Contrarian: Digging More Holes

IN THE EARLY 1990S, I WAS A CRAB FISHERMAN IN ALASKA, and between trips we would stop in Seattle. I remember going to a coffee shop there called Starbucks and thinking, “Someone should open one of these in Philadelphia.” And a few years earlier, when I was an EMT in North Philadelphia, I remember driving around Northern Liberties and thinking, “Someone should really renovate this neighborhood.”

Based on those two thoughts, I’ve come to consider myself a visionary in the world of investment. Before you call me for advice, though, you might want to know that I also consider myself a legal scholar because I’ve seen a hundred episodes of Law & Order. And you might also want to know that while driving around North Philadelphia as an EMT, I didn’t just imagine renovations for Northern Liberties, but also for six or seven other areas in North Philadelphia, all of which, 20 years on, are still utter wasteland.

Philadelphia’s wastelands are unique. For one thing, they are everywhere, like cancerous lesions that have sprouted all over the city. Chicago has its South Side, Boston its South End, L.A. the South Central neighborhood, but our blight can be found anywhere you look. Southwest Philly, Germantown, Strawberry Mansion, West Philadelphia, Kensington, Mantua, and, of course, North Philly all sport block after block of abandoned and burned-out houses with trash blowing across deserted lots. And unlike those other cities, where slums can only be seen from trains and freeways, our wastelands are highly visible. Just a few blocks from the city center, the Divine Lorraine Hotel sits right on Broad Street, a 10-story Victorian monstrosity that’s been collecting mold for a decade, welcoming tourists to the desolation of Ridge Avenue.

Recently, the media have made a lot of the revitalized downtown, with its increased foot traffic and retail space, but through yet another administration, our blighted neighborhoods have gone virtually untouched. According to a study from 2000, Philadelphia had the highest rate of abandoned buildings per capita in the country, and it sure doesn’t appear that anything has changed — our vacant lots cover an area the size of Center City.

It’s not as if City Hall is unaware of the problem; in fact, it used to be the Street administration’s signature issue. We have the Redevelopment Authority, the Empowerment Zone, the Keystone Opportunity Zone, the Girard Coalition, the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, the Vacant Land Stabilization Project, and some half a dozen more government or community groups. They’ve accomplished next to nothing in the past 20 years.

This is government at work: The federally funded Empowerment Zone began a project in the mid-’90s to build an arts center, to be named after jazz great Billie Holiday, near Temple’s campus. They dug a huge hole in the ground, then cancelled the project and filled it back in again, which cost $1.5 million. Now it’s a vacant lot. Meanwhile, the NTI, the most ambitious of Mayor Street’s projects, began in 2001, with a $250 million-plus budget, to raze and replace abandoned city buildings, starting in Strawberry Mansion. Hopefully, not much of that money has been spent, because a recent stroll through Strawberry Mansion revealed no significant change since I worked there 20 years ago. A few empty lots have been seeded and had their ugly chain-link fences replaced by wooden ones, but I could have done that myself on a few Sunday afternoons.

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