-powered tools, I and the skilled carpenters in the camp could create, from recycled materials and donated fasteners, structures like those at Christmas Village, easily disassembled and transported, to see us through the winter.
What's more difficult to create is a sharing, loving community with those who the System has habitually fractured and fragmented. We've come a long way in a short time and formed the core of such a community of shared involvement and responsibility. We've been conditioned by being forced to exist alone, to grab all we can before someone else does, this alienation suiting the purposes of a status quo which would keep us invisible and blame us for our own misfortunes.
If we find a place to move from here, we need to immediately structure the receiving and distribution of donations in an equitable fashion and create, with guidance from the Interfaith Community, a minimal list of expectations and obligations agreed to by those who would join our community and work toward building solutions, not only for our group, but at least as an example, for all the needy.
It's been suggested that the churches of the Interfaith Community might provide temporary sanctuary for our small tent community, providing a launching pad for other, longer-term solutions such as acquiring abandoned indoor or outdoor space through legal channels, disappearing into safer spaces ofr bouncing from church yard to church yard, doing clean up and repairs in the community, inviting community involvement and integrating the homeless within these communities. But by tomorrow, Monday, we need a place to regroup or just crawl back under the rocks we crawled out from, disappointed that the hot air generated by Occupy was insufficient to keep us warm through the coming snows.
Despite protests from the National Park Service, PennDOT and the anti-blight group SCRUB, City Council passed an ordinance yesterday to allow 10,000-square-foot digital wall wraps at the foot of the Ben Franklin Bridge. SCRUB, which calls the law blatant (illegal) spot zoning, has already fought these same signs all the way to Supreme Court. In addition to overlooking the Independence National Historic Park, a dynamic digital wall wrap this close to Interstate 676 could potentially endanger some of Pennsylvania's federal highway funding, as we recently reported. That's because of national highway beautification laws.
It's worth noting that the vote on the bill, which was introduced by Councilman Frank DiCicco, was not unanimous — although, according to SCRUB's Jim Mullen, it was expected to be a unanimous decision a few weeks ago, before Council members were informed of the potential impacts on highway funding. Yesterday, Council members Goode, Jones, Kelly and Krajewski and Council President Anna Verna voted against it. However a 12-5 majority, such as the bill had on its passage yesterday, would be enough to override any mayoral veto provided no council members change their votes.
"If it does not get vetoed, then a neighborhood group is going to file a lawsuit," added Mullen, who is concerned that the rule could create a slippery slope. "One sign on this corridor means 10 signs will follow."
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