Savings the Neighborhoods

Welcome to MURL and the first summer session. This is my
first post on our ‘buildingblocks’ blog in some time. Take
a look at this piece that I found on the Philly.com Web
site. The authors talk about the fate of the neighborhoods,
and offer up three areas that the city should focus on.
Read it over. What do you think? Do you agree? Are the neighbrohoods beyond 'repair'?
I know it is a toally different subject, but what's your take on the new wired initiative in Philadelphia? Is it a case of the have and have nots, or a chance to equalize things?
Professor TP

The fate of our neighborhoods
By BEVERLY COLEMAN & ALAN MALLACH
PHILADELPHIA HAS become two different cities.
One for the poor.
One for the prosperous.
While some neighborhoods are thriving, others are seeing
increasing real-estate speculation and absentee ownership.
Our middle class is shrinking.
Philadelphia may be turning into an anomaly, a city with
increasingly expensive housing and a tremendous number of
poor people. Despite real-estate prices that skyrocketed in
the last five years, residents are showing little growth in
jobs and income.
The future is uncertain. Will property values continue to
rise over the next few years, or tail off? What will follow
Mayor Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative now
that the money is nearly all spent?
How will casinos affect the city? What will the next mayor's
policies look like? Will the improvements of recent years be
a flash in the pan, or put the city on a path to genuine
social and economic health?
What we do know is that rising housing prices don't
guarantee healthy neighborhoods. If Philadelphia is going to
be a healthy city, it has to make sure that the higher
prices reflect real, sustainable improvement in our
neighborhoods, and that lower-income families benefit from
neighborhood change rather than being priced out of their
homes. The city's biggest challenge is to sustain growth
while improving the quality of life not only for the
affluent, but for all its people.
If it is to rise to this challenge, the city has to focus on
three critical areas over the coming years:
* Create an efficient, predictable, transparent process to
foster redevelopment and revitalization.
* Focus on rebuilding neighborhoods, not just adding housing
units.
* Make sure that the city's residents benefit from change.
Philadelphia needs a predictable, efficient development
review process, user-friendly for everyone from the family
rehabbing a house in Kensington to a developer building 500
condos on the waterfront. We need new, modern, user-friendly
zoning, land-use and building codes.
Incentives must be used strategically - such resources are
too scarce to be wasted. Young families should get them to
fix up abandoned houses and live in them, not be discouraged
by complex regulations and red tape.
And Philadelphia should use housing as a tool to rebuild its
neighborhoods, not add more housing as an end in itself.
Housing development should not take place in isolation, but
has to be targeted to the strengths and weaknesses of each
neighborhood.
By its location and design, every investment in new housing
should add value and enhance the physical quality of its
neighborhood. To enhance the quality of urban life, all new
developments should be linked to transit, open space, school
construction and commercial activity.
Philadelphia's redevelopment has to offer people of all
ages, races and incomes ample housing and a decent quality
of life.
We need to do more to hold onto upwardly-mobile families by
providing them with housing choices, safe neighborhoods and
good schools, while ensuring that lower-income residents
have sound, affordable roofs over their heads.
Land-banking, inclusionary zoning and other strategies
should be used to preserve and create more affordable
housing, building permanent housing stock for the many
families who can't afford what the private market offers.
Over the last few years, via efforts ranging from the
Neighborhood Transformation Initiative to the work of the
city's dynamic community-development corporations,
Philadelphia has demonstrated the ability to confront its
problems and move forward.
But the progress has presented the city with a new series of
challenges: how to build on success to produce sustained
growth, create healthy, economically integrated
neighborhoods, and ensure that all residents benefit from
revitalization.
We're confident that Philadelphia's government, development
agencies, educational institutions and businesses will rise
to the occasion. *
Beverly Coleman is executive director of NeighborhoodsNow.
Alan Mallach is resource director of the National Housing
Institute and author of "Building a Better Philadelphia."