Red Tape vs. Green Lots
Two Puerto Rican immigrants are fighting to clean up vacant land near them and find the battle often moves from the weed-filled lots to the offices of City Hall. --- In the middle of a dense urban grid, about a half mile from Emerald Street and Lehigh Avenue, Saro Rodriguez has a farm. Years of work outdoors have taken their toll on this tall, fair-haired and light-skinned Puerto Rican now being treated for skin cancer. "This is our private garden," But Rodriguez knows it's not safe around here at night. Rodriguez's chickens, rabbits and vegetable garden fit neatly in the 45 foot square plot next to his house near Front and Sterner Streets. It's a part of the city that's either called North Philadelphia or Kensington, depending on who's talking. As Rodriguez's partner Luz Santiago opens the padlocked 6 foot high gate to the garden, she holds her nose. "Oh, that smell!" Santiago says. It's not the smell of the garden that disgusts Santiago, but someone walking down the block smoking mariujana. Santiago says the drug trade is the reason her own neighbors give up on Kensington. "Even if you are poor, you don't have to live like a pig. But the city has to cooperate with us," Santiago says. When Rodriguez and Santiago bought their home in 1995, next door was an abandoned house used for prostitution and drugs. The place burned, but it took constant lobbying before the city finally knocked it down. The vacant lot started to fill up with trash. Rodriguez decided they could do something better with the land. "The city they spend the money to clean the lot - clean the houses - and they use that lot to dump," Rodriguez says. "They should give it to somebody to use it."
"How you say..the route? Every department you have to go then to another department. They send me from office to office. Send me over here, over there," Rodriguez says. "It's difficult." Herb Wetzell, the head of the city's Redevelopment Authority, says it now takes the city 54 steps and 12 different agencies to acquire land and 39 steps and 9 departments to get rid of it. He's the head of a task force whose job is to streamline the resulting bureaucratic mess. "We asked the people who do it and they didnt even know how the system works," Wetzell says. This is Wetzell's self-described dream job: A chance to change the face of Philadelphia by giving residents more time to fix their neighborhoods instead of battling city agencies. Wetzell says the first step was realizing that as many as four city agencies were doing the same work over and over again. "We talked about the initial research and then like three people said, 'Well, I looked that up and another said I looked that up.' And its like a light bulb goes off: 'Whoa! We spent a lot of time looking this up!'" Wetzell is planning a database that would end the duplication and make the city accountable for how long the land transfer process takes. The point is to avoid a nightmare situation. The city is about to create as many as 13 thousand more vacant lots when it tears down dangerous buildings as part of a demolition project. Mayor John Street says the success of his anti-blight plan hinges on what happens after the buildings come down.
But even while the city dedicates itself to streamlining the land transfer process, applications still sit on desks. Saro Rodriguez has waited nearly a year for a permit for a lot across the street from his house right next to a bar. From his bedroom window, Rodriguez watches people toss their empty 40s into broken stacks of glass. He wants to transform that lot, make it and not the bar the place his neighbors gather. "The back is going to be a vegetable garden,"Rodriguez says. "In the middle is going to be a small Puerto Rican house for hanging, barbecue, whatever." But before any of that can happen, Rodriguez has to hear from the city that he's got the right to fence off the property and make it into the kind of oasis he's made in the garden next door to his home.  whyy.org |
Rodriguez says with a smile. "I have plans, but I got sick. The doctor says i have to stay out of the sun. Maybe I have to work in the night time."
But it took Rodriguez two years just to get through the the bureaucratic maze required to buy the land. Others wait over five years for city land that holds nothing but garbage. Now Rodriguez owns three lots and is finding new problems. Tax bills he thought he'd paid keep coming back despite visits to countless city departments.
"This is not about running into a neighborhood and tearing down a bunch of buildings and declaring victory over blight," Street says.