In battered Kensington, signs of progress

For the first time in decades, under the renewed efforts of Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration, some residents and city officials alike agree that many of Kensington’s most chronic challenges have been improving — albeit slowly.

Fewer dealers dot the corners. Three times as many police officers patrol the neighborhood, disrupting their business. Half as many people are living on the streets compared with last year, police said. Some residents say quality-of-life issues — trash pickup, abandoned car removals, 311 calls — are being addressed more quickly.

And gun violence — long a byproduct of the drug economy and fragmented crews fighting for turf — is at its lowest level in a generation.

City agencies and healthcare groups say they have also worked to get drug users into treatment more quickly, and have started building a network of care that they hope will keep fewer people from returning to the streets. Riverview Wellness Village, Parker’s new $100 million recovery and treatment facility, now houses about 200 people.

“Neighbors [are] telling me how many more people are sitting on their steps, how many more children are riding their bikes, how many more people may walk the commercial corridor,” Parker said this week. “To me, that’s progress. … We weren’t going to close our eyes and ignore it and walk around like it didn’t exist, or just contain it in one area.”

She’s committed to long-term change there, she said.

But in this stretch of Philadelphia, where the drug economy has flourished for decades, improvements are relative.

Cartagena Hart, 54, said the disbandment of the encampments along the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues pushed more drug activity to Somerset, turning the block where she lives with her husband and seven children into the new ground zero for the open-air market.

More dealers show up to give out free samples of drugs — and free pizza slices to go with them — in an effort to win over customers in a more competitive market, she said. She is constantly asking people to stay off her steps.

One of Kensington Avenue’s marquee restaurants, Cantina La Martina, closed this month in part due to the instability around Somerset.

Deputy Police Commissioner Pedro Rosario sees the ongoing challenges.

“Am I where I want to be? No. Nowhere close to it,” said Rosario, who oversees the policing strategies in Kensington. “But ‘moving in the right direction’ is not giving us enough credit.”

Improvements in Kensington, he said, may always be limited by the depths of the drug crisis and economy.

“It’s never gonna be as good as everyone wants it to be,” he said, but “it’s like the first time we’re all kind of rowing in the right direction.”

Some harm-reduction groups said the progress is surface level, and criticized the city for pushing homeless people into other areas where they are harder to reach: Harrowgate, Center City, the SEPTA stops at Broad and Snyder, Erie Avenue, and 69th Street.

“They’ve made it more difficult for people to be visibly homeless,” Sarah Laurel, who heads the harm reduction organization Savage Sisters in Kensington, said of the city’s efforts. “But have they actually resolved the dire need of community members who are unhoused?”

Still, one woman in her 30s, who has come to Kensington on and off since she was 16, acknowledged the neighborhood is no longer the “free-for-all” it was at the height of the pandemic.

“It has changed,” she said, clutching a crack pipe on a quiet block away from police. “You can still get high on the street, you just can’t get caught doing it.”

And that, Rosario said, is progress.

Rosario has been a police officer in Kensington for 24 years, and saw how the neighborhood became what he calls “the flea market” of the city’s billion-dollar drug economy.

There have always been drug organizations that run specific blocks there — crews from Weymouth, Jasper, and Rosehill Streets, each with its own product, stamp, and employees to sell it.

But in the last five years, he said, blocks have been “leased out.” Someone in New York City or the Dominican Republic will often “own” a block, Rosario said, and rent it out to a local dealer to use for a week to make a stack of money and move on. Dealers even started using drug users to sell in the last few years, he said, because they are less obvious to police, can be paid less, and are seen as “expendable.”

That structure makes it challenging for police to identify and arrest the people in charge, he said. If a lower-level dealer is arrested — or killed — the top distributors can easily find a replacement.

Even after large-scale investigations — like the FBI’s two-year probe that led to the arrest of more than 30 members of a Weymouth Street drug gang last month — drug activity often subsides for a few weeks before another group is ready to step up. Police have shut down that stretch of Weymouth since the arrests to keep a competing crew from immediately moving in.

And the dealers are fearless, he said. Just before the police department was set to open a mini station near F Street and Allegheny Avenue in November 2020, the building was firebombed, he said. He suspects it was dealers attempting to prevent a growing police presence. (The department has since opened a station at 1952 Allegheny Ave.)

When Parker tapped Rosario to lead the police department’s plans in the neighborhood, his first order of business was to reduce the violence so that city workers felt safe enough to go into the neighborhood.

Last summer, the department assigned about 75 rookie cops to buttress existing patrols in the neighborhood, and it has continued to send in more officers. There are now three times as many police patrolling the main drag along Kensington Avenue as there were in 2021 — most of them on foot.

Rosario says the expanded police presence has contributed to a historic decline in violence.

While shootings citywide are down about 55% compared to three years ago, they have fallen even more in Kensington.

Through the second week of November, 46 people had been shot in the 24th Police District — an 82% drop from 2022, when, during the same time period, 259 people were shot. And there are half as many shooting victims as there were a decade ago.

“I cannot emphasize how important that is to resetting the norms in that community,” said Adam Geer‚ the city’s chief public safety director. “That is 82% less families dealing with the trauma. That is 82% less gunshots heard ringing in the night.”

Through Nov. 15, arrests for drug dealing in the neighborhood were up 23% since Parker came into office. Still, overall, the city is on pace to see the fewest number of drug-related arrests in at least 15 years, city data show, and as law enforcement largely focuses in Kensington, arrests for selling drugs in other parts of the city are down about 34% compared with the 23 months before Parker was elected mayor.

Geer said the city is still in the beginning phases of its efforts. Illicit drug sales will likely always persist, he said, “but what we are really, really going after is the open, blatant, in the air using drugs and selling drugs toxic to this community.”

Rosario also said that reducing the area’s homeless population — by disbanding encampments and generally “being as disruptive as possible” — was critical to reducing the strain on the area’s services and residents, and lessening the open-air drug use and dealing.

It has worked. Last September, there were about 750 people living on the streets in the area, according to a weekly count by police. During the same time this year, there were about 400.

But homelessness in the city generally has not improved, city data show.

There are actually about 400 more people experiencing homelessness this year than last, according to data from the Office of Homeless Services. Police and care providers believe some have simply moved to other neighborhoods to avoid the police presence.

Rosario acknowledged the dispersal, but said Kensington didn’t deserve to bear the burden of those crowds alone.

Because shutting down the drug market in Kensington, he said, “is like trying to stop a wave” at the beach.

“You can disperse it,” he said. “Maybe you can reengineer to kind of push it to a different direction.”

But you can’t stop it.

One drug dealer can see the shift — and feel it in his wallet.

The 47-year-old man, who asked not to be identified because he sells illegal drugs, said he came to Kensington from New York in 2012 after serving time in prison for robbery. He’s been in the drug trade since he was 12, he said, taught by his parents, who hustled in the Bronx.

Today, he spends his days and nights on a quiet, trash-strewn corner, smoking K2 and selling crack, meth, and dope — whatever the man in the maroon Crown Victoria drops off that day.

During the pandemic, he said, business was booming. When he worked the overnight shift on Jasper Street, he said, he made at least $1,500 a week. Today, with more police on the corners and fewer customers on the streets, he’s lucky to clear $400.

A 28-year-old dealer along Kensington Avenue scoffed at the police enforcement. Where does the city expect the drug economy to go if not here? he asked. The drug trade is a constant, a viable employer with a stable customer base, and it has to go somewhere.

“They can’t put a cop on every f― block,” said the man, who asked not to be identified to discuss illegal activity.

A few streets over, a 36-year-old man who smokes fentanyl and crack said that, a year or two ago, there would be five or six dealers on the corner of Jasper Street and Hart Lane.

Now, he said, there’s one.

“It’s harder to get drugs,” he said.

As police have cracked down on retail theft — once an easy way for people in addiction to make quick cash by reselling the items — it’s also gotten harder to fuel his habit, he said. He usually gambles online on his phone to scrape together a few extra dollars, he said, getting paid through CashApp, which some dealers use to accept payment now.

Many people in addiction said life overall is harder in Kensington — police clear away their tents, shoo them out of parks, and remove the often-stolen grocery carts used to carry belongings. It makes them feel subhuman, said one 36-year-old woman who has struggled with addiction since she was 13.

“We just want to be safe and warm,” she said.

But the biggest fear on the block these days, people said, is the withdrawal.

As medetomidine replaces xylazine in the city’s drug supply, people who use drugs are experiencing new complications: seizures, tremors, blood pressure that skyrockets one minute, then plummets the next.

The withdrawal symptoms, which can begin within two hours, are so intense they can send people into cardiac arrest. Only hospitals can offer the most effective treatments for medetomidine withdrawal, and more people are ending up in intensive care units.

» READ MORE: A new, more powerful tranquilizer on Philly streets is causing worse complications among opioid users.

Dave Malloy, director of mobile services for Merakey, one of the city’s main addiction treatment providers, said the city has made strides in streamlining access to treatment in the last two years.

Evaluations that once required a daylong wait at a hospital can now happen in the field through mobile units like Malloy’s, getting people to rehab within hours. Doctors can also start patients on medications like Suboxone or methadone, to lessen their withdrawal symptoms, in as little as 45 minutes.

Malloy said that treatment providers, hospitals, police, and city agencies are working together better than they have in years.

“There was a realization that everybody had been siloed,” he said.

Only about 6% of the city’s homeless people who accepted help from outreach workers went to drug treatment and detox centers in recent years, according to city data — a statistic that, as of February, had not improved under Parker’s tenure.

The city said it has also expanded the number of beds available for people in recovery by 66% through the opening of the Riverside Wellness Village, where people can live for up to a year after completing 30 days of inpatient drug treatment. Once construction is complete, the facility will house over 600 people.

Another 180 people are living in a shelter at 21st Street and Girard Avenue, which the city expanded last spring.

And the Neighborhood Wellness Court — a fast-track diversion program where people in addiction who are arrested for low-level offenses are brought before a judge the same day, in hopes of getting them into treatment more quickly — is growing.

In the first three months of the court, which Parker’s team launched in January and runs one day per week, only two of the approximately 50 people who had come through completed the program. Most who opted to go to rehab immediately left and absconded from follow-up hearings. At one point, operations were so disjointed that court leadership threatened to shut it down.

But Parker is committed to the court’s success and wants it to operate five days a week. The city recently hired a new director to oversee the court, and is in the process of hiring 14 additional staff members to provide better follow-up care.

Still, through early September, of the 187 people who had come through the court, only 10 completed the program and saw their criminal cases expunged, according to city data.

And while most people still do not come to court, the city said that it expects the situation will improve with the additional hires, and that there is success in the 130 people who have accepted some form of service through the court, even if they weren’t ready to enter recovery.

The increased police enforcement has sent more people in addiction to jail, and several people have died in police custody after they overdosed or had medical emergencies while going through withdrawal.

And not all residents feel the progress, or see the increased police presence as a good thing.

Theresa Grone, 41, who lives next to McPherson Square Park, said she and her children still cannot sit outside without someone in addiction asking them if they have free drug samples or clean syringes.

And, she said, the police in the neighborhood have gotten more aggressive and harass people who aren’t doing anything wrong. Drug dealers and users still dominate the block.

“They’re not in the places they used to be, but they’re still there,” she said — on side streets, in abandoned houses, moving to corners as soon as the police leave.

She feels like the city is expanding resources for people in addiction more than for families like hers — a group of eight people renting a rowhouse in disrepair who want to move but can’t afford to.

But other residents, like Cartagena Hart, hope to never leave.

She said she has always seen the beauty and strength of Kensington, even at its lowest — the neighbors who care for each other’s children and feed the homeless, the police officers who will show up as soon as she texts them for help.

“Kensington,” she said, “is love to me.”

And she’s proud, she said, that her advocacy and that of her neighbors has helped city leaders finally invest in helping them.

Staff writers John Duchneskie, Max Marin, Anna Orso, Dylan Purcell, Sean Walsh, and Aubrey Whelan contributed to this article.