Summary
She and her husband regularly find fliers stuffed in their door with the teasing headline: "Buy Your Home for Cash." A developer who owns several properties on Fourth Street recently asked to buy her church for $35,000. [Donna Saunders] refused. "I'm going to fight tooth and nail to stay in this community," she says. "I'm not leaving because I'm a fighter."
"We've been one of the most underserved communities in the city," [Darrell Clarke] says. "Now I ride down the street and say, 'That neighborhood's rebuilt.' People are excited about living in North Philadelphia. It's all good.""I don't know how long we'll be able to last," says Saunders. "With all these new houses and new people, I don't believe any of us will be here for long."See the full content of this document
Extract
There Goes the Neighborhood
As gentrification pushes northward, a community of survivors is slowly displaced.
In the '40s right through to the early '60s North Philadelphia reflected the city's burgeoning middle class, a large swath of land bumping up against the heart of the city.But then came flight, followed by blight, and now most people think of North Philadelphia as hell on earth, the scourge of society.Trash. Drugs. Blight. Poverty. Shootings. Robberies. Gangs. Rapists.It's the cancer that's kept Philadelphia from being a first-class city. A place that would be better off bulldozed.In reality, of course, North Philadelphia has always been a far more complex place. It's not one neighborhood, but many.Some neighborhoods are hopelessly lost, and others struggle to keep their grip. But there are also blocks and blocks where dignity has always ruled, where homes are well-maintained and neighbors pull together.But now North Philadelphia, both the Godforsaken and the handsomely preserved, is disappearing.It's disappearing near Temple, where the university is ever expanding, and in Fairmount, Fishtown and Northern Liberties, where private developers are investing millions. It's disappearing in targeted neighborhoods where suburban-style housing is replacing crumbling row homes and garbage-filled lots.Center City is pushing north, and the unimaginable is hap...See the full content of this document
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