Vacant Lots
By Dan Eldridge
Flying Kite, February 1, 2011
If you've ever experienced the huge burst of inspiration that often accompanies a work-related seminar, you've probably also suffered the inevitable psychological let-down that tends to occur as the daily grind gets in the way of your best-laid plans. It's something even the most dedicated among us have experienced, and that's exactly why the story of Kensington Farms and the upcoming Green Wall Project is so inspiring.
The story starts with a visit of community leaders to a training session held annually by NeighborWorks America, a government-funded community building organization. The conference aims to help residents "come up with one good idea for their neighborhood," explains Ade Fequa of the New Kensington CDC.
And yet the team organized by Fequa and his colleague, Tom Potts, took that challenge one step further, and settled on two good ideas. Potts is heading up the Green Wall Project, which will use low-flow planters and wire mesh to literally create green, flowering walls alongside three neighborhood structures this spring, including Johnny Brenda's and Eileen's Hair Salon. The project is being paid for with a $2,000 grant from NeighborWorks, although Potts says other business owners in the area will soon be able to sponsor similar green walls on their own buildings for roughly $600.
The goal of Fequa's Kensington Farms project, meanwhile, which is being covered by a separate $2,000 NeighborWorks grant, is to convert a vacant lot at the corner of Frankford and Cambria into a garden operated by local residents. And although no deal has yet been inked on that particular lot, Fequa says he'll look elsewhere in the immediate area if need be. "There's a great disparity of fresh food that's available in the area," Fequa says, "and there's lot of drug activity and bad things happening there. We want to focus as many resources there as possible, so we can try to turn that area around."
Source: Ade Fequa and Tom Potts, New Kensington CDC Neighborhood Advisory Committee
The story starts with a visit of community leaders to a training session held annually by NeighborWorks America, a government-funded community building organization. The conference aims to help residents "come up with one good idea for their neighborhood," explains Ade Fequa of the New Kensington CDC.
And yet the team organized by Fequa and his colleague, Tom Potts, took that challenge one step further, and settled on two good ideas. Potts is heading up the Green Wall Project, which will use low-flow planters and wire mesh to literally create green, flowering walls alongside three neighborhood structures this spring, including Johnny Brenda's and Eileen's Hair Salon. The project is being paid for with a $2,000 grant from NeighborWorks, although Potts says other business owners in the area will soon be able to sponsor similar green walls on their own buildings for roughly $600.
The goal of Fequa's Kensington Farms project, meanwhile, which is being covered by a separate $2,000 NeighborWorks grant, is to convert a vacant lot at the corner of Frankford and Cambria into a garden operated by local residents. And although no deal has yet been inked on that particular lot, Fequa says he'll look elsewhere in the immediate area if need be. "There's a great disparity of fresh food that's available in the area," Fequa says, "and there's lot of drug activity and bad things happening there. We want to focus as many resources there as possible, so we can try to turn that area around."
Source: Ade Fequa and Tom Potts, New Kensington CDC Neighborhood Advisory Committee
By Dan Eldridge
Flying Kite, January 11, 2011
The Enterprise Center's community development corporation has long played an important role in the lives of the 8,634 residents who live in the West Philly neighborhood it serves, Walnut Hill. And thanks to a recently awarded grant from the U.S Department of Agriculture's Farmers Market Promotion Program, it will soon be doing even more important work in the neighborhood--namely, promoting the regular consumption of fruits and veggies in a part of town where fresh produce isn't always easy to come by.
The $89,613 grant will allow the CDC to complete the construction of a quarter-acre community farm that sits between Market and Ludlow streets in Walnut Hill. It will also allow the group to build its own farm stand on the site, where the youth growers involved with the program can sell their produce--everything from kale, broccoli and Swiss chard to spinach, eggplant and collard greens--to the community. (Last season, the group sold its produce primarily at the Clark Park Farmers' Market.)
The money will also be used to start a CSA (community supported agriculture) program this spring in Walnut Hill, which will allow local residents to buy seasonal produce directly from the youth farmers by buying into a membership or "subscription" program. And it'll even allow the CDC to provide EBT access, allowing locals to buy the produce with their food stamp cards.
"We're a lot better off here than a lot of neighborhoods," says Managing Director Greg Heller, referring to Walnut Hill's proximity to supermarkets and green grocers. "But a lot of people do still rely on corner stores and bodegas, so we see a pretty big need for this project. We think the impact locally is going to be pretty huge."
Source: Greg Heller, The Enterprise Center CDC
The $89,613 grant will allow the CDC to complete the construction of a quarter-acre community farm that sits between Market and Ludlow streets in Walnut Hill. It will also allow the group to build its own farm stand on the site, where the youth growers involved with the program can sell their produce--everything from kale, broccoli and Swiss chard to spinach, eggplant and collard greens--to the community. (Last season, the group sold its produce primarily at the Clark Park Farmers' Market.)
The money will also be used to start a CSA (community supported agriculture) program this spring in Walnut Hill, which will allow local residents to buy seasonal produce directly from the youth farmers by buying into a membership or "subscription" program. And it'll even allow the CDC to provide EBT access, allowing locals to buy the produce with their food stamp cards.
"We're a lot better off here than a lot of neighborhoods," says Managing Director Greg Heller, referring to Walnut Hill's proximity to supermarkets and green grocers. "But a lot of people do still rely on corner stores and bodegas, so we see a pretty big need for this project. We think the impact locally is going to be pretty huge."
Source: Greg Heller, The Enterprise Center CDC
Eastwick’s Common Ground gardeners fear a $5B airport project could bulldoze their fruits and vegetables, harvested to feed families for free
By Dan Geringer
Philadelphia Daily News, December 21, 2010
HUNCHED AGAINST the penetrating December cold, Eastwick's Common Ground gardeners, many of them senior citizens with Deep South family roots, worked the compost-rich soil along Bartram Avenue near Island Avenue as they have for more than 30 years ” spreading horse manure over dormant vegetable beds, wrapping young fruit trees against the coming ice storms, harvesting the last of the winter cabbage, collards, lettuce and kale.
But this winter, for the first time in the Eastwick community gardeners' long history of feeding hundreds of fellow Philadelphians, they worry if their days as urban farmers will be ended abruptly by the bulldozer and the concrete truck, as so many food-producing gardens have.
Three years ago, a long-term lease with the city became year-to-year with the Philadelphia International Airport, expiring June 30, 2011, and threatening a way of life that has provided tons of free, fresh vegetables for Eastwick gardeners' families, neighbors and economically disadvantaged seniors who rely on church and community food cupboards.
As the months went by and airport officials remained tight-lipped about their plans for the lease, the gardeners' worries turned to fear.
"Our main concern is: Are we going to have a garden?" Butch Thomas, president of the Eastwick Community Gardens Association that has farmed this land since the 1970s, said last week.
"We are in limbo," said JoAnn Thompson, the association's secretary. When the gardeners received a letter from the airport last spring that sounded to them as though the lease would not be renewed, "I had a panic attack," Thompson said. "I was so depressed.
"Everything is in the ground by June," she said. "We are already harvesting early crops by June. A lot of us are eating out of our gardens."
Thomas said the gardens' thousands of pounds of produce sustain families all year long. "We freeze it, we can it, we jar it," he said. "We live on it."
So do hundreds of non-gardeners, Thompson said. The garden's bylaws prohibit selling.
"I grow so much that I give away 98 percent of the stuff from my garden to family, friends, neighbors and the seniors in my church," Thompson said. "It's an unbelievably good feeling. I never want that to end."
Contacted by the Daily News, James Tyrrell, who has been the city's deputy director of aviation, property/business development since 2001, said that the Eastwick community gardeners have nothing to fear ” for now.
He said the garden property is not part of the airport's $5.35 billion expansion plan, adding:
"I have no plans to develop that portion of ground at this time. Our intention, as of now, is to do another one-year lease."
But when asked about a long-term commitment, he said, "One thing I can guarantee you is: At the airport, everything changes. I have no plans today for any other use for that property other than maintaining it as a garden."
Informed by the Daily News[/TEXT.50.RAG] of Tyrrell's immediate intentions, Thomas and Thompson said they were relieved to know there would be a 2011 harvest, but they are still fearful about their long-term future ” and not without good reason.
Philadelphia's food-producing gardens have declined dramatically from 501 in 1996 to 226 today, said Michael Nairn, a University of Pennsylvania urban-studies lecturer who co-authored a 2009 community-gardens analysis with Penn colleague Domenic Vitiello.
"The Redevelopment Authority often shut down gardens, giving the gardeners only a few weeks to clear off the land," Nairn said.
At the large, decades-old Garden of Eatin' at 25th and Dickinson, he said, "the gardeners were given three weeks to vacate.
Thomas and Thompson have only to look through the fence behind their Common Ground gardens to see the refugees from an uprooting much closer to home.
Only a couple of years ago and only a couple of miles away, the urban farmers who for decades had worked the Victory Gardens on Penrose Ferry Road near Fort Mifflin Road were abruptly ordered to leave because the city's bulldozers were coming.
Many of them became Thomas' and Thompson's new neighbors, but still feel the pain of their displacement.
Victory Gardens president Mark Pisa, a stone mason, who has chickens and a syrup-producing maple tree along with a wide range of fruits and vegetables on his mini-farm, said he is grateful for the move because "I've gotten two days of union work in a year and a half, so this is how I feed my family."
But although an eagle and lots of hawks from the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in nearby Tinicum often perch in a big old tree and watch him work, Pisa said he misses the feeling of peace he had in the original Victory Gardens.
Tyrrell looks at the rescue of the displaced Victory Garden farmers as evidence of the airport's positive attitude toward community gardens and gardeners.
When the airport acquired the Victory Gardens land in 2008, he said, it cleared the heavily wooded acres alongside Eastwick's Common Ground gardens so that the displaced urban farmers could re-establish their vegetable patches there. "Those [Victory Gardens] farmers didn't have a lease with the city," Tyrrell said. "They were just there. They were going to be evicted. We agreed to take those farmers into our [Eastwick] garden area, which we expanded from just under 100 plots on four acres to 160, 170 plots on over seven acres.
"The [Eastwick] garden serves as a good buffer for us between the airport and the community," Tyrrell said. "The airport doesn't do anything in a vacuum. We met with community groups. The whole thing was transparent. They very much supported keeping the gardens. So it was a win-win for everybody. We like the farmers."
Thomas and Thompson said they would feel more confident about their future if Tyrrell's professed affection for the farmers translated into a long-term commitment.
"This dirt," Thomas said, pointing to the licorice-black soil beneath her feet, "takes years to build up ” years of hauling leaves, horse manure, compost. This dirt is so rich that you always have an abundance.
"I only wish I had more dirt so I could feed more people," she said. "I live near Springfield Avenue and 59th, in Southwest Philadelphia. When I drive home after a day of gardening, my neighbors are waiting for me, knowing I'm bringing lots of good stuff. The seniors at Monumental Baptist Church are waiting for me on Sundays.
"Last summer, I had broccoli with heads the size of dinner plates, and a ton of tomatoes," she said. "I had 33 collards, so that's 33 people that got to eat fresh collards. One day, I had 31 cucumbers. I'm feeding a lot of people out of this rich dirt."
She pointed to a blue cooler that contained one of the secrets of her dirt. "Fish heads," she said. "And fish guts. Earthworms love that stuff. I have earthworms the size of baby snakes, and I need my worms."
The trouble, she said, is that birds do, too. "Sam is supposed to scare them away," Thomas said, pointing to a scarecrow, slumped over on a small bench as if asleep ” his once-bright clothes bleached to a pale gray by months of unrelenting sun, his once-firm straw belly softened by rain.
"He's a mess," Thomas said with an affectionate smile. "The birds he's supposed to be scaring perch all over him. I'll get him new clothes and new straw in the spring. Right now, he's just company."
She and Sam see each other most days of the year, Thomas said. "This is an obsession," she said. "I've been out here after a winter storm, brushing the snow off my peach tree's branches so they won't break. You wrap them up like they were your babies.
"In nice weather, I like to sit here and just look at the wonder of it all ” the peace, the sense of growing things to feed people. I've got flowers around each bed, and hummingbirds stop by. How many people in Philadelphia have seen a hummingbird eat from a flower? Why would anybody ever want to tear this down?"
But this winter, for the first time in the Eastwick community gardeners' long history of feeding hundreds of fellow Philadelphians, they worry if their days as urban farmers will be ended abruptly by the bulldozer and the concrete truck, as so many food-producing gardens have.
Three years ago, a long-term lease with the city became year-to-year with the Philadelphia International Airport, expiring June 30, 2011, and threatening a way of life that has provided tons of free, fresh vegetables for Eastwick gardeners' families, neighbors and economically disadvantaged seniors who rely on church and community food cupboards.
As the months went by and airport officials remained tight-lipped about their plans for the lease, the gardeners' worries turned to fear.
"Our main concern is: Are we going to have a garden?" Butch Thomas, president of the Eastwick Community Gardens Association that has farmed this land since the 1970s, said last week.
"We are in limbo," said JoAnn Thompson, the association's secretary. When the gardeners received a letter from the airport last spring that sounded to them as though the lease would not be renewed, "I had a panic attack," Thompson said. "I was so depressed.
"Everything is in the ground by June," she said. "We are already harvesting early crops by June. A lot of us are eating out of our gardens."
Thomas said the gardens' thousands of pounds of produce sustain families all year long. "We freeze it, we can it, we jar it," he said. "We live on it."
So do hundreds of non-gardeners, Thompson said. The garden's bylaws prohibit selling.
"I grow so much that I give away 98 percent of the stuff from my garden to family, friends, neighbors and the seniors in my church," Thompson said. "It's an unbelievably good feeling. I never want that to end."
Contacted by the Daily News, James Tyrrell, who has been the city's deputy director of aviation, property/business development since 2001, said that the Eastwick community gardeners have nothing to fear ” for now.
He said the garden property is not part of the airport's $5.35 billion expansion plan, adding:
"I have no plans to develop that portion of ground at this time. Our intention, as of now, is to do another one-year lease."
But when asked about a long-term commitment, he said, "One thing I can guarantee you is: At the airport, everything changes. I have no plans today for any other use for that property other than maintaining it as a garden."
Informed by the Daily News[/TEXT.50.RAG] of Tyrrell's immediate intentions, Thomas and Thompson said they were relieved to know there would be a 2011 harvest, but they are still fearful about their long-term future ” and not without good reason.
Philadelphia's food-producing gardens have declined dramatically from 501 in 1996 to 226 today, said Michael Nairn, a University of Pennsylvania urban-studies lecturer who co-authored a 2009 community-gardens analysis with Penn colleague Domenic Vitiello.
"The Redevelopment Authority often shut down gardens, giving the gardeners only a few weeks to clear off the land," Nairn said.
At the large, decades-old Garden of Eatin' at 25th and Dickinson, he said, "the gardeners were given three weeks to vacate.
Thomas and Thompson have only to look through the fence behind their Common Ground gardens to see the refugees from an uprooting much closer to home.
Only a couple of years ago and only a couple of miles away, the urban farmers who for decades had worked the Victory Gardens on Penrose Ferry Road near Fort Mifflin Road were abruptly ordered to leave because the city's bulldozers were coming.
Many of them became Thomas' and Thompson's new neighbors, but still feel the pain of their displacement.
Victory Gardens president Mark Pisa, a stone mason, who has chickens and a syrup-producing maple tree along with a wide range of fruits and vegetables on his mini-farm, said he is grateful for the move because "I've gotten two days of union work in a year and a half, so this is how I feed my family."
But although an eagle and lots of hawks from the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in nearby Tinicum often perch in a big old tree and watch him work, Pisa said he misses the feeling of peace he had in the original Victory Gardens.
Tyrrell looks at the rescue of the displaced Victory Garden farmers as evidence of the airport's positive attitude toward community gardens and gardeners.
When the airport acquired the Victory Gardens land in 2008, he said, it cleared the heavily wooded acres alongside Eastwick's Common Ground gardens so that the displaced urban farmers could re-establish their vegetable patches there. "Those [Victory Gardens] farmers didn't have a lease with the city," Tyrrell said. "They were just there. They were going to be evicted. We agreed to take those farmers into our [Eastwick] garden area, which we expanded from just under 100 plots on four acres to 160, 170 plots on over seven acres.
"The [Eastwick] garden serves as a good buffer for us between the airport and the community," Tyrrell said. "The airport doesn't do anything in a vacuum. We met with community groups. The whole thing was transparent. They very much supported keeping the gardens. So it was a win-win for everybody. We like the farmers."
Thomas and Thompson said they would feel more confident about their future if Tyrrell's professed affection for the farmers translated into a long-term commitment.
"This dirt," Thomas said, pointing to the licorice-black soil beneath her feet, "takes years to build up ” years of hauling leaves, horse manure, compost. This dirt is so rich that you always have an abundance.
"I only wish I had more dirt so I could feed more people," she said. "I live near Springfield Avenue and 59th, in Southwest Philadelphia. When I drive home after a day of gardening, my neighbors are waiting for me, knowing I'm bringing lots of good stuff. The seniors at Monumental Baptist Church are waiting for me on Sundays.
"Last summer, I had broccoli with heads the size of dinner plates, and a ton of tomatoes," she said. "I had 33 collards, so that's 33 people that got to eat fresh collards. One day, I had 31 cucumbers. I'm feeding a lot of people out of this rich dirt."
She pointed to a blue cooler that contained one of the secrets of her dirt. "Fish heads," she said. "And fish guts. Earthworms love that stuff. I have earthworms the size of baby snakes, and I need my worms."
The trouble, she said, is that birds do, too. "Sam is supposed to scare them away," Thomas said, pointing to a scarecrow, slumped over on a small bench as if asleep ” his once-bright clothes bleached to a pale gray by months of unrelenting sun, his once-firm straw belly softened by rain.
"He's a mess," Thomas said with an affectionate smile. "The birds he's supposed to be scaring perch all over him. I'll get him new clothes and new straw in the spring. Right now, he's just company."
She and Sam see each other most days of the year, Thomas said. "This is an obsession," she said. "I've been out here after a winter storm, brushing the snow off my peach tree's branches so they won't break. You wrap them up like they were your babies.
"In nice weather, I like to sit here and just look at the wonder of it all ” the peace, the sense of growing things to feed people. I've got flowers around each bed, and hummingbirds stop by. How many people in Philadelphia have seen a hummingbird eat from a flower? Why would anybody ever want to tear this down?"
December 5, 2010 - 12:30pm - 3:30pm
Cost: Tickets $25 online or at the doorOrganized by Mill Creek Farm
http://www.millcreekurbanfarm.org
Support community-based agriculture and environmental education at Mill Creek Farm's annual benefit party
DATE: Sunday, December 5, 2010
TIME: 4:30 pm - 7:30 pm
LOCATION: the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center
640 Waterworks Drive, Philadelphia (behind the Art Museum)
Please join us to celebrate our 5th growing season and help support our work for the coming year.
Highlights include:
Premier of "West Philly Grown," a documentary film about the Mill Creek Farm
Exciting variety of silent auction and raffle prizes (make great holiday gifts)
Live Music by The Bro's Perspective, a jazz-funk-fusion trio, plus violinist Carlos Santiago and harpist Mary O'Malley
Drinks from The Philadelphia Brewing Company, Dock Street Brewery, and Art in the Age
Food from local restaurants including Bar Ferdinand, Beau Monde, and Honest Tom's Taco Shop
The historic and educational Water Works
TICKETS and MORE information: www.millcreekurbanfarm.org
Tickets $25 online or at the door
*ADA accessible*
DATE: Sunday, December 5, 2010
TIME: 4:30 pm - 7:30 pm
LOCATION: the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center
640 Waterworks Drive, Philadelphia (behind the Art Museum)
Please join us to celebrate our 5th growing season and help support our work for the coming year.
Highlights include:
Premier of "West Philly Grown," a documentary film about the Mill Creek Farm
Exciting variety of silent auction and raffle prizes (make great holiday gifts)
Live Music by The Bro's Perspective, a jazz-funk-fusion trio, plus violinist Carlos Santiago and harpist Mary O'Malley
Drinks from The Philadelphia Brewing Company, Dock Street Brewery, and Art in the Age
Food from local restaurants including Bar Ferdinand, Beau Monde, and Honest Tom's Taco Shop
The historic and educational Water Works
TICKETS and MORE information: www.millcreekurbanfarm.org
Tickets $25 online or at the door
*ADA accessible*
By Jennifer Lin
The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 11, 2010
The problem of blight has confounded Philadelphia mayors for decades and generated volumes of policy papers.
Now comes a new study, and an urgent warning: Do something posthaste, because vacant land and abandoned buildings are costing us dearly.
Released Wednesday, a report prepared for the city's Redevelopment Authority (RDA) and the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corps., representing nonprofit developers, has taken a stab at calculating the financial impact of 40,000 vacant properties.
Among the findings:
Philadelphia's surfeit of blighted properties undermines the total value of real estate in the city, estimated at $50 billion, and drags it down by $3.6 billion, an average of about $8,000 per household.
The city is spending $20 million a year to maintain vacant lots, clean up waste, demolish or seal dangerous buildings, and provide extra fire and police protection.
The owners of 17,000 blighted parcels owe the city $70 million in back taxes, a sum that increases $2 million a year.
"This is costing all of us," said Lee Huang, a director of Econsult Corp., an economic research firm that led the study. "All of us are losing property value, household wealth, and the city is not collecting the tax revenue it's due."
Econsult calculated that if Philadelphia could change the way it manages vacant property, it could "reactivate" development in certain neighborhoods with healthy real estate markets.
For city-owned land, that could mean coordinating the processes by which various agencies acquire, assemble, and dispose of abandoned property. For non-city parcels, it could include speedier foreclosures on tax-delinquent land and buildings.
By examining census tracts with the strongest potential for development, the Econsult team estimated that reforms could spur the building of 3,400 new housing units in five years. It looked at areas where home values exceeded the average cost of new construction - roughly $192,000 for a 1,500-square-foot home. Those sections included Northern Liberties, Kensington, Passyunk Square, Queen Village, University City, the Art Museum area, and parts of Northeast Philadelphia.
Brian Abernathy, chief of staff for city Managing Director Richard Negrin, said Mayor Nutter had made those reforms a priority.
According to the study, one-fourth of the city's abandoned properties are owned by city agencies, including the RDA, Department of Public Property, and Philadelphia Housing Development Corp. The Philadelphia Housing Authority, a state-chartered, federally funded agency not controlled by the city, accounts for about 1,800 vacant properties, or 4.5 percent of the total.
Even so, Abernathy said, the perception is that the problem is the city's to fix, that "we own the problem."
Nutter is only the latest mayor to try to eliminate blight. Former Mayor John F. Street raised nearly $300 million in bonds to demolish crumbling houses and acquire vacant parcels through eminent domain, though the program fell short of its goals.
Lacking the funding of Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, the Nutter administration is working from within to improve the city's management of vacant land, Abernathy said.
Under Nutter's direction, Negrin and Finance Director Rob Dubow have assembled city managers from 14 agencies to find more effective ways to banish blight.
One of the first changes will be the consolidation of all city-controlled vacant land into one digital master list. The RDA and public property department have recently posted their holdings online; next, the lists will be combined.
The agencies will also work to coordinate the disposal of vacant properties. As it stands now, each has its own system for handling land deals.
People who want to buy vacant land from the city will be able to turn to one source for information about abandoned lots or buildings, Abernathy said.
Another goal of the mayor's vacant-land group: helping the Sheriff's Office pick up the pace in pursuing tax delinquents. Abernathy called the threat of a sheriff's sale "a stick to make people pay."
John M. Carpenter Jr., the RDA's deputy executive director, said it takes 10 to 25 years before the Sheriff's Office puts a tax-delinquent property up for sale. In other parts of the country, such as Genesee County, Mich., such foreclosures are accomplished within three years.
The Philadelphia Sheriff's Office handles about 100 sales a month. It is working with the city's revenue, finance, and legal departments to increase the volume of sales, he said.
Rick Sauer, president of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corps., said the report on vacant land was aimed at quantifying the costs of the current systems. How the city reforms those systems, he said, is a conversation that has just begun and must include political and government stakeholders as well as private developers.
If people are to understand the urgency, Sauer said, "It's important to identify more clearly the fiscal impact on the city."
Now comes a new study, and an urgent warning: Do something posthaste, because vacant land and abandoned buildings are costing us dearly.
Released Wednesday, a report prepared for the city's Redevelopment Authority (RDA) and the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corps., representing nonprofit developers, has taken a stab at calculating the financial impact of 40,000 vacant properties.
Among the findings:
Philadelphia's surfeit of blighted properties undermines the total value of real estate in the city, estimated at $50 billion, and drags it down by $3.6 billion, an average of about $8,000 per household.
The city is spending $20 million a year to maintain vacant lots, clean up waste, demolish or seal dangerous buildings, and provide extra fire and police protection.
The owners of 17,000 blighted parcels owe the city $70 million in back taxes, a sum that increases $2 million a year.
"This is costing all of us," said Lee Huang, a director of Econsult Corp., an economic research firm that led the study. "All of us are losing property value, household wealth, and the city is not collecting the tax revenue it's due."
Econsult calculated that if Philadelphia could change the way it manages vacant property, it could "reactivate" development in certain neighborhoods with healthy real estate markets.
For city-owned land, that could mean coordinating the processes by which various agencies acquire, assemble, and dispose of abandoned property. For non-city parcels, it could include speedier foreclosures on tax-delinquent land and buildings.
By examining census tracts with the strongest potential for development, the Econsult team estimated that reforms could spur the building of 3,400 new housing units in five years. It looked at areas where home values exceeded the average cost of new construction - roughly $192,000 for a 1,500-square-foot home. Those sections included Northern Liberties, Kensington, Passyunk Square, Queen Village, University City, the Art Museum area, and parts of Northeast Philadelphia.
Brian Abernathy, chief of staff for city Managing Director Richard Negrin, said Mayor Nutter had made those reforms a priority.
According to the study, one-fourth of the city's abandoned properties are owned by city agencies, including the RDA, Department of Public Property, and Philadelphia Housing Development Corp. The Philadelphia Housing Authority, a state-chartered, federally funded agency not controlled by the city, accounts for about 1,800 vacant properties, or 4.5 percent of the total.
Even so, Abernathy said, the perception is that the problem is the city's to fix, that "we own the problem."
Nutter is only the latest mayor to try to eliminate blight. Former Mayor John F. Street raised nearly $300 million in bonds to demolish crumbling houses and acquire vacant parcels through eminent domain, though the program fell short of its goals.
Lacking the funding of Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, the Nutter administration is working from within to improve the city's management of vacant land, Abernathy said.
Under Nutter's direction, Negrin and Finance Director Rob Dubow have assembled city managers from 14 agencies to find more effective ways to banish blight.
One of the first changes will be the consolidation of all city-controlled vacant land into one digital master list. The RDA and public property department have recently posted their holdings online; next, the lists will be combined.
The agencies will also work to coordinate the disposal of vacant properties. As it stands now, each has its own system for handling land deals.
People who want to buy vacant land from the city will be able to turn to one source for information about abandoned lots or buildings, Abernathy said.
Another goal of the mayor's vacant-land group: helping the Sheriff's Office pick up the pace in pursuing tax delinquents. Abernathy called the threat of a sheriff's sale "a stick to make people pay."
John M. Carpenter Jr., the RDA's deputy executive director, said it takes 10 to 25 years before the Sheriff's Office puts a tax-delinquent property up for sale. In other parts of the country, such as Genesee County, Mich., such foreclosures are accomplished within three years.
The Philadelphia Sheriff's Office handles about 100 sales a month. It is working with the city's revenue, finance, and legal departments to increase the volume of sales, he said.
Rick Sauer, president of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corps., said the report on vacant land was aimed at quantifying the costs of the current systems. How the city reforms those systems, he said, is a conversation that has just begun and must include political and government stakeholders as well as private developers.
If people are to understand the urgency, Sauer said, "It's important to identify more clearly the fiscal impact on the city."
By Melissa Dribben
Philly.com, November 8, 2010
The site where the sinking homes of Logan stood has languished for over a decade, a field of unfulfilled dreams. Developers have envisioned profitable malls. Residents have pictured a supermarket, senior housing, and a recreation center. Religious leaders have longed for parking for churchgoers. And the local councilwoman, Marian Tasco, has fantasized about a string of pearly, high-end designer outlets.
Someday, some of these wishes may come true. But given the wobbly economy and the problems that make the site unstable, no ambitious project has much hope now. Last month, Tasco convened a neighborhood meeting on Logan's future, one of countless get-togethers held over the years. Although fliers were distributed to nearly 1,000 residents, only about 80 attended.
"I've heard it all before," said Sarah Simon, 58, who skipped the meeting. The retired school security worker has lived on North Marvine Street for more than 30 years. "That land is going to waste," she said. "People have died waiting for that improvement."
The wait, however, might finally be over.
Deciding that small progress would be better than none, the community seems to support turning the site into a green zone. A portion of the property may become a tree nursery to grow saplings for planting throughout the city. Other portions may be used for solar energy production, community gardens, and recreation.
"It's exciting," said Terry Gillen, director of the city's Redevelopment Authority until last week. "I think we can finally move forward."
One of Gillen's last acts before leaving the job she held for two years was to begin consolidating the property's ownership.
"There's money to do it," Gillen said. About $2.5 million has been budgeted to buy the land from a constellation of public agencies and private owners and to pay off liens. Next, she said, the Redevelopment Authority will cooperate with the Logan community to determine how to reuse the land.
"Now we can finally get into the planning process," she said. The details, however, remain the devilment.
Before the recession, the city invited commercial developers to submit plans for the site.
"I don't know what happened - the whole thing just got pulled," said Bart Blatstein, one of two who came up with proposals. Blatstein, who developed the Schmidt's Brewery site in Northern Liberties, said the Logan tract could "be an economic generator for the area, bringing in much-needed infrastructure like a supermarket."
Community representatives, however, were not thrilled with the proposals. "They felt that the neighborhood deserved a better aesthetic," said Tasco.
The city, meanwhile, was concerned that the developers were seriously underestimating the cost of stabilizing the ground, budgeting only $7 million to $25 million. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has projected that digging out the soft material and replacing it would require at least $50 million.
Furthermore, the city owns only about 90 of the 990 parcels outright. Until it controls all the property, no development project, no matter how brilliant, can go forward.
This is the situation Gillen found in 2008. At the time, the city was investigating the finances of the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, which would have helped consolidate ownership. All expenditures were frozen until the study was complete.
Last summer, she commissioned yet another study, this time by the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a nonprofit that, free of charge, assesses vexing development problems and suggests solutions.
The report concluded that at least for now, the best plan would be to grow trees. Lots of trees. The city's Office of Sustainability wants to plant 300,000 trees in Philadelphia by 2017-2020. If the Logan triangle were to be made into a tree farm, the ULI report said, it could serve as a horticultural savings bank.
"You always hear, 'We want, we want, we want, we want,' " said Craig Schelter, former head of Philadelphia's Planning Commission and a member of the ULI team. "But at some point, you need to say to the community, 'Get over it. You're going to have to accept something else.' "
Here is where the political infighting figures into the problem. Gillen has bucked City Council on a number of issues. "The job of City Council people is to fight for their own turf. I respect that," she said. "But the mayor's goal is to bring net new jobs to the city. Not just move them from one part to the other."
One of the reasons she hired ULI to do the study, she said, was to avoid a test of will and power and obtain a neutral opinion on the best plans for Logan.
Tasco has said repeatedly, "I'm just the councilperson. It's for the community to decide." But it is unclear how "the community" is defined.
Sarah Simon, for example, and her son James said they liked the tree-farm proposal. "Trees? That would be great!" said James, 40, who works at the airport for the Transportation Security Administration. Chunks are missing from the ceiling in their rowhouse due to water damage, not a sinking foundation. They live two blocks from the triangle and say that their neighborhood, once a thriving middle-class community, has suffered from the city's neglect. Residents have fled. Strangers dump trash on the site.
"When the economy was great in the '90s, they could have developed it," his mother said. "But now, everybody likes the idea of trees. We'd like a community garden, too. And solar is in!"
Tasco, however, said, "I haven't talked to anyone about a tree farm. That [the farm] was Terry Gillen's wish. We'll put that in the mix."
Someday, some of these wishes may come true. But given the wobbly economy and the problems that make the site unstable, no ambitious project has much hope now. Last month, Tasco convened a neighborhood meeting on Logan's future, one of countless get-togethers held over the years. Although fliers were distributed to nearly 1,000 residents, only about 80 attended.
"I've heard it all before," said Sarah Simon, 58, who skipped the meeting. The retired school security worker has lived on North Marvine Street for more than 30 years. "That land is going to waste," she said. "People have died waiting for that improvement."
The wait, however, might finally be over.
Deciding that small progress would be better than none, the community seems to support turning the site into a green zone. A portion of the property may become a tree nursery to grow saplings for planting throughout the city. Other portions may be used for solar energy production, community gardens, and recreation.
"It's exciting," said Terry Gillen, director of the city's Redevelopment Authority until last week. "I think we can finally move forward."
One of Gillen's last acts before leaving the job she held for two years was to begin consolidating the property's ownership.
"There's money to do it," Gillen said. About $2.5 million has been budgeted to buy the land from a constellation of public agencies and private owners and to pay off liens. Next, she said, the Redevelopment Authority will cooperate with the Logan community to determine how to reuse the land.
"Now we can finally get into the planning process," she said. The details, however, remain the devilment.
Before the recession, the city invited commercial developers to submit plans for the site.
"I don't know what happened - the whole thing just got pulled," said Bart Blatstein, one of two who came up with proposals. Blatstein, who developed the Schmidt's Brewery site in Northern Liberties, said the Logan tract could "be an economic generator for the area, bringing in much-needed infrastructure like a supermarket."
Community representatives, however, were not thrilled with the proposals. "They felt that the neighborhood deserved a better aesthetic," said Tasco.
The city, meanwhile, was concerned that the developers were seriously underestimating the cost of stabilizing the ground, budgeting only $7 million to $25 million. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has projected that digging out the soft material and replacing it would require at least $50 million.
Furthermore, the city owns only about 90 of the 990 parcels outright. Until it controls all the property, no development project, no matter how brilliant, can go forward.
This is the situation Gillen found in 2008. At the time, the city was investigating the finances of the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, which would have helped consolidate ownership. All expenditures were frozen until the study was complete.
Last summer, she commissioned yet another study, this time by the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a nonprofit that, free of charge, assesses vexing development problems and suggests solutions.
The report concluded that at least for now, the best plan would be to grow trees. Lots of trees. The city's Office of Sustainability wants to plant 300,000 trees in Philadelphia by 2017-2020. If the Logan triangle were to be made into a tree farm, the ULI report said, it could serve as a horticultural savings bank.
"You always hear, 'We want, we want, we want, we want,' " said Craig Schelter, former head of Philadelphia's Planning Commission and a member of the ULI team. "But at some point, you need to say to the community, 'Get over it. You're going to have to accept something else.' "
Here is where the political infighting figures into the problem. Gillen has bucked City Council on a number of issues. "The job of City Council people is to fight for their own turf. I respect that," she said. "But the mayor's goal is to bring net new jobs to the city. Not just move them from one part to the other."
One of the reasons she hired ULI to do the study, she said, was to avoid a test of will and power and obtain a neutral opinion on the best plans for Logan.
Tasco has said repeatedly, "I'm just the councilperson. It's for the community to decide." But it is unclear how "the community" is defined.
Sarah Simon, for example, and her son James said they liked the tree-farm proposal. "Trees? That would be great!" said James, 40, who works at the airport for the Transportation Security Administration. Chunks are missing from the ceiling in their rowhouse due to water damage, not a sinking foundation. They live two blocks from the triangle and say that their neighborhood, once a thriving middle-class community, has suffered from the city's neglect. Residents have fled. Strangers dump trash on the site.
"When the economy was great in the '90s, they could have developed it," his mother said. "But now, everybody likes the idea of trees. We'd like a community garden, too. And solar is in!"
Tasco, however, said, "I haven't talked to anyone about a tree farm. That [the farm] was Terry Gillen's wish. We'll put that in the mix."
By Kia Gregory
The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 4, 2010
Standing before a judge in an ornate room of City Hall, Skip Wiener rocked from side to side, unsure of what the hearing would hold.
In certain barren parts of Philadelphia, Wiener, a slight man with wispy gray hair, is known as a guerrilla gardener. He spies long-abandoned, junk-filled lots and works with neighbors to turn the swaths into beds of fruits, vegetables, and herbs.
But Wiener, testing a new state law, found himself before a judge for the first time, asking for stewardship over a stretch of land in the Haddington section of West Philadelphia.
Wiener heads a nonprofit called Urban Tree Connection, which for two decades has worked with low-income communities to revitalize their neighborhoods by transforming abandoned lots into open green spaces. Their mantra: "We build community one vacant lot at a time."
To his surprise, Wiener would get his wish.
Urban Tree Connection would become one of the first community groups in Philadelphia to be granted conservatorship under the new law. In a city with an inventory of 40,000 vacant, blighted properties, officials believe the conservatorship act could have a significant effect, empowering community groups to take over such lots.
Under the Pennsylvania Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act, which became law in February 2009, nonprofit groups such as Wiener's, senior lien holders, neighbors, and other frustrated individuals can petition the court to be named conservators of an abandoned and blighted property. To meet the criteria, the property must also be considered a public nuisance, in need of substantial repair, a fire risk, and unfit for occupancy.
As conservator, UTC can legally continue to plant and harvest on the land and follow through on its vision to create a community cooperative.
Census estimates from 2000 show that about 300,000 vacant properties litter neighborhoods across Pennsylvania, almost a third of them in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, said Elizabeth Hersh, executive director of the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania, a foundation that provided research for the law.
"This is what we intended in advocating for this law," Hersh said of Urban Tree's victory. "As a neighborhood, you're always trying to get someone else to do something. But with conservatorship, neighbors and community organizations have the ability to go to court and do something for themselves."
Fran Burns, the city's licenses and inspections commissioner, agreed. "It's still too early to tell," Burns said of the fledgling law's impact. "But I like the idea of a tool for the community to try to take ownership of blighted properties that are directly affecting them. It's another way to get the same result we're after - to get owners to maintain property."
Under the act, modeled after laws in Maryland, Ohio, and New Jersey, the recorded owner still owns the property. The conservator is appointed for the limited purpose of rehabbing the property. But if the owner never assumes responsibility of the property and its woes, the conservator may request a sale and transfer of ownership.
Burns noted that UTC could become "a trailblazer" for other communities. The organization's victory is celebrated as one of the first.
Before there were okra, tomatoes, and butter beans for Mr. Woody to pick, and crops for Grumpy Freddy to water, and pears for Nicole Speller to can, preserve, and dole out to her neighbors, the two-thirds-of-an-acre lot near their homes was a dumping ground.
For years, at the property behind a semicircle of 60 rowhouses at 53d and Wyalusing Streets, rusted barrels from the old Polselli construction business sprouted from the ground like mutated shrubs, neighbors say, while oil and unknown chemicals seeped into the dirt.
Within the tall jungle of vines and weeds, people dumped tires, trash, "you name it," said Speller, who has lived in the neighborhood 21 years, raising two daughters. "You might have found Jimmy Hoffa back there," she added with a chuckle.
Through three mayoral administrations - Goode, Rendell, and Street - a band of neighbors wrote to City Hall, Speller said, and gathered petitions for help.
"The city cleaned the lot up and removed some of the debris," Speller said, "but it didn't really help."
The lot was home to more stubborn problems: prostitutes; drug dealers; stolen, stripped cars; shootouts; and fires that took out the old garage and lashed at some of the homes.
According to public records, no one has paid the property taxes on the site in more than a decade, and the owner, Rudolph Polselli, has long since moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Polselli was served with the petition, said UTC's lawyer, Joel Tasca, but the 72-year-old never responded. Several voice-mail messages The Inquirer left for Polselli were not returned.
Speller grew up on a farm in North Carolina, so when Wiener came with his idea of a community garden, she, like many in the neighborhood, was overjoyed.
"I never thought it would come to pass," Speller said of the lot's elevation from menace to haven. "We kept getting ignored."
"Tomatoes, okra, peas," said Woody Fletcher, 71, standing in his back yard near his rose of sharon bush, rattling off the list of crops he and his neighbors have harvested from the lot. "Southern food - we got all of that growing now."
After a massive cleanup, chemical tests, and a load of mushroom soil, about a third of the old lot has been dedicated to urban farming. As a result, neighbors harvest from 40 to 100 pounds of produce a week, Wiener said, for 15 families in the neighborhood.
"We think we can have triple that," he said, walking over the lot's wood chips one afternoon, a few weeks before the hearing, as butterflies fluttered around him. "The demand is going to exceed what we can produce."
Over the years, Urban Tree Connection has jump-started, guerrilla-style, six other community gardens within the Haddington community, working with neighbors as it did at the Polselli site. With the largesse of the Wyalusing lot, Wiener and neighbors envisioned a cooperative that residents invested in and own, one that created summer jobs for youth - which led to the petition to Common Pleas Court for conservatorship.
"When we started to think about creating a community business, seeded and rooted in the community," said Wiener, "one of the things that would give it muscle and power is that the neighbors controlled this piece of land.
"We're taking this to a different level," he continued, "so we need to be on strong footing. And we can't if we don't control the land on which the production is happening."
Wiener considered the petition a long shot. For one thing, the legislation refers to abandoned and blighted structures, not land. "That's the whole possibility of it being just rejected by the court," he said.
Yet from the depths of the blight lay hope. Because of the previous fires, Wiener noted, "it's just circumstance that the buildings aren't there anymore."
At the hearing last month, as a half-dozen Haddington residents looked on, Wiener steeled himself for a long day. Along with his lawyer, he brought hundreds of pages of petitions and affidavits to show the judge. He began his presentation with a short video on UTC's work. It served as a window into the possibilities for the Wyalusing lot and its surrounding community.
After commending UTC's efforts and the neighborhood's support, Judge William J. Manfredi did not hesitate in his decision.
"We'll turn it over," said Manfredi, granting UTC conservatorship of the parcel.
Wiener spun around and looked at the neighbors, who were also in a state of disbelief - but smiling.
In the hallway, they all hugged and congratulated one another, hopeful that the decision would bear fruit - and vegetables.
"People are very protective of this garden now," Speller said. "For the ones growing up now, this is what they're going to remember - the garden - and that's a good thing."
In certain barren parts of Philadelphia, Wiener, a slight man with wispy gray hair, is known as a guerrilla gardener. He spies long-abandoned, junk-filled lots and works with neighbors to turn the swaths into beds of fruits, vegetables, and herbs.
But Wiener, testing a new state law, found himself before a judge for the first time, asking for stewardship over a stretch of land in the Haddington section of West Philadelphia.
Wiener heads a nonprofit called Urban Tree Connection, which for two decades has worked with low-income communities to revitalize their neighborhoods by transforming abandoned lots into open green spaces. Their mantra: "We build community one vacant lot at a time."
To his surprise, Wiener would get his wish.
Urban Tree Connection would become one of the first community groups in Philadelphia to be granted conservatorship under the new law. In a city with an inventory of 40,000 vacant, blighted properties, officials believe the conservatorship act could have a significant effect, empowering community groups to take over such lots.
Under the Pennsylvania Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act, which became law in February 2009, nonprofit groups such as Wiener's, senior lien holders, neighbors, and other frustrated individuals can petition the court to be named conservators of an abandoned and blighted property. To meet the criteria, the property must also be considered a public nuisance, in need of substantial repair, a fire risk, and unfit for occupancy.
As conservator, UTC can legally continue to plant and harvest on the land and follow through on its vision to create a community cooperative.
Census estimates from 2000 show that about 300,000 vacant properties litter neighborhoods across Pennsylvania, almost a third of them in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, said Elizabeth Hersh, executive director of the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania, a foundation that provided research for the law.
"This is what we intended in advocating for this law," Hersh said of Urban Tree's victory. "As a neighborhood, you're always trying to get someone else to do something. But with conservatorship, neighbors and community organizations have the ability to go to court and do something for themselves."
Fran Burns, the city's licenses and inspections commissioner, agreed. "It's still too early to tell," Burns said of the fledgling law's impact. "But I like the idea of a tool for the community to try to take ownership of blighted properties that are directly affecting them. It's another way to get the same result we're after - to get owners to maintain property."
Under the act, modeled after laws in Maryland, Ohio, and New Jersey, the recorded owner still owns the property. The conservator is appointed for the limited purpose of rehabbing the property. But if the owner never assumes responsibility of the property and its woes, the conservator may request a sale and transfer of ownership.
Burns noted that UTC could become "a trailblazer" for other communities. The organization's victory is celebrated as one of the first.
Before there were okra, tomatoes, and butter beans for Mr. Woody to pick, and crops for Grumpy Freddy to water, and pears for Nicole Speller to can, preserve, and dole out to her neighbors, the two-thirds-of-an-acre lot near their homes was a dumping ground.
For years, at the property behind a semicircle of 60 rowhouses at 53d and Wyalusing Streets, rusted barrels from the old Polselli construction business sprouted from the ground like mutated shrubs, neighbors say, while oil and unknown chemicals seeped into the dirt.
Within the tall jungle of vines and weeds, people dumped tires, trash, "you name it," said Speller, who has lived in the neighborhood 21 years, raising two daughters. "You might have found Jimmy Hoffa back there," she added with a chuckle.
Through three mayoral administrations - Goode, Rendell, and Street - a band of neighbors wrote to City Hall, Speller said, and gathered petitions for help.
"The city cleaned the lot up and removed some of the debris," Speller said, "but it didn't really help."
The lot was home to more stubborn problems: prostitutes; drug dealers; stolen, stripped cars; shootouts; and fires that took out the old garage and lashed at some of the homes.
According to public records, no one has paid the property taxes on the site in more than a decade, and the owner, Rudolph Polselli, has long since moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Polselli was served with the petition, said UTC's lawyer, Joel Tasca, but the 72-year-old never responded. Several voice-mail messages The Inquirer left for Polselli were not returned.
Speller grew up on a farm in North Carolina, so when Wiener came with his idea of a community garden, she, like many in the neighborhood, was overjoyed.
"I never thought it would come to pass," Speller said of the lot's elevation from menace to haven. "We kept getting ignored."
"Tomatoes, okra, peas," said Woody Fletcher, 71, standing in his back yard near his rose of sharon bush, rattling off the list of crops he and his neighbors have harvested from the lot. "Southern food - we got all of that growing now."
After a massive cleanup, chemical tests, and a load of mushroom soil, about a third of the old lot has been dedicated to urban farming. As a result, neighbors harvest from 40 to 100 pounds of produce a week, Wiener said, for 15 families in the neighborhood.
"We think we can have triple that," he said, walking over the lot's wood chips one afternoon, a few weeks before the hearing, as butterflies fluttered around him. "The demand is going to exceed what we can produce."
Over the years, Urban Tree Connection has jump-started, guerrilla-style, six other community gardens within the Haddington community, working with neighbors as it did at the Polselli site. With the largesse of the Wyalusing lot, Wiener and neighbors envisioned a cooperative that residents invested in and own, one that created summer jobs for youth - which led to the petition to Common Pleas Court for conservatorship.
"When we started to think about creating a community business, seeded and rooted in the community," said Wiener, "one of the things that would give it muscle and power is that the neighbors controlled this piece of land.
"We're taking this to a different level," he continued, "so we need to be on strong footing. And we can't if we don't control the land on which the production is happening."
Wiener considered the petition a long shot. For one thing, the legislation refers to abandoned and blighted structures, not land. "That's the whole possibility of it being just rejected by the court," he said.
Yet from the depths of the blight lay hope. Because of the previous fires, Wiener noted, "it's just circumstance that the buildings aren't there anymore."
At the hearing last month, as a half-dozen Haddington residents looked on, Wiener steeled himself for a long day. Along with his lawyer, he brought hundreds of pages of petitions and affidavits to show the judge. He began his presentation with a short video on UTC's work. It served as a window into the possibilities for the Wyalusing lot and its surrounding community.
After commending UTC's efforts and the neighborhood's support, Judge William J. Manfredi did not hesitate in his decision.
"We'll turn it over," said Manfredi, granting UTC conservatorship of the parcel.
Wiener spun around and looked at the neighbors, who were also in a state of disbelief - but smiling.
In the hallway, they all hugged and congratulated one another, hopeful that the decision would bear fruit - and vegetables.
"People are very protective of this garden now," Speller said. "For the ones growing up now, this is what they're going to remember - the garden - and that's a good thing."
By Valerie Russ
Philadelphia Daily News, September 15, 2010
Penelope Giles drove her Ford pickup truck around Francisville yesterday, pointing to vacant lots that a neighborhood group worked to "clean and green" in the North Philadelphia area.
Of the hundreds of lots that have been cleaned, she took pride in pointing out one in particular.
The lot, on 20th Street near Ogden, was turned into a "neighborhood pocket park" with shrubbery, flowers, a park bench and large colorful planters.
It used to be "a very scary place to walk through," said Giles, executive director of the Francisville Neighborhood Development Corp.
"It was terrible. It was crack alley. It was so overgrown and full of trash. People would rob people, and throw pocketbooks back there."
Now, it looks peaceful, with a large, colorful mural with mosaic tiles on one wall. More planting is set for next week.
"There was a house right across the street that had been on the market for over a year, but as soon as we did that park, that house sold in two months," Giles said.
She pointed to a number of houses on the block with "For Sale" signs.
"They were all holes, they were vacant lots. But this whole area was developed because of the park," she said. "This is a prime example of what reducing blight is all about. It's not always about bricks and mortar."
Giles is set to take part in a citywide Revitalizing Urban Neighborhood Conference called "Leading the Change" at Temple University on Monday.
The conference - which will address such issues as blight reduction and neighborhood development - is sponsored by City Council, the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, the Building Industry Association, Temple, and the Daily News.
It runs from 8:30 a.m. until 2 p.m. at Ritter Hall, 13th Street near Montgomery Avenue.
The Francisville NDC's goal is to revitalize the business corridor along Ridge Avenue, Giles said.
But the group realized it had to reduce blight and make the neighborhood more appealing to attract business. And it had to attract more residents, including higher-income residents. Francisville is just north of Fairmount, and extends from Broad Street to Corinthian and from Fairmount Avenue to Girard.
"We had to embrace the idea that economic diversity is necessary to support more quality businesses," said Giles, a musician who grew up in the neighborhood.
Rick Sauer, executive director of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, will moderate a panel Monday discussing land assembly and disposition.
He said there are about 40,000 vacant lots in the city, and three-fourths are privately owned.
But the publicly owned lots are held by a number of agencies: the Redevelopment Authority, the city's Department of Public Property, the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp. and the Philadelphia Housing Authority.
"There is a lack of coordination among the agencies and they all have different missions," Sauer said.
"There is a need to consolidate property ownership so sites can be assembled and enable development to happen at a larger scale."
Of the hundreds of lots that have been cleaned, she took pride in pointing out one in particular.
The lot, on 20th Street near Ogden, was turned into a "neighborhood pocket park" with shrubbery, flowers, a park bench and large colorful planters.
It used to be "a very scary place to walk through," said Giles, executive director of the Francisville Neighborhood Development Corp.
"It was terrible. It was crack alley. It was so overgrown and full of trash. People would rob people, and throw pocketbooks back there."
Now, it looks peaceful, with a large, colorful mural with mosaic tiles on one wall. More planting is set for next week.
"There was a house right across the street that had been on the market for over a year, but as soon as we did that park, that house sold in two months," Giles said.
She pointed to a number of houses on the block with "For Sale" signs.
"They were all holes, they were vacant lots. But this whole area was developed because of the park," she said. "This is a prime example of what reducing blight is all about. It's not always about bricks and mortar."
Giles is set to take part in a citywide Revitalizing Urban Neighborhood Conference called "Leading the Change" at Temple University on Monday.
The conference - which will address such issues as blight reduction and neighborhood development - is sponsored by City Council, the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, the Building Industry Association, Temple, and the Daily News.
It runs from 8:30 a.m. until 2 p.m. at Ritter Hall, 13th Street near Montgomery Avenue.
The Francisville NDC's goal is to revitalize the business corridor along Ridge Avenue, Giles said.
But the group realized it had to reduce blight and make the neighborhood more appealing to attract business. And it had to attract more residents, including higher-income residents. Francisville is just north of Fairmount, and extends from Broad Street to Corinthian and from Fairmount Avenue to Girard.
"We had to embrace the idea that economic diversity is necessary to support more quality businesses," said Giles, a musician who grew up in the neighborhood.
Rick Sauer, executive director of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, will moderate a panel Monday discussing land assembly and disposition.
He said there are about 40,000 vacant lots in the city, and three-fourths are privately owned.
But the publicly owned lots are held by a number of agencies: the Redevelopment Authority, the city's Department of Public Property, the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp. and the Philadelphia Housing Authority.
"There is a lack of coordination among the agencies and they all have different missions," Sauer said.
"There is a need to consolidate property ownership so sites can be assembled and enable development to happen at a larger scale."
By Catherine Lucey
Philadelphia Daily News, July 28, 2010
EVEN ROCKY'S block isn't immune from Philadelphia's ongoing abandoned-property problem.
On Tusculum Street, near Kensington Avenue, which includes the house featured as the boxer's home in the film "Rocky," neighbors are furious over an abandoned house that attracts drug-addicted squatters.
"We kept going in and boarding it up, but they keep knocking it down," said longtime resident Pat Aird, who said the neighbors have appealed to numerous city agencies without success.
It's a common complaint in Philadelphia. Despite aggressive anti-blight programs over the years, including hundreds of millions of dollars spent on former Mayor John Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, vast stretches of city land remain abandoned - about 40,000 vacant or abandoned properties.
"We're largely dealing with the same problems we were dealing with before NTI," said Mark Alan Hughes, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who previously served as Mayor Nutter's sustainability director.
Under Street, the city threw $296 million in bond money at the problem, with plans to tear down crumbling buildings, package cleared lots together and get them to developers. Street's administration reduced the number of blighted buildings and encouraged development, but critics noted that it fell far short of his goal to demolish 14,000 buildings.
"I think it was the right issue," Hughes said. "It was a really bold attempt. They raised a lot of money." But ultimately, he said, the program was less effective than expected.
Even when the city knows of a problem, it isn't easy to fix.
The house on Rocky's block is a good example. The Department of Licenses and Inspections has received three complaints in the past year about the house on East Tusculum Street. But L&I did not find the house to be structurally dangerous.
Because the house is privately owned, all L&I can do is cite the owner for maintenance violations. The city could demolish the property only if it was in danger of collapsing, said L&I Deputy Commissioner Bridget Collins-Greenwood. Still, Collins-Greenwood said they would check the building again to ensure it is structurally sound.
And so the issue remains. Compounding the problem is that only about 30 percent of the abandoned properties across the city are publicly owned, and those are owned by one agency or another. The rest are privately held and frequently owe back taxes. Sometimes they go to sheriff's sale, but often they just decay.
Finding a solution
Redevelopment Authority Executive Director Terry Gillen said that a city working group is currently reviewing how Philly could better deal with abandoned and tax-delinquent properties.
One success story they have been studying is Flint, Mich. Devastated by the closing of General Motors auto plants, Flint's population has plummeted from 200,000 to just more than 100,000 in the past 50 years, leaving massive stretches of empty land.
In Genesee County, home to Flint, the government set up a land bank, which takes control of abandoned and tax-foreclosed properties and decides the best usage for the city - be it to sell to a developer, give to a community group or maintain the land itself.
The advantage, said former Genesee County Treasurer Dan Kildee, is that the county can decide strategically how to use properties, instead of selling them at sheriff's sale to speculative developers who may not improve the sites.
"Every house on the block has their value affected by how we treat the abandoned houses," said Kildee, now president of the Center for Community Progress, a nonprofit agency that tries to educate communities about land management.
The land-bank system has led to renewed downtown investment in Flint, as well as community gardens in neighborhoods. Other municipalities are now considering the program.
In Pennsylvania, state Rep. John Taylor, who represents Port Richmond, has sponsored legislation that would give local municipalities the right to establish land banks that could acquire land for development. The bill recently passed in the state House and must now get approval from the Senate.
"You could acquire [properties] in bulk and sell them in bulk," Taylor said. "And make the buyer comply with a plan."
Setting land-use priorities
Gillen stressed that a key piece of any new land program, whether a land bank or not, must be deciding what the city's priorities are for abandoned properties. She also said the administration was committed to protecting homeowners.
"I think we've got to talk about what land-use priorities are," said Gillen, who stressed that the city has not yet decided the next move. "Is it a priority to give land to people who operate homeless shelters? Is it a priority to give land to people who develop jobs?"
Another part of that conversation has to be about what scale the city should be.
Philadelphia hasn't suffered the same population loss as Flint - where much of the abandoned land is being converted into gardens and open space. But Philly's population has dropped from just more than 2 million in 1950 to about 1.5 million now. Yet the city's 1960 comprehensive plan was based on the notion that the number of residents would grow to 2.5 million.
"The city is much smaller than it was built for," Hughes said. "There are huge amounts of city that it doesn't make sense to build on. We don't need this physical city to be capable of housing 2.5 million people any more."
And some experts stressed that while a land bank might be a helpful tool to improve vacant-land management, it won't suddenly make all these properties desirable to investors.
"The overwhelming majority of the properties that get registered to a land bank, there's going to be no buyer for that," Hughes said. "The vast majority of parcels that enter the land bank, it's not going to be selling the land, it's going to be managing them while vacant."
Still, former City Housing Director John Kromer said now is a good time for the city to get property plans in place, before the economy rebounds.
"One important thing to remember about vacant properties is, as we emerge out of the recession, more and more people are going to realize how valuable they are," Kromer said. "I think it means that investors and developers that previously hadn't looked at Philadelphia would take another look."
On Tusculum Street, near Kensington Avenue, which includes the house featured as the boxer's home in the film "Rocky," neighbors are furious over an abandoned house that attracts drug-addicted squatters.
"We kept going in and boarding it up, but they keep knocking it down," said longtime resident Pat Aird, who said the neighbors have appealed to numerous city agencies without success.
It's a common complaint in Philadelphia. Despite aggressive anti-blight programs over the years, including hundreds of millions of dollars spent on former Mayor John Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, vast stretches of city land remain abandoned - about 40,000 vacant or abandoned properties.
"We're largely dealing with the same problems we were dealing with before NTI," said Mark Alan Hughes, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who previously served as Mayor Nutter's sustainability director.
Under Street, the city threw $296 million in bond money at the problem, with plans to tear down crumbling buildings, package cleared lots together and get them to developers. Street's administration reduced the number of blighted buildings and encouraged development, but critics noted that it fell far short of his goal to demolish 14,000 buildings.
"I think it was the right issue," Hughes said. "It was a really bold attempt. They raised a lot of money." But ultimately, he said, the program was less effective than expected.
Even when the city knows of a problem, it isn't easy to fix.
The house on Rocky's block is a good example. The Department of Licenses and Inspections has received three complaints in the past year about the house on East Tusculum Street. But L&I did not find the house to be structurally dangerous.
Because the house is privately owned, all L&I can do is cite the owner for maintenance violations. The city could demolish the property only if it was in danger of collapsing, said L&I Deputy Commissioner Bridget Collins-Greenwood. Still, Collins-Greenwood said they would check the building again to ensure it is structurally sound.
And so the issue remains. Compounding the problem is that only about 30 percent of the abandoned properties across the city are publicly owned, and those are owned by one agency or another. The rest are privately held and frequently owe back taxes. Sometimes they go to sheriff's sale, but often they just decay.
Finding a solution
Redevelopment Authority Executive Director Terry Gillen said that a city working group is currently reviewing how Philly could better deal with abandoned and tax-delinquent properties.
One success story they have been studying is Flint, Mich. Devastated by the closing of General Motors auto plants, Flint's population has plummeted from 200,000 to just more than 100,000 in the past 50 years, leaving massive stretches of empty land.
In Genesee County, home to Flint, the government set up a land bank, which takes control of abandoned and tax-foreclosed properties and decides the best usage for the city - be it to sell to a developer, give to a community group or maintain the land itself.
The advantage, said former Genesee County Treasurer Dan Kildee, is that the county can decide strategically how to use properties, instead of selling them at sheriff's sale to speculative developers who may not improve the sites.
"Every house on the block has their value affected by how we treat the abandoned houses," said Kildee, now president of the Center for Community Progress, a nonprofit agency that tries to educate communities about land management.
The land-bank system has led to renewed downtown investment in Flint, as well as community gardens in neighborhoods. Other municipalities are now considering the program.
In Pennsylvania, state Rep. John Taylor, who represents Port Richmond, has sponsored legislation that would give local municipalities the right to establish land banks that could acquire land for development. The bill recently passed in the state House and must now get approval from the Senate.
"You could acquire [properties] in bulk and sell them in bulk," Taylor said. "And make the buyer comply with a plan."
Setting land-use priorities
Gillen stressed that a key piece of any new land program, whether a land bank or not, must be deciding what the city's priorities are for abandoned properties. She also said the administration was committed to protecting homeowners.
"I think we've got to talk about what land-use priorities are," said Gillen, who stressed that the city has not yet decided the next move. "Is it a priority to give land to people who operate homeless shelters? Is it a priority to give land to people who develop jobs?"
Another part of that conversation has to be about what scale the city should be.
Philadelphia hasn't suffered the same population loss as Flint - where much of the abandoned land is being converted into gardens and open space. But Philly's population has dropped from just more than 2 million in 1950 to about 1.5 million now. Yet the city's 1960 comprehensive plan was based on the notion that the number of residents would grow to 2.5 million.
"The city is much smaller than it was built for," Hughes said. "There are huge amounts of city that it doesn't make sense to build on. We don't need this physical city to be capable of housing 2.5 million people any more."
And some experts stressed that while a land bank might be a helpful tool to improve vacant-land management, it won't suddenly make all these properties desirable to investors.
"The overwhelming majority of the properties that get registered to a land bank, there's going to be no buyer for that," Hughes said. "The vast majority of parcels that enter the land bank, it's not going to be selling the land, it's going to be managing them while vacant."
Still, former City Housing Director John Kromer said now is a good time for the city to get property plans in place, before the economy rebounds.
"One important thing to remember about vacant properties is, as we emerge out of the recession, more and more people are going to realize how valuable they are," Kromer said. "I think it means that investors and developers that previously hadn't looked at Philadelphia would take another look."
Strawberry Mansion neighbors try to salvage a block that the rest of the city, even animals, seem to treat as a garbage can.
By DAN GERINGER
Philadelphia Daily News, July 23, 2010
SHORTLY BEFORE 4 a.m. on the first day of June, a desperate man came running from Dauphin Street, through a weed-choked, unfenced, vacant lot and onto Dakota Street, near 30th, pursued by men with guns.
Willie McRae, 77, who has lived on the North Philadelphia block since 1956 and has been its captain for more than 50 years, was awakened by gunshots.
"They finished him off right here," McRae said earlier this week, pointing to a bullet scar in the narrow street, close to his house. "He died right by that fire hydrant."
Police arrived quickly, McRae said, but it was too dark for them to look for shell casings because the streetlight over the crime scene was out, as it had been for weeks since McRae reported it to the city's highly touted, one-call-fixes-all 3-1-1 number.
And the police couldn't pursue the shooters in the darkness because the most likely escape route - a vacant lot next to the home of McRae's neighbor and lifelong friend, Fitzgerald Johnson, 77 - was overgrown with man-size weeds and filled with rubble from an exposed wall that had been deteriorating since the city demolished the adjoining rowhouse decades ago.
Johnson said that despite his requests, the city's Department of Licenses & Inspections has never repaired the wall and cleared the lot.
The vacant lot leads into an alley that runs behind the West Dakota Street rowhouses. The alley is so thick with weeds, vines and massive junk trees that it supports a thriving population of raccoons, opossums and feral cats.
"The police told us, 'We're not going in there because it's too dark to see,' " McRae said.
When Johnson asked the city to trim or remove the alley's trees, he was told that it was the responsibility of the homeowners on Gordon Street, whose back yards line the alley.
The trouble is, Johnson said, some of those properties have no visible homeowners. Some homes are abandoned. Some belong to the Philadelphia Housing Authority. So the city should trim the out-of-control trees, he said.
McRae said that the body lay on West Dakota Street from 4 to 8 a.m., when police finally had enough daylight to do their job.
At 9 a.m., he said, as if by magic or by police request, Peco showed up and finally fulfilled his weeks-old 3-1-1 call by fixing the streetlight.
A forgotten block
McRae said that the June incident shows how the city fails to provide basic services to the hardworking, taxpaying residents of his block - one of whom is a police officer - despite Mayor Nutter's public pronouncements about his one-call 3-1-1 system.
"I hate 3-1-1," McRae said. "When this light went out, I called 3-1-1, and they said it would take up to 10 working days. I said, 'You mean, we have to be in the dark here for two weeks? It takes you two weeks to fix a streetlight?' "
McRae hates getting the runaround instead of results because he worked hard all his life - full time for 34 years in an office-furniture factory and part time at the Tastykake plant - and he personally cut the weeds for decades in his block's several vacant lots until a shoulder injury last year forced him to stop, three years shy of his 80th birthday.
"I used my weed-wacker for the smaller stuff, my sling blade for the bigger stuff and a lot of help from the Almighty," McRae said.
His neighbor, Johnson, who drove a truck for 23 years and worked in a plant that made foam for car seats for 18, is equally angry about the city's failure to repair a crumbling wall from an L&I demolition. The debris that tumbled down ruined the vacant lot where he had a vegetable garden for decades. Now, the rubble makes it useless.
"The city came out once," Johnson said, looking at the remnants of his once-fertile garden. "They told me they wouldn't be able to get their heavy equipment onto the lot because of the street-sign pole in front of it."
"That little pole," McRae said, pointing at it, "once held a sign telling people not to park along that curb on Tuesdays when the street was being cleaned. The street cleanups stopped years ago. The sign is gone.
"So the city didn't clean up the lot because of a useless little pole they could have removed easily. I could remove it myself right now if they'll finally clean up this lot."
"I used to plant so many string beans, peas, okra, cucumbers and squash, I had plenty to share with my neighbors," Johnson said. "I loved that garden."
According to the city's Bureau of Revision of Taxes, that lot has belonged to the city's Department of Public Property since 1983, so the city has failed to clean and green its own property.
The lot's sole purpose today is to serve as access to West Dakota Street for a family of five raccoons that lives in the overgrown alley behind the block's row houses.
"The mother and father are big giant raccoons," said Robert Thompson, who has lived on the block for four years.
"They walk right down the street, looking for food," said his mother-in-law, Carol Henry, 65, a nursing-care worker who has lived on the block since childhood. "They're not afraid of anything."
"They are scary," Thompson said. He pointed to a white plastic table with two chairs, a colorful vegetable-print tablecloth and a vase of artificial flowers, set up on the sidewalk in front of a neighbor's house.
"Mary Izzard and her daughter, Alexis, put that little table out in the daytime to eat their lunch," Thompson said. "Not at night, though. Raccoons."
"I'm trapped here"
Johnson and McRae, wearing their Phillies caps as usual, walked down their block to the 31st Street corner, where a 30-foot Empress tree's massive branches are entangled in the power lines and its roots have broken up the sidewalk into chunks that look like the aftermath of an earthquake.
Beneath the tree, the unstable back-yard wall of a burned-out house is so near collapse that McRae can move one of its concrete blocks with one finger.
"Kids play around here all the time," he said, as Thompson's daughter and Henry's granddaughter, Daesha, 4, came out of her house to play under their watchful eyes.
"I'm afraid this [wall] is going to fall on a child," McRae said. "Years ago, that's what happened over near 33rd and Montgomery. A wall like this fell and killed a little boy."
L&I came out once and looked at the wall, McRae said, and told him that it was the responsibility of the property owner.
"That house is burned," McRae said. "No one lives there. I don't think there is a property owner anymore. Meanwhile, this wall keeps getting closer to falling down."
McRae walked up Dakota Street toward 30th, where he looked at two vacant lots that form the gateway to his block. The lot on the north side is overgrown with weeds that he hasn't been able to cut since his shoulder injury. The south-side lot is covered with a thick layer of trash that has obviously been there since the days of a faded Obama/Biden campaign poster that clings to its useless chain-link fence.
"I don't want to live where trash is being dumped," said McRae in a voice that was equal parts frustration and sadness. "But I'm trapped here. This is my home. I've worked hard but I can't get any cooperation from the city. That's what angers me."
Getting the city's attention
Informed of the situation by the Daily News, City Councilman Darrell Clarke, whose North Philadelphia district includes McRae's block, said, "Under former Mayor Street, the NTI [Neighborhood Transformation Initiative] program addressed these kinds of issues and gave people in the community hope that the city does care about you.
"Just something like cleaning a lot, greening it and putting a nice wooden fence around it can make a marked difference for a minimal cost because people respect it and don't trash the lot."
Delivering his hard-times budget, Mayor Nutter recently cut the citywide vacant-lot program - administered by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society - by $840,000, or 33 percent.
So, although Clarke has put West Dakota Street's vacant lots on his clean-and-green list, they have to wait for future funding that may or may not come through.
"Under NTI, I also had a significant demolition budget for vacant, dangerous properties," Clarke said, "and I spent it. But that program is gone, L&I's demolition budget has been reduced and I don't see those dollars coming in the foreseeable future."
When the Daily News told L&I Commissioner Fran Burns about the West Dakota Street problems, she immediately suggested a tour of the block with McRae and his neighbors.
"People get aggravated when they feel they've gone through the system, and the system has failed them," Burns said. "What I usually like to do is go out and meet the neighbors to see for myself what they're talking about. Then I can tell them directly, frankly, here's what we can do immediately and here's what the city cannot do."
True to her word, Burns called McRae and made plans to meet him today on the block.
If Burns agrees to repair the deteriorating wall exposed by a long-ago L&I demolition, clean up the rubble-strewn lot next to it so Johnson can again grow vegetables for his neighbors and demolish the unsafe wall at the 31st Street corner, she will go a long way toward restoring the residents' faith in the city government that they've paid taxes to all these years.
If she can get the trash removed from the disgusting lot on the 30th Street corner and the other nuisance lots on the block, McRae might feel that after decades of being a lone voice in a weed-choked wilderness, he has finally been heard. And respected.
Willie McRae, 77, who has lived on the North Philadelphia block since 1956 and has been its captain for more than 50 years, was awakened by gunshots.
"They finished him off right here," McRae said earlier this week, pointing to a bullet scar in the narrow street, close to his house. "He died right by that fire hydrant."
Police arrived quickly, McRae said, but it was too dark for them to look for shell casings because the streetlight over the crime scene was out, as it had been for weeks since McRae reported it to the city's highly touted, one-call-fixes-all 3-1-1 number.
And the police couldn't pursue the shooters in the darkness because the most likely escape route - a vacant lot next to the home of McRae's neighbor and lifelong friend, Fitzgerald Johnson, 77 - was overgrown with man-size weeds and filled with rubble from an exposed wall that had been deteriorating since the city demolished the adjoining rowhouse decades ago.
Johnson said that despite his requests, the city's Department of Licenses & Inspections has never repaired the wall and cleared the lot.
The vacant lot leads into an alley that runs behind the West Dakota Street rowhouses. The alley is so thick with weeds, vines and massive junk trees that it supports a thriving population of raccoons, opossums and feral cats.
"The police told us, 'We're not going in there because it's too dark to see,' " McRae said.
When Johnson asked the city to trim or remove the alley's trees, he was told that it was the responsibility of the homeowners on Gordon Street, whose back yards line the alley.
The trouble is, Johnson said, some of those properties have no visible homeowners. Some homes are abandoned. Some belong to the Philadelphia Housing Authority. So the city should trim the out-of-control trees, he said.
McRae said that the body lay on West Dakota Street from 4 to 8 a.m., when police finally had enough daylight to do their job.
At 9 a.m., he said, as if by magic or by police request, Peco showed up and finally fulfilled his weeks-old 3-1-1 call by fixing the streetlight.
A forgotten block
McRae said that the June incident shows how the city fails to provide basic services to the hardworking, taxpaying residents of his block - one of whom is a police officer - despite Mayor Nutter's public pronouncements about his one-call 3-1-1 system.
"I hate 3-1-1," McRae said. "When this light went out, I called 3-1-1, and they said it would take up to 10 working days. I said, 'You mean, we have to be in the dark here for two weeks? It takes you two weeks to fix a streetlight?' "
McRae hates getting the runaround instead of results because he worked hard all his life - full time for 34 years in an office-furniture factory and part time at the Tastykake plant - and he personally cut the weeds for decades in his block's several vacant lots until a shoulder injury last year forced him to stop, three years shy of his 80th birthday.
"I used my weed-wacker for the smaller stuff, my sling blade for the bigger stuff and a lot of help from the Almighty," McRae said.
His neighbor, Johnson, who drove a truck for 23 years and worked in a plant that made foam for car seats for 18, is equally angry about the city's failure to repair a crumbling wall from an L&I demolition. The debris that tumbled down ruined the vacant lot where he had a vegetable garden for decades. Now, the rubble makes it useless.
"The city came out once," Johnson said, looking at the remnants of his once-fertile garden. "They told me they wouldn't be able to get their heavy equipment onto the lot because of the street-sign pole in front of it."
"That little pole," McRae said, pointing at it, "once held a sign telling people not to park along that curb on Tuesdays when the street was being cleaned. The street cleanups stopped years ago. The sign is gone.
"So the city didn't clean up the lot because of a useless little pole they could have removed easily. I could remove it myself right now if they'll finally clean up this lot."
"I used to plant so many string beans, peas, okra, cucumbers and squash, I had plenty to share with my neighbors," Johnson said. "I loved that garden."
According to the city's Bureau of Revision of Taxes, that lot has belonged to the city's Department of Public Property since 1983, so the city has failed to clean and green its own property.
The lot's sole purpose today is to serve as access to West Dakota Street for a family of five raccoons that lives in the overgrown alley behind the block's row houses.
"The mother and father are big giant raccoons," said Robert Thompson, who has lived on the block for four years.
"They walk right down the street, looking for food," said his mother-in-law, Carol Henry, 65, a nursing-care worker who has lived on the block since childhood. "They're not afraid of anything."
"They are scary," Thompson said. He pointed to a white plastic table with two chairs, a colorful vegetable-print tablecloth and a vase of artificial flowers, set up on the sidewalk in front of a neighbor's house.
"Mary Izzard and her daughter, Alexis, put that little table out in the daytime to eat their lunch," Thompson said. "Not at night, though. Raccoons."
"I'm trapped here"
Johnson and McRae, wearing their Phillies caps as usual, walked down their block to the 31st Street corner, where a 30-foot Empress tree's massive branches are entangled in the power lines and its roots have broken up the sidewalk into chunks that look like the aftermath of an earthquake.
Beneath the tree, the unstable back-yard wall of a burned-out house is so near collapse that McRae can move one of its concrete blocks with one finger.
"Kids play around here all the time," he said, as Thompson's daughter and Henry's granddaughter, Daesha, 4, came out of her house to play under their watchful eyes.
"I'm afraid this [wall] is going to fall on a child," McRae said. "Years ago, that's what happened over near 33rd and Montgomery. A wall like this fell and killed a little boy."
L&I came out once and looked at the wall, McRae said, and told him that it was the responsibility of the property owner.
"That house is burned," McRae said. "No one lives there. I don't think there is a property owner anymore. Meanwhile, this wall keeps getting closer to falling down."
McRae walked up Dakota Street toward 30th, where he looked at two vacant lots that form the gateway to his block. The lot on the north side is overgrown with weeds that he hasn't been able to cut since his shoulder injury. The south-side lot is covered with a thick layer of trash that has obviously been there since the days of a faded Obama/Biden campaign poster that clings to its useless chain-link fence.
"I don't want to live where trash is being dumped," said McRae in a voice that was equal parts frustration and sadness. "But I'm trapped here. This is my home. I've worked hard but I can't get any cooperation from the city. That's what angers me."
Getting the city's attention
Informed of the situation by the Daily News, City Councilman Darrell Clarke, whose North Philadelphia district includes McRae's block, said, "Under former Mayor Street, the NTI [Neighborhood Transformation Initiative] program addressed these kinds of issues and gave people in the community hope that the city does care about you.
"Just something like cleaning a lot, greening it and putting a nice wooden fence around it can make a marked difference for a minimal cost because people respect it and don't trash the lot."
Delivering his hard-times budget, Mayor Nutter recently cut the citywide vacant-lot program - administered by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society - by $840,000, or 33 percent.
So, although Clarke has put West Dakota Street's vacant lots on his clean-and-green list, they have to wait for future funding that may or may not come through.
"Under NTI, I also had a significant demolition budget for vacant, dangerous properties," Clarke said, "and I spent it. But that program is gone, L&I's demolition budget has been reduced and I don't see those dollars coming in the foreseeable future."
When the Daily News told L&I Commissioner Fran Burns about the West Dakota Street problems, she immediately suggested a tour of the block with McRae and his neighbors.
"People get aggravated when they feel they've gone through the system, and the system has failed them," Burns said. "What I usually like to do is go out and meet the neighbors to see for myself what they're talking about. Then I can tell them directly, frankly, here's what we can do immediately and here's what the city cannot do."
True to her word, Burns called McRae and made plans to meet him today on the block.
If Burns agrees to repair the deteriorating wall exposed by a long-ago L&I demolition, clean up the rubble-strewn lot next to it so Johnson can again grow vegetables for his neighbors and demolish the unsafe wall at the 31st Street corner, she will go a long way toward restoring the residents' faith in the city government that they've paid taxes to all these years.
If she can get the trash removed from the disgusting lot on the 30th Street corner and the other nuisance lots on the block, McRae might feel that after decades of being a lone voice in a weed-choked wilderness, he has finally been heard. And respected.