Turf Wars: Neighbors Gone Wild

Because everyone playing the development game knows the rulebook is out of date, it’s become pretty much an accepted fact of life in Philly that we’ll make the rules up as we go. Unfortunately, the process we’ve landed on looks a lot like our politics.

“There became an air of entitlement,” says Carl Primavera, a leading zoning and land-use attorney in the city. “Neighborhoods started expecting to be paid in some fashion for their support, beyond the benefits of having a healthy business come to their neighborhood.”

Primavera draws a line between these exchanges and the free back deck former city treasurer Corey Kemp had constructed during the Street administration’s pay-for-play scandal. But the exchanges still boil down to a kind of pig-meet-trough equation. Primavera says he’s had community groups come up to him after presentations and say, “We like the project, but we don’t know what to ask for.”

Primavera relates one instance where he knew precisely what was meant, but resisted anyway, hoping to find that his questioner had some sense of shame. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well,” the man said, “should we ask for lighting? A community garden? We don’t know. … ”

The man was asking an attorney what kind of graft his client might be willing to supply in exchange for the group’s politically important statement of support. But the near-criminality of what he was up to never seemed to enter the man’s mind. Such is the self-righteousness of a person acting On Behalf of His Community.

In a sense, we’re all complicit. Did we begin a collective examination of our citizenry’s ethical fitness when the casinos started promising communities cold hard cash in exchange for letting them land their parasitic coin-operated spaceships among them? Nope. ’Cause we’re used to this crap. Northern Liberties even has what some refer to derisively as an “extortion committee,” which works to see what kind of swag it can leverage from big developments.

Community support is so important that some developers hire Carl Engelke, who worked for former state senator Vince Fumo, to help them navigate the various political and community constituencies. “There’s a way to do things,” Engelke says, “that tends to make projects run smoothly. You sit down with the City Councilman. You sit down with all the relevant community groups. You explain your project. … ”

That people are employed to negotiate this process is a sign of its entrenchment. Primavera won’t name the community involved in what might be his best story. But one neighborhood has so embraced the transactional aspect of granting its approval to city projects that residents actually developed a formula. “They wanted some kind of contribution for condo projects,” he says, “and they worked it out according to the dollars per key. They wanted a certain number of dollars per unit in exchange for approving the project.”