Yorktown residents take issue with student renters

Todd Thompson takes pride in his home, so when five college-age guys attending a party recently in a rental property across the street ran behind his house to urinate, he was upset.

"When you're just renting, you're partying, you're destroying - you don't care," Thompson said. "It's unacceptable."

Thompson was one of about 50 residents of the Yorktown section of North Philadelphia who gathered last night for an informational question-and-answer session with Commissioner Fran Burns of the Department of Licenses & Inspections to discuss the longstanding problem of out-of-town landlords' renting to Temple University students.

After years of complaints that student housing violated a special zoning law for the Yorktown and Jefferson Manor neighborhoods, workers from L&I last May posted "cease operations" notices on at least eight homes that were rented to students.

The 2005 special-zoning ordinance prohibits "multifamily dwellings, apartment houses, tenement houses, student housing not owner-occupied, and fraternity and sorority houses."

Residents were advised to call 3-1-1 if they saw new students moving in, but to call 9-1-1 if students were living in a house that already had gotten a cease-operations notice.

Burns told the residents that a couple of the properties that L&I visited are now vacant, some are grandfathered in - meaning they were bought before the 2005 ordinance - and some owners added renters to the deeds of their homes as a way to comply with the ordinance.

"It's baffling," said Fred Tookes, a Yorktown resident. "It's a serious technicality."