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Brick houses with green lawns rest next to vacant lots with overgrown weeds creeping through the chain-link fence. Pink-pedaled remnants of spring blanket the sidewalks. A group of young men smoke a blunt in the backyard of a church.
Welcome to the projects in West Poplar, where shades of suburbia are blurred with the grit and charm of the city. The fixed-income homes in West Poplar, which includes West Poplar Apartments and Poplar Nehemiah, comprise approximately 400 homes.
“I don’t talk to a lot of the kids who come around this neighborhood,” says Davin Jeter, 24, who has lived in the West Poplar Apartments for a year and works as a handyman. Jeter says the quiet neighborhood is a hangout for many young people looking to hustle who are not residents.
“I wish they would just go home,” he says, spinning screwdriver bits on and off between his fingers.
Older community members like Rojer Kern, a member of the Office of Neighborhood Economic Development, recall West Poplar being plagued by drugs and crimes within the past two decades. The area had formerly been populated by Richard Allen row homes, which Kern says have grown synonymous with urban decay in Philadelphia.
“At one time Richard Allen was more than 1,900 units,” Kern says. “Now there are 500 units.”
The federal government allotted $20 million to develop the 205 Poplar Nehemiah housing projects in 1996. The Nehemiah projects included driveways, garages and green lawn space in their design to take advantage of the vacant space, Kern says. The remaining Richard Allen homes were demolished from 2001 to 2003.
The West Poplar Apartments followed the design of suburban ranch-style homes. The design has proved popular among the West Poplar residents and a cost-effective way to beautify the stigmatized housing developments in the city, Kern says.
“The Office of Housing and Urban Development used the same model and style of housing for its housing and reconstruction ever since,” Kern says.
With its proximity to Center City and Northern Liberties, Kern sees the opportunity for West Poplar to transform into one of the city’s most ethnically and economically mixed neighborhoods.
“The whole area is changing at warp speed,” says Margie Pierce, director of the West Poplar Neighborhood Advisory Council. “You have a lot of older homes in West Poplar that are abandoned, uninhabited, and we have developers coming in who are trying to refurbish these homes, and more of a trendy kind of people coming into the area.”
The Neighborhood Advisory Committee office is located within the Mother African Zoar United Methodist Church, the second-oldest in Philadelphia, but operates independently of the church. Whatever changes await West Poplar, Pierce says she hopes the deeply rooted neighborhood partnerships are involved. Some development firms have built and refurbished properties without consulting with the Neighborhood Advisory Council ahead of time, Pierce says, but others have been receptive to the community and hired West Poplar residents. Most recently, the NAC helped find part-time and full-time work for 15 West Poplar residents at the Green Grocer on North Broad Street.
Interstate Realty Management Company is delighted that West Poplar Apartments is featured in your article; but, the story has many incorrect facts and we are dissappointed that our on-site computer training Center is referred to as West poplar Community Center. Please use its official HUD designation of West poplar Apartments Neighborhood networks Computer Training Center. At the least since your article blurs the lines betweern West poplar the community and West Poplar Apartments, “Apartments” should have been used when referring to our computer center. Additionally, West Poplar Apartments is approximately 30 years old and is a Section 8 new COnsteruction development. West poplar Apartments at no time replaced any Richard Allen Homes units. West Poplar Apartments employs twon on-site supportive services persons, a site social sergices coordinator and a computer center instructor/facilitator.
Olivette Beaton, Vice President of Social services Interstate Realty.
We apologize for the errors. Please let us know if the changes made are now accurate. Thanks.
I drive through West Poplar each day and see this area differently than as described in your article. The north side of West Poplar is comprised of “suburban” single family houses which seem out of place. There are a number of male youth on corners in the middle of the day. The city cleans this area, cuts the grass and does everything to make it look less threatening. In the middle of this area is the John F. Street Recreation center which is a community joke. The south side of West Poplar is comprised of brick row homes which are being renovated by ordinary middle class people. There are also vacant lots which are being developed. It is a tale of two neighborhoods. One created artificially to house and hide low income people. The other is a just another middle class area striving to be a better place. It is far from a cohesive neighborhood.
I’m a bit late to this post, but I wanted to add my two cents.
My wife and I moved into a house near 12th and Poplar in January 2009. No one cuts the lawns here but the homeowners, and the park’s maintained by people that are hired out with the money paid to the HOA ($100/yr) by the owners of the houses in the neighborhood. It’s the homeowners who clean up the park every year. And while my neighbors may have been worse off twenty or thirty years ago, on my street, I’m surrounded by really nice people who, if you’re not up early enough in the morning, shovel your sidewalk for you just cuz they already started on their own sidewalk. And if I get the jump on them, I shovel their sidewalks too. Their kids have grown up and are going to college, my neighbor’s daughter has an executive position at Whole Foods. I live across the street from an older couple who are both Penn grads. These people may have come from a low-income background, but you’re being presumptuous about what they’re like now.
The only thing the city does is come by every week to pick up trash and recycling – and they take bulk trash every week, not once a month the way it was in Downingtown, where I’d previously lived, let alone once a quarter back in central PA where I grew up. I would love it if the city mowed my lawn and picked the wayward trash up from the sidewalk! But it’s the people who live here who do that. I don’t know if it’s good or bad if you think it’s the city who makes this place look less threatening.
That said, in my first park clean up two years ago, I found a stash of unused needles in a bush, and this year I found a discarded crack pipe, and tiny little baggies blow into my lawn from time to time. Sure, some kids around here no doubt smoke weed, but that’s no different from any town in the US regardless of race or class, in my own experience. But the harder stuff comes from outside this neighborhood – not from the people I’ve met during the block parties and community events held here.
Anyhow, if you walked through our neighborhood and spoke to my neighbors or myself, maybe you’d get a more accurate idea of what we’re like than what you get just driving by.
I just listened to a marching band circle my block. It was awesome, people came out of their houses to listen, some joined up and walked with the band. Looks like they stopped in the parking lot of that ‘joke’ community center John Kiernan mentioned. Again, if you drive by it, I guess you don’t get a good impression of what goes on there.
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