University City has been redeveloped again and again. How could the latest effort be more equitable?
Neighborhood residents need affordable housing and good schools, urban planning professor Laura Wolf Powers writes in her new book.
University City is a job engine of Philadelphia, and, in the era of remote work, its hospitals, laboratories, and universities are arguably more important than Center City’s skyscrapers.
But as Laura Wolf-Powers, professor of urban planning at Hunter College in New York City, demonstrates in her new book, the neighborhood’s history is fraught. In the 1950s, as the city began leaking jobs and population, there were fears that the University of Pennsylvania might decamp from its historic campus and head to the suburbs, too.
Instead, administrators decided to stay and expand using the abundant resources and powers available through the public sector during the urban renewal era.
That meant demolishing a neighborhood of 3,423 known colloquially as “Black Bottom.” The scheme imperfectly succeeded in its goals — retaining Penn employees in the immediate area — and tarnished the university’s reputation in West Philadelphia for generations to come.
Wolf-Powers, a former instructor at Penn, examines this history in University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District, and then compares that moment with the more recent blossoming of this corner of West Philadelphia. Her conversation with The Inquirer has been edited for clarity and concision.
Your book looks at the influence of Penn, Drexel, and other large institutions on urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s and the more recent building boom in University City. What differences would you highlight?
There has been a fair amount of progress since the urban renewal era in terms of the ability of people in low-income neighborhoods of color to make claims on redevelopment activity and to experience political citizenship in that context. Universities like Drexel and Penn do a lot more community engagement than was done with residents of the Black Bottom in the 1950s. Now you have the University City District’s award-winning career pipeline programs. Drexel is really leaning into that, as well. You have these things in place that offer opportunities to people who are less well-educated and not university-affiliated.
But at the same time, my main point is that the universities are not accepting responsibility for the fact that their activity is having a big impact on land value or the consequences of that for renters and low-income homeowners.
Neighborhood groups fear that rising property values and rents may displace residents. But in parts of West Philly that aren’t seeing development, people are being displaced by crumbling homes, crime, and lack of opportunity. Is there a middle path?
I recognize that there are many fewer people and many fewer jobs in Philadelphia today than there were in the 1950s and ‘60s. It makes sense that officials would look to innovation-driven office and lab development, along with live-work-play accoutrements.
But in order to participate fully in that development, people need housing security. They need an education system that does a decent job. All those things are left for later. Those are not seen as economic development moves.
The assumption is that what is going to be economically beneficial for an area is bringing new people in who can pay high rents, people who have disposable income to spend. That is part of the formula, but without some attention to these more basic economic needs that people have, public costs associated with homelessness and the criminal legal system will continue to rise. And there’s a lot of missed opportunity. These communities have people with potential, with ideas for businesses that could be integrated into economic development policy.
A lot could be accomplished by taking actions in the land market that enable people to continue to live in the vicinity of these economic development projects. Because you have a situation where people who are displaced from Mantua or from the University City Townhomes aren’t going to be able to send their kids to Powel/SLAMS [the rejuvenated local public school]. That recapitulates a pattern by which people of limited means don’t have access to the quality of public education as people who are able to pay more for housing.
In a lot of ways city, state, and federal government have been much less active in recent redevelopment schemes than they were in the mid-century ones. Given the more restricted government resources these days, what can be done?
There’s something tragic that at a time of relative abundance in terms of the resources that the public sector had available that what they chose to do was to participate in the direct displacement of low-income communities of color. The lasting legacy of federal government investment in cities in struggling urban areas in the 1960s and ‘70s can be seen much more in the criminal justice system than it can in education or job training or housing.
Cities are in a very tough position. There’s this austerity mentality and a much greater faith in public private partnerships to generate economic growth. But we’re in a period now, with federal legislation on infrastructure and economic revitalization that has been passed in the last year and a half, where there are public resources available again. People who are responsible for deploying those resources, if they think differently about how to solve the economic development dilemma, then they could make different choices about how to deploy those resources.
There’s a harmful narrative that, well, we tried the War On Poverty, and it didn’t work. It must be the fault of the people themselves who didn’t emerge from poverty, they must have defects or be unable to do anything except pursue lives of crime. I think if you turn that around and look at how things played out in the 1960s and ‘70s, you can imagine that spending public resources on something like high-quality high school education is not only an opportunity, but also an obligation.