Town vs. Temple: Yorktown residents fight to keep students from quiet neighborhood near university

SOME FOLKS call them the "Steel Magnolias" of Yorktown.

And all they want, they say, is to preserve the character of their neighborhood of single-family homes in a quiet North Philadelphia enclave sitting in the shadows south of Temple University.

But now, some Yorktown residents say that their community is being threatened because real-estate investors are buying up homes and converting them to housing for Temple students.

"It's a neighborhood that's under siege," said State Sen. Shirley Kitchen, "and they are not receiving the support they should from [the Department of] Licenses and Inspection."

Kitchen said that a recent city ordinance limits the number of unrelated persons living in a house in the Yorktown District to no more than three people.

But she said that some landlords "put as many as 8 to 10 students" in a property.

Eileen Evans, deputy commissioner for L&I, called the situation "a tricky issue."

"There's a concern of what an influx of students is going to do in an otherwise quiet residential neighborhood," Evans said.

Residents say that they have no problems with most students, but Constance Taylor, who lives on 12th Street near Jefferson, said that students next door to her got drunk last Saturday and ran and jumped over her fence, destroying a potted plant and leaving a cap full of vomit on her glass patio table.

The students in the house on the other side constantly leave uncovered trash cans on the porch and let their dog poop in the front yard.

Evans said that inspectors will go out to a house if L&I receives a complaint.

But Darrell Clarke, the councilman who wrote the ordinance for Yorktown, concedes that it is hard to enforce.

He said that inspectors feel odd knocking on doors and asking who is living there and what their relationship is.

Residents said that they've heard from L&I that they "have to catch someone in the act." And during some inspections, one report showed, the tenants, whether they are Temple students or not, have refused L&I inspectors permission to enter.

The Yorktown residents say that the landlords tell the students not to open the door, or if they do, to say that they are cousins.

One former student, Michelle Sears, wrote an article in the Temple News in April 2007 quoting her landlord as saying: "Do any of you guys have beds that we can just temporarily remove? Or ones we can just make look like sofas? Tell them the landlord lives downstairs. If they come to the door, just say all five of you are cousins."

Contacted for this story, Sears said that she no longer lives in the Yorktown area. But her article lamented that Temple students are in a bind.

"Temple can't provide housing, but now the nearby streets can't, either. Something's got to give, and students are soon going to find out, if they haven't already, that neighborhood families are not giving up without a fight."

For years, Yorktown billed itself as a "suburban community in the city." Each home had a small patch of green grass on half of the front yard and a concrete driveway leading to a garage on the other.

But in what Yorktown residents say is symptomatic of the bigger problem of landlords converting homes zoned for single-family residences into "rooming houses" for students, more and more "absentee landlords" have been stripping out front and back yards all over Yorktown and paving them over with concrete.

Just last week, on July 31, Kitchen and a group of Yorktown residents - mostly women and mostly age 50 and above - protested on Guildford Place, and temporarily stopped a contractor from pouring concrete over the areas where grassy front yards had once been.

The homes are being rented to Temple students, the neighbors and another Temple student said.

Mary McCrea, president of the Stakeholders' Committee of the Yorktown Community Organization, said that the residents were concerned that the contractor was working without permits.

When the protesters called L&I, they were told that property owner Michael Parkhill, who lives in Sea Girt, N.J., didn't need a permit to pour concrete on the grass in front of the houses he owns at 1512 and 1514 Guildford Place.

It just so happens that the curbs are so depressed that the tenants can easily drive over the curb and park on the newly paved front yard.

Contacted for this article, Parkhill said that he "didn't want to get involved."

"I try to be a good neighbor and try to keep my property well-maintained and cleaned."

A few doors down the street from where the "Steel Magnolias" stopped the concrete truck, Mary Key, 78, sat on the porch in front of her house. She has a neat patch of grass out front. And to her right, her neighbor has a yard full of lush plants.

But directly across the street, at 1521 Guildford, also owned by Parkhill, the grass was ripped-out years ago and there are two blocks of concrete pavement in front of the house. There is no grass.

Asked if she thought that the owner would like to live in a neighborhood where the grass had been paved over, Key quipped: "He doesn't care! He doesn't live here."

Nancy O'Donnell, a director of Philadelphia Green, part of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, said that she was glad to hear that Yorktown residents were taking a stand over the zoning issues.

"When you take that [grass] away, the character of the community changes," O'Donnell said.

"By pouring concrete down where you used to have grass, you'll have more reflective heat from the sun. The grass absorbs some rainfall and it creates a cooling effect for the neighborhood."

Last week's protest wasn't the first for the ladies of Yorktown.

There was another protest in mid-July, on Jefferson Street near 12th, said McCrea, who is 70 and has lived in the neighborhood for 44 years.

McCrea said that the protests were over a property where contractors had first tried to remodel it for students in February.

McCrea said that she went downtown to L&I, pulled the records and saw that there had been no permits for construction at the house.

"Then I went up to the 11th floor and filed a complaint," she said.

The house was soon sealed up, but in mid-July, workers were at the site again.

Pam Pendleton-Smith, another Yorktown activist, showed a reporter a copy of findings from L&I inspectors that found that three addresses in the 1200 block of Oxford Street were flagged for "Operating illegal rooming house."

Despite an ordinance recently pushed by residents that limits a dwelling to three students, the report by the L&I inspector found two houses with four students and one with six students.

The report was from February 2007, but yesterday Pendleton-Smith said that the residents don't know if L&I is actually enforcing the law.

"We can't get a straight answer out of L&I," Pendleton-Smith said. "They won't tell us what the next step is."

Yesterday, Belen Wondwossen, a senior biology major, walked from the house she is renting on Guildford Place toward Temple. She moved in just last week and said that she hadn't heard of the protest.

She said that both her landlord and her neighbors have been "great, so far."

She lives in the house across from Mary Key that is all paved in front.

"As a student, it is convenient to have both a parking space and an apartment so close to campus," Wondwossen said. *