Gentrified neighborhoods, damaged homes | Real Estate Newsletter

Philly’s aging rowhouses were built to stand together. That means that careless digging or demolition at one property can threaten the whole row.

The city has declared about 300 occupied rowhouses unsafe or imminently dangerous during neighboring construction since 2018, according to our analysis.

The people affected the most by construction damage are longtime residents of gentrifying neighborhoods who can least afford repairs.

Keep scrolling for that story and to see what lessons we can learn about converting offices to apartments from Philly’s industrial past, peek inside an industrial loft apartment, and see how Virtua is involved in an emerging housing model in New Jersey.

I was disappointed I didn’t get any photos of home Halloween decorations when I asked a couple weeks ago. But I’m loving this week’s trivia question, which focuses on West Philly neighbors who do something special with the alley between their homes.

📮 Is your neighborhood one that gets a lot of trick-or-treaters or comes together to celebrate on Halloween? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me about it.

— Michaelle Bond

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

Each year, 50 Philly rowhouses are made unsafe or destroyed by construction next door. My colleagues mapped out where in the city this damage is happening.

They found that Philadelphians in majority-Black neighborhoods are five times more likely than those living in majority-white neighborhoods to live next to a construction site where the city has identified unsafe practices.

Longtime residents in gentrifying areas are most at risk. Take the story of Olivia and George Flamer.

They had owned their Point Breeze home, which had once belonged to Olivia’s grandmother, for 41 years when it collapsed in 2012. The couple says the demolition of the rowhouse next door destabilized their century-old home, although the developer disputes that.

Read on for more of their story and the stories of other families who say their lives were upended by construction damage.

In our latest column from architecture critic Inga Saffron, she applauds two recent redevelopment projects that brought apartments to former Philadelphia industrial sites that sat vacant for decades: a Peco power plant in Fishtown and a brewery in — where else? — Brewerytown.

I’ve toured the inside of both buildings — the former power plant now called the Battery this summer and Poth Brewery Lofts two years ago for a story I wrote about Philly being a leader in turning old factories into apartments.

As I watched my step navigating construction sites and listened as enthusiastic company officials told me what they had planned, it was difficult to fully picture the transformations developers promised.

First of all, both buildings are huge. They were never set up to be homes. Both required a lot of imagination and creativity to turn into places people might want to live.

Inga called these two projects the toughest of Philly’s difficult cases of reviving industrial zombies.

She first toured the buildings when they were ruins pre-pandemic, but this fall, she went back as renters started moving into apartments. In her column, she says we can apply what we learned from transforming these industrial buildings to repurpose empty office towers.

It was love at first sight when Butch Cordora saw the apartment in a refurbished industrial building in Philly’s Callowhill neighborhood.

He wanted a loft, and he liked the big cogs and pulleys hanging from the ceiling. He signed a lease in August for the 1,630-square-foot space he calls “industrial steampunk.”

His place has exposed brick, as well as metal and wood, and he likes the combo.

Cordora took what he learned from watching a lot of HGTV to divide his large space into several smaller ones to create a dining nook, gym, and office.

We usually focus on homeowners in this section, so I like that we’re highlighting how a renter made his apartment his own. (Reach out to us, renters! You can nominate your home by emailing my colleagues at properties@inquirer.com.)

Take a peek at Cordora’s floor-to-ceiling bookcase with an attached ladder, spiral staircase that leads to his deck, and the home touches infused with his personality.

For the third year in a row, neighbors in West Philly got together to create a “haunted alleyway” in between their homes for Halloween. The elaborately decorated free attraction with ghoul, ghost, and skull tunnels also is open tomorrow and Friday.

Question: Roughly how many feet long is the alleyway?

A) 50

B) 100

C) 200

D) 300

This story has the answer.

Do you know the location this photo shows?

📮 If you think you do, email me back. You and your memories of visiting this spot might be featured in the newsletter.

Shout out to Denise S., who knew that last week’s photo showed Isaiah Zagar’s mosaic mural on the side of the former Painted Bride Art Center in Old City. The mural is being taken apart before the building is knocked down to make way for short-term rentals.

―

I’m still in a Halloween state of mind and thought you might also be interested in seeing the Census Bureau’s list of spooky-sounding place names.

There’s the classic Sleepy Hollow in New York and also one in Illinois. Transylvania County is in North Carolina, where there’s also a Seven Devils Town. And there’s an actual place called Truth or Consequences in New Mexico.

Also on the list is Delaware’s Slaughter Beach, a place I had never heard of until I saw signs that freaked me out as I drove down to Rehoboth Beach in September.

Enjoy the rest of your week.