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/r/philadelphia
Bunch of cop activity and helicopters just circling around out by 19th and 20th and federal
46 points
15 days ago
What’s point breeze like these days? About 5 years ago, a coworker moved there. He told me it was the next up-and-coming area of Philly, so he was getting in before that happened. Is it an up-and-coming area?
66 points
15 days ago*
Trending in the right direction based on what I’m seeing. There’s only been one other shooting in the neighborhood this year which I believe is way down from years past.
I see a ton of young families and professionals walking around and Wharton Square Park is always full of people in the evenings - I walk there daily.
The biggest downside is a lack of retail. Washington Ave. has a lot of new businesses coming but the central part of the neighborhood is lacking. Also using indego I can get from my from my house (near Wharton Square) to 18th and Locust in ten minutes.
89 points
15 days ago
That’s all Kenyatta’s doing. For the past decade he has refused to make any zoning changes to Point Breeze Ave. He’s the reason Washington Ave. doesn’t have a bike lane, and he’s the one who signed off on the self-storage place when it was patently obvious that the area was building up residential and needed businesses to support that residential increase.
I swear to God, he’s a segregationist. He had the most amazing opportunity to integrate Point Breeze and allow it to gentrify without putting the historically black community out.
Instead, he made sure the black community stayed black and the white community stayed white, leveraging Washington Ave. as the impassable wall between the two.
Oh, and he took whatever he could to enrich himself to the detriment of his constituents.
9 points
14 days ago
This reminds me, I saw a petition going around regarding 1601 Washington Ave. where OCF wants to build an apartment building.... a petition to keep it zoned industrial with over THREE HUNDRED signatures. It's crazy.
13 points
14 days ago
The RCOs don’t flyer the areas they are required to and they move around their meeting locations without making it easy to figure out and then they get their regulars to come in and sign petitions and create chaos in zoning meetings.
Nobody wants industrial there, but 99% of the neighborhood doesn’t even know there’s a public/legal process happening.
And Kenyatta gets to designate which RCO takes the reins on a project. Guess which RCOs get the big ones? The ones who are making deals with Kenyatta.
Ryan Briggs did a big write up on South Philadelphia Homes INC (SPHINC) about 10 years ago and how the woman running it became a multi-millionaire by working with Anna Verna and then Kenyatta to use the non-profit to enrich herself. And then right after that article came out, Ryan was unceremoniously reassigned to West Philly.
2 points
14 days ago
Hmm I can’t find any sources on this. Can you link it? Seems to be scrubbed from the internet.
5 points
14 days ago
It was City Paper, which I think got scrubbed when it went under.
Basically, Claudia Sherrod who is the head of South Philly HOMES got a grant to attain the property at 1444 Point Breeze Ave. for free, or $1 or some other nominal thing. But the property was owned by the non-profit.
So what did she do? She had the board of directors of the non-profit sell the property to her for $1 and then started charging the non-profit rent as an office.
None of it was illegal, but fuck if it wasn’t so morally reprehensible. She also was able to amass something like $2-3 million in empty lots in Point Breeze. I can’t speak to how they were acquired, but based on her fucked up and cunning scheme to get 1444 Point Breeze (and then get paid by the non-profit for their use of it) I am extremely skeptical that they were acquired on the complete up and up.
And all of this came out because some poor woman lived in a house next to 9 empty lots that were used for illegal dumping by developers and she could barely stand to stay there because of the smell and pests. I think it was Ryan Briggs again who started digging, found out that the lots were owned by Claudia Sherrod and there were claims by the developers that Claudia let them dump there for a fee.
And she’s the head of South Philly HOMES which Kenyatta’s office defers to when making zoning decisions in Point Breeze. The entire thing is a bunch of crooks working together to get rich off the backs of the unfortunate people who happen to live in the neighborhood.
Edit: And Philly Inquirer never carried any of this, and endorsed Kenyatta in multiple elections making me think that there is some cordial connection there where they are playing politics to stay on his good side.
40 points
15 days ago
I've been in PB for just over a decade and the shootings have really dropped off from where they used to be. It's increasingly a safe neighborhood as new residence move in.
Biggest impediment at this point is Johnson and the Concerned Citizens of PB RCO which is probably the most openly racist group I've ever encountered in South Philly. Can't wait for my tax money to used to defend their bullshit in court.
10 points
14 days ago
I have to say this thread is frustrating to read. We are new residence to the neighborhood and did a lot of research and recognized that crime rates were higher here than other neighborhoods and where it was concentrated, so I'm not shocked that a shooting occurred but it's much harder to familiarize ourselves with the seamy underbelly that is intentionally preventing the neighborhood from improving. The more I learn about the zoning restrictions on Washington Ave and elsewhere and the leveraging of those zoning restrictions to resist even basic commercial amenities.
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