Turf Wars: Neighbors Gone Wild
Why? Because the music drifts up to said resident’s luxe pad on summer evenings—and the Jerk Hut isn’t zoned for outdoor music. It’s unclear when this might be resolved.
And this kind of absurdist tragicomedy isn’t just for restaurants. Developers of every stripe must face outdated zoning laws and powerful neighborhood groups. Let us count the ways: In Chestnut Hill, a doctor trying to build a dialysis center must give four presentations to four separate committees of the same civic association. In Center City, opposition mounts to a 7-Eleven sign at 12th and Chestnut because it doesn’t fit the character of the block—a 7-Eleven somehow dragging down the vibe created by all those wig and pager shops. Want to build a back deck on your house? Be prepared for a fight. Zoning provisions demand that a certain percentage of open space be maintained on every lot—rendering you vulnerable to a zoning challenge from any neighbor who objects to the smoke of your summer barbecues. Got real loot and want to build a high-rise? The cautionary tale is Stamper Square, a planned Headhouse Square condo, hotel, restaurant and public space that got stopped in talks with neighborhood groups there.
The give-and-take between developers and communities isn’t all bad. Consider Bart Blatstein, who bought the old Schmidt’s Brewery site with plans to build an urban strip mall. Libs residents converted Blatstein into a developer who at least considers the aesthetics—leading to a series of mostly agreeable condominiums and apartments and his ambitious Italian-style Piazza. But we as a city seem incapable of distinguishing between disagreements profound, like that one, and provincial: In 2004, John Westrum presented plans to rehab the decrepit Byberry mental hospital, a collection of abandoned buildings in Northeast Philadelphia. For 15 years, Byberry had played host to a nightly procession of bums, drunken teenagers, ghost hunters and animal sacrifices. To replace that, Westrum proposed a mix of office space and new residential development. But a representative of the Somerton Civic Association balked, telling the Inquirer, “We want the whole 50 acres to be senior housing.”
“It should never have been so difficult,” says Westrum today. “There was just no clear process.”
So after more than a year of community meetings and architectural smash-ups in which plans were drawn, redrawn and then redrawn some more, a neighborhood wasn’t reborn — but instead got trapped in amber, with 398 housing units targeted to that coveted 55-and-older demographic.
A community comprised of the childless and the elderly. How about that? Just what the neighborhood’s president wanted.
AS INQUIRER ARCHITECTURE CRITIC Inga Saffron tells it, city governments got bit by the planning bug in the mid-20th century. Titanic figures like New York’s Robert Moses and our own Ed Bacon operated like quasi-mayors—and screwed up as regularly as they succeeded. Once cities realized that these large-scale urban renewal programs actually contributed to blight, crime and poverty, the planning party ended. In the wake of this reflexive inaction, Philadelphia’s zoning code has been allowed to molder for more than 75 years with just one significant overhaul.
