How Kensington Avenue’s open-air drug market went international — and the city’s fight to take back the neighborhood

Kiara Lynn Garcia was just doing what young people in Kensington are told to do: get out.

After graduating from college in 2019, she took her international relations degree and flew farther than most of her childhood friends could dream — 8,000 miles, to Shenzhen, China, where she began her career teaching English as a second language.

But in her first year abroad, as the pandemic raged, a viral video reached Garcia’s friend circle in China and catapulted her back home.

The clip showed a man driving under the familiar blue shadow of the El train, filming droves of people nodding out in the streets, some openly injecting drugs, others itching at gruesome wounds or asleep in front of shuttered stores. “This is not a horror movie,” the videographer narrated in Mandarin. “This is real life.”

“Is this your hometown?” a friend asked Garcia.

No, she said: “That’s my neighborhood. I live around the corner.”

Over the last four years, thousands of Kensington residents such as Garcia have seen their neighborhood’s already notorious billion-dollar drug market become an international spectacle.

The plight of Kensington, which has long been known as the epicenter of the Philadelphia region’s opioid crisis, now serves as a cautionary tale for foreign governments, a punching bag for Republican presidential candidates, and a source of macabre clickbait on the internet.

The 100 most-watched YouTube videos documenting the anguish along Kensington Avenue have accrued more than 300 million combined views, analytics data show, reaching Mexico, Germany, and Indonesia. More than 3,600 times a month last year, viewers searched for the phrase “Kensington zombies” — a slur for the people seen nodding out along the avenue.

Kensington’s viral moment has coincided with an unprecedented call for change. Mayor Cherelle L. Parker took office in January vowing to end the open-air drug market for good and stabilize the neighborhood. And as other countries look to Kensington for lessons in what to avoid, local leaders wonder whether the Parker administration will learn from past mistakes.

“Kensington has brought both international embarrassment and a sense of urgency to deal with what’s happening,” said Casey O’Donnell, the CEO of Impact Services, one of Kensington’s three large community development nonprofits. “But that urgency and embarrassment does not translate to effective problem solving.”

Interviews with more than three dozen residents, neighborhood leaders, public health experts, and current and former city officials show how four decades of neglect, failed policing, and political missteps brought the neighborhood to a breaking point — and offer some insights for the Parker administration as it charts its strategy.

Specifics about the impending cleanup will remain unclear until the mayor releases her plan next month. But Parker says she is prioritizing the longtime residents who have shouldered an unfair burden. At her first budget address earlier this month, the mayor said: “I want to make Kensington a neighborhood of choice and beacon of pride again.”

The challenge is enormous. More than one-third of the city’s homeless people live in Kensington. The zip code 19134 saw 1,270 fatal overdoses between 2015 and 2022, more than double any other neighborhood. Kensington endured a historic surge of drug-fueled gun violence during that same period, with more than 1,400 shootings, including 300 within a five-minute walk of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. Residents lodged more quality-of-life complaints with the city’s 311 system than any other part of the city over the last three years — contending with abandoned cars, crumbling buildings, and human feces in the streets.

Past plans sought to police the troubles away from Kensington, neighborhood leaders say, and failed to provide meaningful solutions to keep them from coming back.

“The problems are so deep,” said Maria Gonzalez, executive director of the economic development nonprofit HACE, “we need all the help we can get.”

Many stakeholders fear that a crackdown without a long-term plan will simply end in displacement, causing a catastrophic surge in overdose deaths and increased burden on surrounding neighborhoods. As developers sweep up land in upper Kensington’s drug market, some longtime residents, 45% of whom live in poverty, say they are wary that a dramatic wave of gentrification is next, bringing high rents and property taxes that will force them out, too.

Five months ago, Garcia, 27, returned from China to face Kensington, post-pandemic. She saw more businesses had closed, such as the Rainbow clothing store where she used to spend her weekly allowance. SEPTA trains, once an escape route from Kensington for her, had seemed to inherit her neighborhood’s chaos.

As City Hall debates a path forward, she asks herself: “Why should I stay?”

Garcia didn’t learn about the generation before her that “got out” until she was a teenager.

After migrating from Puerto Rico in the 1980s as a child, her mother planted roots in North Philadelphia, where she eventually worked cashier jobs and saved for a home. At the time, families of color struggled to obtain mortgages due to systemic racism and redlining, but Kensington offered a wealth of places cheap enough to buy in cash.

Browsing old high school yearbooks, Garcia realized that most of the residents were once white, such as the Horowitzes, who sold her family their two-story rowhouse. And those dreary, vacant factories she walked past each day — once, they employed thousands.

Through the 1950s, Kensington was the still beating heart of a manufacturing hub known as “the Workshop of the World.” Tailors and ice cream parlors dotted Kensington Avenue. And the textile mills offered so much work that, in the words of author Allen M. Hornblum, “you could get fired at one plant in the morning and have another job by noon.”

As manufacturers fled, the lost jobs and empty factories left a void for a drug market to fill.

In the 1970s, methamphetamine flooded the streets, trafficked by members of the Irish-led “K&A Gang.” Crack cocaine arrived a decade later, followed in the 1990s by high-purity heroin from Colombia and the Dominican Republic.

With unemployment spiraling, young people became snared in a drug trade that, by 1992, formed a $250 million underground economy. Narcotics cops began disparaging parts of Kensington, named after London’s royal borough, with a new moniker: “The Badlands.”

Fueled by suburban buyers, a single drug corner could net $25,000 to $50,000 in a single day, moving more than 13,000 packets of heroin, said Jorge Cintron Jr., a second-generation Kensington dealer in the 1990s who is now incarcerated in state prison. The more potent, the better.

Overdose spikes and gun violence attracted police crackdowns, he said, but some officers looked the other way for a cut of the profits, as prosecutors showed in several high-profile convictions.

“At times they would take your money, and at times they would lock you up,” Cintron said. “Once people start dying and the media gets involved about how many people die from a certain drug corner, then you see the crackdown.”

By the time Garcia’s family moved in the ‘90s, Kensington’s newfound melting pot of Black, white, Latino, and Asian residents faced deep economic disinvestment. Across demographic lines, they shared frustration with the entrenched narcotics scene.

They formed antidrug groups, held vigils for those killed by gun violence, and begged City Hall to intervene. Police brass often blamed residents for not providing enough tips about dealers, even as graffiti sprayed on walls warned “snitches” to stay quiet.

“We all knew it was a slippery slope,” said Roxy Rivera, a lifelong resident of Fairhill and Kensington, who runs the Somerset Neighbors for Better Living community group. “The resources just weren’t being poured into the area.”

Mayor after mayor promised to root out the drugs, launching law enforcement offensives with names like military campaigns: Operation Fishnet, Operation Sunrise, Operation Safe Streets. No matter how large the drug busts, relief was short-lived.

At the same time, the neighborhood began to absorb the cottage industry needed to ease the suffering.

Hundreds of unregulated recovery houses proliferated throughout the neighborhood — so many that one state representative called Kensington “the drug rehab capital of the world.” Ed Rendell, the city’s mayor between 1992 and 2000, disregarded state law to open the first needle exchange program in Kensington to help quell the spread of HIV and other illnesses.

The neighborhood became a de facto containment zone for the city and the region’s addiction problems, said Robert Fairbanks, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has studied the city’s recovery house system.

“The question became not about eradicating poverty and drug addiction,” he said, “but how to manage it.”

And that strategy proved politically viable for City Hall, he added — until containment compounded into crisis.

Garcia grew up around the open-air dealing, but she didn’t see someone openly shoot up in the street until about 2014, while walking one morning to Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

After that, she said, “I started taking the train.”

In the last decade, the opioid crisis thrust the addicted population further into public view, fueled in part by the rise of ultra-potent synthetic opioids in the drug supply, the COVID19 pandemic, and shortsighted city planning, according to former officials, police commanders, and neighborhood leaders.

By 2017, then-Mayor Jim Kenney faced a hydra-headed dilemma: Philly was in the throes of an overdose epidemic, people were dying in the streets, and decades of neglect in Kensington were again catching up to City Hall.

Along the Conrail train tracks that cut through the neighborhood — the same lines that used to provide factories with lumber and metal — a heroin user encampment known as “El Campamento” had grown into a public health crisis. Officials said they could no longer turn their backs on the squalor along the railroad gulch, which had brought national embarrassment.

“I just walked into hell,” celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz told his 3.4 million TV viewers, after touring the site.

After the camp’s closure that summer, some residents applauded. But in the coming months, hundreds of homeless people set up under the overpasses along Lehigh Avenue, their suffering now in plain sight on the sidewalks of residential streets.

Some current and former city officials blamed an influx of addicted people to Kensington from throughout the region and even far-off states. Others acknowledged that they miscalculated the impact of shutting down the railroad encampment. The city offered to connect the unhoused with services, but few accepted the offer, said Thomas Nestel III, the former chief of SEPTA Transit Police.

“Something had to be done,” Nestel said. “I thought it was the right choice at the time. I don’t know if it was the right choice. But maybe it was … because it moved it into the public eye.”

Within a year of closing El Campamento, Kenney unveiled his long-term Kensington plan — one that married the law enforcement practices of the past with the lifesaving practice of harm reduction, a public health practice that focuses on keeping drug users alive.

The “Resilience Project” invested more than $20 million in national opioid-settlement money in community organizations and expanded treatment outreach, while also aiming to close down sprawling homeless encampments and improve residents’ quality of life.

Kenney also backed a campaign, led by Rendell and the former head of Prevention Point, an addiction services nonprofit, to open the nation’s first supervised drug consumption site at Safehouse. The mayor argued that the site would save lives, deter public drug use, and help steer people into treatment. For a moment, it seemed that Kensington had found a path forward.

Garcia understood the harm reduction approach. She wouldn’t want to die alone in an abandoned house with no one to save her. But the crises around Kensington Avenue spread faster than the city could act.

As the tent cities closed, residents opened their front doors to find people sleeping on their porches and front steps. Neighbors filed 1,648 complaints about homeless encampments alone in the Kensington zip code since 2020.

At McPherson Square, in the heart of the neighborhood, librarians administered Narcan and reversed overdoses on park benches. People began to develop scabrous, burn-like wounds caused by the animal sedative xylazine, known as “tranq.”

Like many residents, Garcia said she started to stop feeling for the people in addiction.

“We’ve empathized. We’ve given food. We’ve given water,” she said. “Only to get back that we can’t walk outside any more with open-toed shoes. This is not a community. This is a public crisis.”

Eleven weeks into the Parker era, the harm-reduction movement once pitched as a solution to Kensington’s problems appears in peril. Years of litigation stalled the Safehouse opening and Council members in September voted to ban injection sites citywide. Council members who represent parts of Kensington are seeking to push out organizations such as Savage Sisters and Prevention Point, while still professing support for their lifesaving doctrine.

Savage Sisters executive director Sarah Laurel, who has lived in Kensington for two years, blamed city leaders for stoking an “us vs. them” dynamic between the housed and the unhoused — both of whom, she argued, are victims of the city’s underinvestment.

“The containment strategy has taken place for a very long time,” she said, “and rather than take accountability for that, the government is scapegoating the most vulnerable people.”

From a small storefront on the avenue, Laurel and her team have reversed overdoses, provided wound care, and offered basic dignities such as hot showers to people on the street. At the behest of City Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, their landlord opted to end their lease — which some thought was an early omen of displacement to come.

Since last summer, people living on the street said 24th District police have ramped up enforcement against sleeping outdoors. The Inquirer identified vacant properties in Kensington where dozens of people have sought shelter in recent months. Others have begun dispersing farther from the avenue, raising alarm for surrounding neighborhoods.

Some people have moved toward Juniata, where Kate Scott runs the local civic association. Lawmakers have offered assurances that they won’t displace the problems, she said. “But no one can promise anything, and we all know that.”

For all the flaws of homeless encampments, people in addiction argue that those spaces offer community and protection, especially for women who often face violence and sexual assault on the street.

Robert Heimer, an epidemiologist at Yale University, said displacement could prove to be a disaster if the death toll climbs further and hospitals and jails become overburdened. Even with the widespread availability of naloxone and access to street-level aid, a record-high 1,413 people died in the city in 2022 from overdoses.

“More and more people will see that what you’re doing isn’t working,” the professor said. “You will still see the corpses, but you won’t have people witnessing and responding and saving people’s lives.”

The mayor’s first budget dedicates $100 million for “triage facilities” to take drug users off the streets for treatment — or potentially face criminal action — but it’s not clear where those centers will be located.

Answers will likely come when Parker, Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel, and Managing Director Adam Thiel are expected to unveil details for their plan in April.

In the meantime, community development organizations have urged city leaders to set clear goals, align Kensington’s vast but diffuse network of service providers, and give the disenfranchised residents a say in the solution.

Fixated on public safety, stakeholders said, past efforts failed to envision a comprehensive strategy that funded housing assistance, reduced treatment barriers, beautified public spaces, and provided workforce development — much of which would require state and federal support.

“Coordination and funding: That’s the only way it’s going to work,” said the Rev. Richard Harris, pastor at Firm Hope Baptist Church in Kensington, who sat on the city’s Opioid Task Force.

The Kensington of Garcia’s youth was no paradise, but she remembers a sense of community — and hope. Saturday mornings, her block captain used to blow an air-horn, summoning the neighborhood kids to help sweep up the trash in the street.

Walking down Kensington Avenue on a brisk March morning, she was reminded of how that community had been beaten down while she was in China.

After being robbed at gunpoint last year, her mother is now afraid to visit stores on the strip, many of which are either crowded with slot-like gambling machines or boarded up for good.

Garcia believes that the mayor has good intentions. But she has doubts about whether a plan that comes together in a few short months can reverse decades of failure.

The challenges extend beyond what’s visible on the streets. Upper Kensington ranks dead last among 46 neighborhoods for mental health, literacy, employment, and women’s life expectancy, according to a 2019 report by the city’s health department and Drexel University.

And with nearly half of all households living in poverty, Bill McKinney, New Kensington Community Development Corporation’s executive director, wonders who will benefit most from radical change. Gentrification has already pushed into upper Kensington. New construction has in some cases broken ground in lockstep with the closure of homeless encampments, as developers pitch the area north of Lehigh Avenue as the “next hot location.”

Some residents, business owners, and outreach workers said they welcome new development as a way to drive out the drug market, and they see hope in Parker’s vision.

“So many years the community has been promised, promised, promised and nothing has worked,” said Buddy Osbourne, a Kensington native and pastor who runs Rock Ministries, a church-based youth boxing program on the avenue. “But I think now you have a lot of people buying into it from the community.”

McKinney, who has lived on McPherson Square for 21 years, said improving public safety and quality of life won’t matter to residents who can’t afford to enjoy prosperity. In a few years, he said, those cheering the cleanup now could be facing the same fate as residents in other once-poor neighborhoods to the south.

“If you don’t have a plan for the aftermath, the only plan is going to be to step aside and turn it over to developers,” he said. “Is that success? Is it success, when you’re not just an embarrassment internationally, but when at the end of the day, the folks who actually suffered through it all end up losing everything?”

Garcia’s eyes lit up on the avenue when she saw Janet Truong, the nail salon owner who has done all her piercings since she was young.

“My customers are like my family,” Truong said, hugging Garcia as she stepped around the crowds camped on the sidewalk and entered the shop.

Garcia is torn. She weighs whether to buy her own house in the neighborhood. But what if city leaders turn their backs on Kensington again in a few months or a year, and the problems continue?

“I just wish I could run,” Garcia said. “I wish I could go to McPherson and just do laps, you know? Other neighborhoods have that. But not in Kensington.”

She stopped outside a rowhouse built more than a century ago during Kensington’s boom years. On the freshly painted brick facade hung a “for sale” sign.

“The ‘I made it out’ should not be normalized,” she said. “It should be ‘We empowered you to do better.’”

Staff writers Dylan Purcell, Samantha Melamed, Anna Orso, Aubrey Whelan, Ellie Rushing, and SEO editor Torin Sweeney contributed to this article.