Kensington High Hears the Mayor
The Providence Dye Works on Emerald Street is coming down. In the next few years, at least 13 thousand more structures are slated to go, leaving thousands of empty lots. In late February, some Kensington High School students that live near the factory heard what Philadelphia's Mayor had to say about the city's plans to deal with vacant land. --- On a snowy February day at the Philadelphia Convention Center, ninth grader Ann Fung showed off the maps and essays she and her classmates wrote about what blight has done to Kensington. But Fung also came to hear what Philadelphia Mayor John Street has planned for the city's 59 thousand empty buildings and abandoned lots. This sort of dead space is taking over Fung's own block. "If we're doing all those lots, you need people to tend them," Fung said. "I thought it was important he talked about education." Street says problems in the city's public school system are in part to blame for population loss. Philadelphia has lost nearly one-third of its population since 1950. "We believe that in order to have first class neighborhoods, we have to improve the quality of education," Mayor Street told a crowd at a conference on vacant land. "For many of the folks who leave our city, you can clean all the vacant lots but they're not sending their children to substandard schools." But after the speech, Fung said she didn't hear anything she thought would directly address the blight problems in her Kensington neighborhood. Fung and the rest of the city are still awaiting the specifics of the Mayor's long-promised plan to redo the neighborhoods with a 250 million dollar blitz on urban decay. ****** Providence Dye Works. a hundred and twenty year old Kensington factory, burnt down in a series of unsolved arsons last November. City contractors are almost done tearing down the three-story brick buildings. Once the block bustled with the textile industry, but as of late the structures have been nothing but headaches. The dye works housed drug dealers and chopshops until they were burnt out. "[The arsons] were a good thing and a bad thing," says 17-year-old derrick lyman, a Kensington High School senior who lives on Emerald Street across from the Providence Dye Works. "It's a bad thing because now it's going to be all open and our house is going to be cold everytime the air blows. The good thing is we'll get something good put in and not have to look at the broken down factory." The head of Mayor Street's anti-blight plan, Pat Smith, says finding investors to fill Philadelphia's future empty spaces is one of her biggest challenges. Smith told Monday's conference-goers her office is studying land banking. The goal of such a project is to speed up the collection of forgotten properties for possible developers. "We recognize how much we should improve our systems that will need reform and have begun to think about a legislation package so we can take land more quickly," Smith says. After listening to Smith's and the Mayor's speeches, Kensington High junior Charityn Baez said another big challenge is to find residents ready to do their part to turn their neighborhood around. Baez takes care of an abandoned lot behind her house, and says work like hers is vital to improving the city's empty spaces and making neighborhoods like hers places where people want to live and stay. "Mostly what we need are people that are committed," Baez said. "Most people don't care. They say it's a waste of time, it's going to get dirty anyway. They dont really care."  whyy.org |