Dozens of families are resisting the demolition of a 70-unit housing development in West Philadelphia.
“I want you to fight, I want you to organize, I want you to talk to your neighbors, I want you to have a meeting, I want you to get a spreadsheet and just the same way that we can organize a barbecue, we can all figure out what it means to actually take control of some of these housing units,” says organizer Sterling Johnson.
The story of the UC Townhomes embodies the concept of organized abandonment, and I think anyone who is concerned with gentrification, displacement, or resisting the destruction of communities and the disposal of human beings, would really benefit from hearing what these organizers have to say.
And then you just started seeing the bagel stores and stuff like that. They bought the laundromat. It was just like everything that we used and everything that was an amenity to us no longer was an amenity to us. But I feel like on some levels the city has say so on how they move in our neighborhoods and in our communities. And the fact that all of them are working together and the city is allowing it. That’s where the problem comes into play at. They’re expanding their universities but they’re not expanding or investing into the communities. And you can always tell when they’re about to rain havoc on your community because they tend to take out the programs that were once invested in the community.
Now, these are people that never lived the real here. They just moved around here because Penn built up around here. But they came together and did a whole meeting, like a community and a town hall and wrote a petition for him not to be able to build another store, another Crown Fried Chicken. You know what they told him? They didn’t want the riff raff from 40th Street over there on that side. But that was outside before you even got there. We was there before you came.
This concept of the real estate state can help us understand gentrification as one stage of a much longer and larger project of abandonment, repossession and extraction. As Stein says, “Through the real estate state, the city becomes gentrified. Through gentrification, the city becomes neoliberal.” The first thing that we wanted to do was stop any demolition. One of the requirements for selling the property to this other developer was that they were going to demolish the property, so that would be a destruction of this community. As the organizing has to communicate with each other, we had these other, the main demand of stopping the demolition, but also for people that wanted to leave, just compensation for them depending on their place.
Of course, they took us to court and they said, “You can’t be here.” I went with one of the main organizers, Melvin Hurston, and he was one of the main plaintiffs, because as a resident it was really important for them to say that, “We have invited these people to be on our property. They are with us and we are doing this together.
That was where we were at, and we really had to transition to what are we going to imagine on this site? So we now have, our main demand is we want to preserve the property. We have reached out to national developers and local consultants that can help a national developer get through Pennsylvania’s tax credit schemes to preserve the property. We know that the other properties around the neighborhood have been preserved using different financing.
The escalations [involved] us coming to their place of business, reaching out to their office, going to their residential neighborhoods, letting your neighbors know that they’re displacing low income families, basically exposing them, that’s definitely how we escalated. The encampment, it was really a last resort. And a lot of people just think that activists just go from zero to a thousand.
When actions are being brought against them, when we’re reaching out to them and when we have to go to the next level, it brings these politicians and other people that hold these high positions into reality. You are human, you’re not invincible and you will be accountable. I don’t know why when people reach a certain level, they feel like accountability does not apply to them, but it very much so does. And I think some people need to be reminded of that. So I come as a remembrance.
That was 1982. That’s why we’re at the current site that we’re at, when we’re talking about, “Why now? Why now is this happening?” It’s because a 40-year deal was created to sunset the Section-8 program in the early ’80s. So when we’re here and we’re talking about how should we be moving, for me, it is about maintaining Section-8 properties and rehabbing them and making sure they stand as is.
It becomes, things start to crystallize about what it is that we’re up to. It is about making sure that this community stays together, so it becomes about the people. From Mrs. Lyle, who has a piece in theabout why she’s close to the University of Penn’s hospital, which is doing a lot for her daughter, she’s back and forth to the hospital. To Miss Charmaine who is taking care of her husband, he’s been on hospice a few times.
Other situations, one of them was called the Arvilla, as well where that building was a subsidized housing program that was terminated and then sold for about $2 million to a developer and now it’s student housing. So there are these situations that continue to happen in our city, and we have seen different ways of attempting to organize them. So from my standpoint, it’s been a learning [process] with each situation.
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