Under the rusting tracks of the rundown Market-Frankford El station, the intersection of Market and 52nd streets bakes in the late September sun. The streets are a patchwork of multicolored asphalt and exposed gravel, littered with deep potholes and broken glass. Scattered trash haphazardly blankets the ground, collecting into browned piles of paper, discarded bottles and cigarette butts at the curb. An old Philadelphia Weekly stand rests overturned on the corner, which, judging by the debris that has accumulated around the stand's mangled base, hasn't been used in months.
People mill slowly up and down the corridor as broken mufflers wheeze by. The hectic power-walking pace that abounds on Locust Walk is absent here - residents amble along at a leisurely rate. They stop occasionally to inspect the sneakers, t-shirts and sunglasses that vendors have set up in a makeshift bazaar along the sidewalk, while less organized entrepreneurs try to hawk their wares to anyone who pays attention.
On the corner, Kevin Brown, a 42-year-old West Philly native, stubs out his Newport cigarette before turning to two passing women and asking, "Taxi? Taxi?" in a bored tone. Parked in front of Brown - with its doors thrown wide open and keys in the ignition - is his dented, early '90s model Buick LeSabre.
Brown, an unlicensed cab driver, has lived at 58th and Market streets for the past 15 years. "I like it alright here," Brown says, referring to the neighborhood, "but it's getting a little bad." Though housing prices remain low, Brown has noticed a distinct rise in violent crime over the past few years. "You see it all the time - people getting robbed, getting beat down. All the time. That's why it ain't good to be in the streets at a certain time." Brown stops to offer his services to another group of passersby before looking up and saying, "Even I don't go out around here at night, and I live in the neighborhood."
Proponents of "urban renewal" - as gentrification is often euphemistically called - contend that its effects are overwhelmingly positive; neighborhoods become safer, businesses thrive and new residents breathe life into once-blighted areas. But what is often left out of this urban Cinderella story is the tale of what happens to the longtime residents whose lives are uprooted by the "progress" that renewal brings.
In a year that has seen a sharp, citywide increase in murders (303 as of last week), an April 11 article in the Philadelphia Daily News identified 52nd and Market as the city's deadliest corner.
While the much-lauded revitalization of University City continues to make it an attractive destination for hipsters and yuppies alike, the harsh pulse of urban poverty still beats strongly only a few blocks away in the heart of West Philadelphia.
A brief stroll down Pine Street to the west of Penn's campus reveals a startling division - at 50th Street, well-kept stone and brick Victorian homes with small, well-manicured gardens abruptly give way to dilapidated row houses and crumbling sidewalks. The wrought-iron gates and shiny new sedans that pepper the street's 4900 block are replaced by weather-beaten, late model Chevys and rusted chain-link fences that strain to support their falling weight on the overgrown weeds and bramble that spill through them onto the sidewalk. This stark image cuts straight to the heart of what's at stake when it comes to gentrification: segregation not just by race or lifestyle, but by cold, hard economics.
A few blocks to the northwest, on the corner where Kevin Brown makes his living, the 52nd Street El station is undergoing a multimillion-dollar upgrade as part of SEPTA's ongoing project to revamp its Market-Frankford line. In the midst of a push that will ostensibly help to make the area more accessible and palatable to the rest of the city, the local residents suffer its consequences. As the Daily News reported, the area has become a local hotbed for drug dealers. With SEPTA's construction has come shuttered storefronts and heavy pedestrian traffic - both combining to create the perfect conditions for narcotics trafficking. "They can just make a sale and blend in," a Philadelphia police officer told the Daily News. "They can see patrol cars from a mile away and just duck into a store."
While the ever-present yellow jackets prowl on each street corner of University City, the drugs and violence go all but unchecked in adjacent neighborhoods. These conditions aren't so much a contrast to the drastic drop in University City's crime rate in recent years, but a direct effect of it. Gentrification hasn't removed the deleterious effects of poverty from the city; it's just pushed them onto the next block.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, the drug market appeared to be booming on 52nd Street. Men slouched nonchalantly against storefront walls, chatting and smoking cigarettes, before walking up to cars in broad daylight and full view of the street to exchange their products for cash. One man standing outside of a delicatessen where 52nd intersects with Arch could be overheard asking pedestrians if they wanted crack.
Two Monday mornings ago, as various news outlets reported, 21-year-old Philadelphia police officer Richard Decoatsworth suffered a shotgun blast to the face less than a block from that intersection. Decoatsworth luckily escaped with his life, but his shooting presents an apt analogy for the state of the neighborhood: The ungentrified streets of West Philadelphia are not unlike the Wild Wild West of yore - a frontier where the desperados go to escape the law and terrorize the locals, a place where not even the police are safe to walk the streets.
The Illusion Hair Salon at 47th and Chestnut streets sits in a small cluster of rundown shops that share the block with a gas station. From the outside, the shops appear to be falling apart - their pockmarked facades are relics of the '80s and don't seem to have received much upkeep since then. Inside, however, the air is warm and convivial. A row of chairs lines the shop's leftmost wall while the mirror behind them gleams as if it had been spit-shined. A big-screen TV in the back radiates the flashy images of hip-hop music videos, while Khahabir Shabaz, one of the barbers, greets each entering group of customers with a wide smile and a "Who'ma gonna do first?"
Shabaz, 29 and a native of West Philly, is the kind of man whose enthusiasm for life bubbles over in each excited sentence he speaks. Though he lives far west and north of Penn's campus, he said he's started to feel the crunch of rising rents. "The neighborhood's aight," he said, "but I'm hearing a lot of people having problems with housing prices going up, you know? And there's always rumors going around that they're going to start turning apartments into dorms."
Shabaz has also begun to see the first wave of bohemian settlers barging their way into his neighborhood. "Right up there on Pine, there's a big old apartment building - it's all kind of squatters in there," he said, stepping back to survey the head he'd been meticulously attacking with clippers. "Just these crazy looking white dudes. The other night, I looked up there and saw them with lights on," he said, throwing his arms into the air in exaggerated exasperation. "They got all kinds of food and electricity up in that place, but meanwhile, we over here scraping and scrapping for this rent, and those motherfuckers just chilling." After pausing for a moment to ponder what he'd just said, Shabaz continued, "I'm cool with it, though. A lot of black people, we like to leave you where you stand."
Shabaz isn't alone in his grudging frustration with the state of West Philadelphia's lower income neighborhoods. "The neighborhood wasn't always like this," said the proprietor of a restaurant near the 52nd Street El station who wished to remain anonymous. "There used to be all kinds of people down here - white, black, Chinese, whatever. Now there's boys running around the streets, getting into trouble, grown men who don't do nothing but drink on the corner."
The restaurant proprietor, who lives in South Philadelphia, noted that she no longer spends time in the area after work, opting instead to head straight home. She said that any revitalization of West Philadelphia was news to her. "It's not a great place to be. The cops can't seem to do anything, SEPTA sure as hell don't care. [We're going to have to] learn to change things ourselves if we want it done."
Nestled between an anarchist community center and a Laotian caf‚ on the 4700 block of Baltimore Avenue, the Mariposa Food Co-op sits on the front lines of University City's gentrification wave. Directly across the street on the bike-cluttered porch of one of the neighborhood's beautiful Victorians is a banner that reads, "More chaos and carnage . No Thanks! U.S. Out of Iraq!" - proudly symbolizing the area's outspoken air of liberal politics.
The Co-op itself carries a similar political charge: Its windows are cluttered with flyers for community organizations and political causes, including one of the ubiquitous, "This is West Philly, 'University City' is a marketing scheme" stickers that dot storefronts and signposts up and down the Baltimore Avenue commercial corridor.
Inside, the well-worn shelves are stocked with countless varieties of organic foodstuffs and local-grown produce. "We are member-only," said Thomason Parner, a 27-year-old resident of the neighborhood (and Mariposa member) on a recent afternoon. "Everyone who shops here does a work shift." The shop - which has been around since the 1970s - now boasts over 700 members, which is perhaps a telling statement about the changing makeup of the neighborhood. "The vast majority of us live within a few blocks of the co-op. Our membership is comprised of a lot of 20s and 30s white activists, a lot of queers, and the old-school, white, anti-racist activists that are left here from the '60s," Parner said. "And we're seeing a lot of new people."
Though it's safe to say that most Mariposa members are against gentrification, the co-op exists within the same paradox that much of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood does: It strives in earnest to support sustainable, local workers and projects, but its offerings are too expensive for most working-class families to afford.
"Some things are on par with what they'd cost at a Whole Foods," said Parner. "But mark-up ranges from 35 to 45 percent. Because of our size, we can't buy in the volume that larger stores can."
Organic food isn't the only thing that has become prohibitively priced in University City - housing costs and rent have risen astronomically in the past decade as well, forcing many University City residents to pack up and move on in search of more affordable neighborhoods. The process is relatively simple: Speculators buy up properties on which they hope to turn a profit, while affluent buyers snatch up houses that allow them to live in hip, exciting neighborhoods. The residents who had lived in the area for decades and decades simply vanish.
"It starts out with artists and activists," said April Rosenblum, a 27-year-old resident of the Cedar Park area who works as a Yiddish teacher. "[They make] it more comfortable for people who are white and the richer people move in."
Rosenblum moved to West Philly a decade ago and has watched firsthand the transformative effects of gentrification. "I was doing a lot of activism and my friends were here, so it made more sense for me to be here," she said. "The neighborhood we lived in was filled with working-class black families." The first few years were relatively uneventful, but then, "Gentrification really began to speed up in 2000 and 2001. There was a block that was almost entirely African-American and maybe three houses of activists. Within a year, it became majority white."
"A lot of artists are still moving here, and I can't blame them. I want to be here. We like to talk idyllically about the neighborhood when we moved in," she said of herself and other area residents who moved in at the beginning of the wave, "but we weren't the pure ones. We couldn't stop the fact that our white privilege would bring people here."
"They raised prices and renters left," Rosenblum continued. "They raised taxes and homeowners left. No one ever talks about where the people who are forced out go. The people on the bottom don't get a say. Why should they have to leave for the neighborhood to become safer?"
It's hard to pinpoint exactly where people go after they move out of a gentrifying area, because most census data and studies only show the changes within the neighborhood itself - displaced residents, on the other hand, can scatter themselves to any number of places across the city, state or even country. But Rosenblum said that most of her former neighbors either went to stay with family in North or South Philly, or the simply moved westward, past the boundaries of University City's gentrification.
Wherever residents who are priced-out of the neighborhoods go, one thing seems clear: gentrification is a process that works two ways. For every house that becomes owner-occupied and rehabbed, there are former residents who must seek out new homes elsewhere. For every drug dealer and gun that is forced off the streets surrounding Penn's campus, one more of each crops up in outlying areas.
"It's not like in gentrification there are good people and bad people," said Rosenblum. "Unless there's a structure in place to protect the people of these neighborhoods, the results will be unjust"
