Wrecking Ball to Launch Big Philadelphia Face Lift

PHILADELPHIA —  This city of row houses and rusting factories is about to embark on one of the most ambitious urban renewal projects in the United States since the 1970s.

Over the next five years, Philadelphia plans to spend $295 million to tear down 14,000 abandoned homes, renovate 2,500 buildings and clear 31,000 vacant lots. The wrecking ball is expected to begin swinging this spring.

Once picked clean, the plots will be turned over to developers, whom officials hope to lure with tax breaks and promises of unprecedented city cooperation.

With the program, Mayor John F. Street hopes to deliver on a decades-old promise to take urban renewal out of downtown areas frequented by commuters and tourists and bring it to the city’s downtrodden neighborhoods.

“This will affect the entire city footprint,” said Street’s spokesman, Frank Keel. “Every section of this city will realize the benefits of this program.”

City officials acknowledge that their investment is a gamble simply because the blight problem is vast. In a companion program over the last two years, the city has cleared 18,000 empty lots, hauled away 11,000 tons of debris and towed 100,000 abandoned cars, and yet Street declared last week, “We have only just begun.”

Every corner of the city bears the scars of 40 years of population flight and job loss. More than 500,000 people--a quarter of the city’s peak population of 2 million--have fled since 1960.

In some neighborhoods, empty buildings stretch for blocks. Even in Center City--the downtown area that is home to the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, as well as thriving restaurants--sit near-vacant and decaying townhouses.

A city inspection survey two years ago issued this bleak tally: Philadelphia was pockmarked with 30,730 vacant lots and 25,922 vacant buildings. In December, the city declared 7,371 of those vacant buildings dangerous, either because they were falling down or had been taken over by squatters and drug dealers. Many of the buildings are in largely impoverished North and West Philadelphia.

“I lived in North Philly for years. I lived in West Philly and it is an abomination to see what has happened to these places,” said the Rev. Kermit Newkirk, pastor at the Harold O. Davis Memorial Baptist Church.

“Some of these were wonderful neighborhoods, strong neighborhoods, working-class neighborhoods. But those who have found a way to escape have escaped, and those that remain have little hope that things will change.”

Newkirk himself moved seven years ago to suburban West Chester, an hour’s drive from his parish in the city’s Logan section, where residents have evacuated hundreds of homes that began sinking in the 1980s.

“We wanted to stay in the city,” he said, “but we couldn’t find anything approaching decent, so we got out.”

The city is billing the program as strikingly different from the urban renewal projects of the 1960s and ‘70s, when planners favored leveling entire neighborhoods, evicting thousands of poor tenants and starting fresh, usually with high-rise apartments.

Instead, officials hope most of the demolitions will be aimed strategically at eliminating blighted buildings while leaving neighborhoods intact.

Street tried to hammer home that strategy when he signed the anti-blight measure last week on a run-down street near the University of Pennsylvania. Penn--long considered an oasis in West Philadelphia--invested millions in surrounding neighborhoods in the 1990s, spurring gentrification.

What has yet to be seen is whether the cleanup will finally get developers interested in neighborhoods that have long been seen as beyond repair.