What Detroit can learn from Philly
A model for Midtown
PHILADELPHIA — Many of the streets of this part of West Philadelphia used to be considered mean, despite the proximity of the University of Pennsylvania, an elite Ivy League institution. The advice was: Don’t go west of 40th.
In the last 15 years, that’s all changed, thanks to a program of homeowner incentives and investment like one being attempted in Midtown Detroit.
In West Philadelphia today, restaurants bustle and coffeehouses abound along tree-lined streets as trolleys whoosh past toward Center City. Similar efforts are under way in other places — Baltimore, Cleveland — but the Midtown effort is a direct descendant of the Philadelphia example. The top consultant to the Detroit project was part of Penn’s program to improve the surrounding area and the first to take the incentive to move in. He still lives in the neighborhood. So what could it mean for Detroit’s Midtown, where employees of the Detroit Medical Center, Henry Ford Health System and Wayne State University are being offered incentives to move in? If the outcome in West Philly is an indication, it could result in higher property values, a drop in violent crime, better schools and a neighborhood where former suburbanites are eager to move. Doug Jerolmack, a 32-year-old geophysicist at Penn, bought into the neighborhood just four years ago, continuing a trend that started in the late 1990s, when homeowner initiatives were launched to bring professors and other employees in. He walks to work and has all the services he needs — plus dozens of friends — within a few blocks. “Now that we’re there,” he said, “I don’t want to live anywhere else.”
Philadelphia story
Detroit’s Midtown is studying success for its rebirth
PHILADELPHIA — In a way, the effort under way to remake Midtown Detroit started near a corner on Larchwood Street in West Philadelphia on Halloween night 1996. Vladimir Sled, a Russian biochemist at the nearby University of Pennsylvania, was walking home with his girlfriend on the tree-lined street when someone tried to snatch her purse. Sled fought with the assailant and was stabbed to death. For years before then, community activists and urban pioneers in the West Philly neighborhoods that had sprung up generations before as suburbs linked by streetcar to Center City had pleaded for civic involvement to address crime, garbage and a lack of services. Sled’s death changed everything: Penn employees, parents and students were outraged; the mayor, Ed Rendell, got involved. And Judith Rodin, then president at Penn, began an effort that, 15 years later, continues to remake the area surrounding the university. With homeowner initiatives like those being offered now in Midtown Detroit, as well as a host of other investments, Penn and other institutions turned their focus west of 40th Street toward the neighborhoods there — Spruce Hill, Walnut Hill, Garden Court and others. They attracted new residents from their employee base, not only with down-payment cash but with easy-to-get loans and new services, such as a supermarket and cinema that the university developed. A new improvement district organization was created — the University City District — which spends more than $5 million a year not only on foot and bicycle safety patrol crews and graffiti cleanup, but on marketing and development. The change has been evident: There are dog-walkers and block parties. Victorian mansions have been rehabbed. And it’s not just institutional workers with incentives available to them who are filling the neighborhoods. Bill Meinel, 51, is a marketing consultant who moved into a Garden Court home in 1998. A year later, he was robbed at gunpoint outside his new home. “I was freaked out,” he said. “My wife wanted to leave. I said, ‘Let’s give it some more time.’ ” Now, he doesn’t hesitate to walk his dogs at 2 a.m. Drop in serious crimes Driving north on I-76 past industrial yards and freight lines, then crossing the Schuylkill River and turning left onto South Street (which quickly becomes Spruce), you are surrounded by Penn, one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the U.S., founded by Benjamin Franklin. Renowned for its business, medical and communications schools, the university and its neighborhoods are home to 25,000 students. Unsurprisingly, like Midtown, it’s a big rental market. Plunge into those neighborhoods today and you find newly rehabbed apartment buildings, coffeehouses, chic restaurants and international bakeries, posh hotels and a supermarket, developed by the university. You also find block after block of three-story residences, and a trolley line along the southern end of the area toward Penn and beyond, Philadelphia’s Center City. According to records, serious crimes in the University City District have declined, and the median sales price of homes have increased, as of 2009 (even after a slight downturn, as experienced nationally), by 154%, over 2000. In Detroit, the three anchor institutions — Detroit Medical Center, Henry Ford Health System and Wayne State University — along with the University Cultural Center Association (UCCA), which spearheads redevelopment efforts in Midtown, are trying to recreate some of that success. They are offering home-buyers who are employees of those institutions a forgivable loan of $20,000 to move into the area, or $25,000, if taken at a rate of $5,000 a year over five years. Renters, an important part of the market in both places (rental occupancy is about 92% in Midtown), would receive $2,500 toward the cost of their apartment in the first year they lived in Midtown and $1,000 for the second year. When Penn started its program in 1998, it offered employees $15,000 in cash or $21,000 in installments (it’s $7,500 now) to buy in the neighborhood. The first taker was Omar Blaik, who happened to be an integral member of Penn’s planning team and who happens to now be the president of U3 Ventures, which is consulting with the UCCA and others on the project in Midtown. More than 900 Penn employees bought into the neighborhood, and many, including Blaik, are still there. As Blaik tells it, interest in Midtown Detroit is “much, much higher” than it was when the West Philly effort was getting off the ground. And if the necessary elements are successfully stitched together there — as he, the anchor institutions and UCCA President Sue Mosey are hoping — it could create an “eds and meds” model that could be reproduced in cities around the country. K-8 school a big draw Katia Strieck, 38, is a librarian at Penn who got $7,500 toward her second house in the neighborhood a few years ago. When she bought into the area the first time, in 2002, she wasn’t working at Penn — so she got no incentive — but by the second time around (when the incentive had been reduced) she had something more to stay for than money: the Penn Alexander School, a prekindergarten through eighth-grade public school. Penn not only helped develop it but provides an additional $1,330 per student to help educate them. The school comes up routinely as among the top reasons why people have come into the UCD and have stayed. “It’s a great community school,” said Strieck, whose daughter attends. New schools aren’t on top of Midtown Detroit’s list of needs, say Blaik and Mosey, in part because singles between 25 and 34 are most likely to move in. But both noted some of Detroit’s highest-performing public schools are in the area, and there are good charter schools there, too. West Philly’s successes have critics. “It’s led to a lot of displacement,” said the Rev. Larry Falcon, 66, who runs the Toviah Thrift Shop and Covenant Community Church from a storefront on Chestnut Street. Falcon acknowledged that the area may have less of some kinds of crime than it used to, but that’s due to the crack epidemic subsiding. And higher property values are not good news to his flock. A Free Press analysis of the seven census tracts wholly contained in the area showed that while the population appeared to stay largely the same from 2000 to 2009, the number of white residents increased 20% while the number of blacks decreased by 32%. In several of the census tracts, per-capita income has risen more than $10,000 a year during that time. Midtown progress If Mosey and Blaik are correct, and if the support is there and the commitment from the relevant parties lasts, there’s no reason to believe that Midtown might not someday look and feel like these streets of close-in West Philadelphia. Renters are encouraged to move in and stay, and much of the townhome and loft stock has been constructed in the last 10 years. Neighboring Woodbridge, which is included in the target area, features a number of single-family homes. Mosey cited statistics showing that average household income of new home-buyers in Midtown in 2008 was $144,321, up from $80,000 in 2006. UCCA has crews to clean up graffiti, and, along with WSU security, is looking to add safety patrols. A supermarket is essential, as is other development, some of which is under way. Businesses are committed to hiring and using vendors from the neighborhood. Displacement, the UCCA says, is not an issue. Funding is. Money has been authorized for the first stages of a light rail from Hart Plaza to Midtown, a big plus. But development and rebuilding efforts by the UCCA may count on grants — such as the Community Development Block Grants President Barack Obama’s budget promises to cut. Budget fights in Washington and Lansing could have a huge effect on plans in Midtown. “Financing is critical. I’m just going to be honest about that,” said Mosey. “We need more for the incentive program, and we need more for the rest of the real estate.… The public sector has to play a role in that, too.” John Fry, president of Drexel University, next to Penn, was at Penn as an executive president in the 1990s and helped guide its efforts to address the neighborhood’s challenges. Homeowner incentives, development, a sense of safety, a new public school — it was all essential. So was something else: time. Fry is now looking at improving the areas north and west of Drexel, with a foregivable loan for employees worth $15,000. “There are no quick fixes in any of this stuff,” he said. “Anybody who thinks this is a silver bullet is mistaken.”
Homes along 43rd Street in the Spruce Hill neighborhood of University City, which surrounds the University of Pennsylvania.
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