Can Philly Have Neighborhood Development Without Moving Blacks Out?

A year and a half ago, former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett mentioned on his nationally syndicated radio show that “you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down.”

Those misguided, genocidal remarks deservedly attracted immediate, outraged responses from people all over the country, especially here in Philadelphia.

Yet, no one seems to be concerned, at all, when developers, city planners, mortgage lenders and elected officials accept the related logic that in order to have neighborhood development in Philadelphia and other mature U.S. cities, we need a process of gentrification, which essentially has meant moving low-income blacks out and moving high income whites in, to targeted neighborhoods.

The Bennett philosophy is based on the premise that blacks are criminally inclined, even at birth; gentrification’s premise is that blacks are inherently unable to maintain property values. Both ideas are dangerously inaccurate and racist.

Yet, the first was roundly rejected and the second appears to be roundly accepted – even by the so-called “good people,” here, and across the country.

In that regard, there was a very interesting story in the June 2007 issue of Philadelphia Magazine. It was called “The Rebirth of North Broad Street,” and it’s all about gentrification.

As I read it, I was struck by the statement that “North Broad Street and environs are primed to become the next hot Center City Neighborhood.” In fact, developer Sam Sherman was quoted in the article as saying that property values in the area’s 19123 zip code would “go up by more than 500 percent over the next five years.” It was at that point that I began to wonder about where the “City of Brotherly Love” was really headed as a 21st Century community.

Like many other cities, Philadelphia, right now, has an opportunity, to decide, for itself, whether there is value in having racial and ethnic diversity in center city and in its other most attractive neighborhoods, or whether the City will continue the national trend of selling its most attractive parcels of land, especially in its central corridors, to those who have been able to benefit most by the racially-imbalanced economy.

It appears to me that such a decision should be a function of city planning.

If we are serious about Philadelphia being racially/ethnically-inclusive over the projectable future, there are a number of things we can do: First, as a long-term strategy, we can begin to take the steps to develop a racially inclusive economy in the City, a path Philadelphia has conscientiously avoided for decades. Then, in the near term, and until the economic expansion takes effect, we can establish targeted rent control neighborhoods; we can establish community land trusts (wherein certain parcels of land are removed from the open market) and we can make broader use of “inclusionary zoning” (wherein developers are either required, or provided with incentives, to include a certain percentage of affordable housing units in their projects).

We would consider these things, of course, if we were concerned at all about what will happen to the lower-income blacks and Hispanics who already reside in the new, “hot neighborhoods.” We would also consider these approaches if we honestly believed that people of color, once included in the economy, could also develop the capacity to purchase and maintain the refurbished properties.

The Philadelphia Magazine article was especially interesting to me because I grew up in the 19123 zip code. My grade school, at Broad and Parrish Streets, was called Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament. It was taught by an order of missionary nuns and an equally missionary order of priests, the Holy Ghost Fathers. Our “99 percent Black, one percent Cuban” Catholic church, at Broad and Fairmount, is now owned by Rev. Herb Lusk’s Greater Exodus organization and was located diagonally across the street from the Divine Lorraine Hotel, which was described in the article as a “great, decaying symbol” that anything very good about North Broad Street “went out of style” long ago.

In our neighborhood, a significantly high percentage of the funeral services took place at Savin’s Funeral Home, at 12th and Brown Streets. In fact, my stepfather’s services were held there. The article quotes long-time funeral parlor owner and neighborhood icon William “Buddy” Savin as saying, “It costs a lot of money to live in this neighborhood now.” This, in a zip code where the current housing value is $74,500, the average household income is $21,500, the black population is 64.7 percent, the Hispanic population, 11.1 percent, and the recently growing white population, 24.2 percent.

In all of the discussions in the Philadelphia Magazine article about $350,000 townhouses being built at 10th and Wallace Streets, there was virtually no discussion about where the current residents will go when they are eventually forced out by higher taxes, upscale retail, and other factors.

Shouldn’t we be concerned about any of this, or is the continued displacement of blacks and Hispanics - substantially to the lower Northeast - a part of our unspoken “ethnic redistribution strategy,” here in Philadelphia?

Another country that adopted such a mass, urban relocation strategy was South Africa. When I visited there, in 1998, I paid great attention to how the former apartheid government, 50 years earlier, had decided, through its “Forced Removal” laws to move what eventually grew to 600,000 blacks, coloreds, Indians and Chinese out of Johannesburg’s most desirable central neighborhoods, and into the far-flung townships, including Soweto (Southwest Townships).

Today, according to Wikipedia, poverty in South Africa, despite its highly publicized 1994 “Democratization,” is largely defined by skin color, with Blacks, at 79.5 percent of the population, constituting 90 percent of the nation’s poor. Not coincidentally, with its dramatic economic imbalance as a key contributor, South Africa, according to Interpol (1998), is a global leader in violent crime and murder rates. Those circumstances sound eerily familiar to Philadelphia residents.

In a perverse way, what has been happening in Philadelphia and other major U.S. cities over the past several decades is very much akin to the Johannesburg model, i.e, a lack of economic inclusion by the city’s blacks and people of color, and the consequent rationalization that neighborhood improvement can only be done by moving them out.

For example, there was no consideration given, whatsoever, in the Philadelphia Magazine story, to the possibility that African Americans, once included economically, might actually be investors and residents in the new developments planned for North Board Street. In the same way, as long as black per-capita income remains at 61.7 percent of white per capita income, in Philadelphia, it’s clear that it will be substantially more difficult for African Americans to participate in the new, “hot” Philadelphia neighborhoods.

As long as the definition of neighborhood improvement includes the mass removal of the City’s black residents, Philadelphia’s prospects to join the ranks of world-class cities are in jeopardy.

Neighborhood inclusion and racial diversity absolutely cannot happen until we begin to develop strategic, municipal plans for cross-racial economic inclusion – in our workforce and in our city’s procurement practices.

It really is fairly simple. People who have good-paying jobs or profitable businesses, generally don’t live in deteriorating houses, or in homes that require third-party development. As fully functioning participants in the economy, they can usually afford the upkeep and maintenance of their own homes and don’t need much government support to do so. In that same vein, there is not much of a demand for “urban renewal” programs or crime reduction strategies targeted to people who live in Rittenhouse Square or Chestnut Hill.

None of this, of course, is a function of race, but it IS a function of income, and if certain races are systematically excluded from income and wealth-building opportunities, over time, then the housing stock in their neighborhoods will decline and trendy boutiques will opt not to relocate into their communities.

This again, is something the new mayor should aggressively wrap his arms around. Our success in this area will be good for the entire city, and it may even reduce our crime rates.

It’s not all that complicated, and it can be done.


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