Abandoned buildings and vacant space in U.S. cities is nothing new. In fact, these problems have plagued cities across the U.S. for decades. In the wake of the housing crash, however, some urban initiatives have gotten creative: Painting boarded up windows and doors to blend in with other buildings in the area. But Philadelphia is taking a hard line on cracking down on property negligent owners.
A window and doors ordinance established in Philadelphia in 2011 prohibits buildings from having the hallmark of vacancy — plywood covering windows and doors. Property owners with boarded-up openings are fined $300 per day, per window or door. In turn, the ordinance has generated $2.2 million more in transfer tax receipts and Philadelphia has increased home values throughout the city by $74 million, the Los Angeles Times reports.
City officials use software used by the IRS to track down owners to take them to Blight Court, which was established along with the ordinance. The new policy even allows the city to attach liens to a property owner’s other property, which incentivizes owners to solve the problem quickly.
As a result, property prices have shot up 31 percent in the last four years. That’s in sharp contrast to the meager 1 percent rise in similar areas, according to a study by Ira Goldstein of the Reinvestment Fund, a community development financial institution.
Rebecca Swanson, who directs the city’s vacant building strategy, said the City of Brotherly Love had already spent millions in demolition to tear down abandon properties, to no avail. Instead, officials decided to take preemptive action by fining owners for “blighting influences.” “That was the whole point, to catch them early, cite them for doors and windows, and hopefully that incentivizes the owner to come out of the woodwork and do something,” Swanson said.
Philadelphia real estate lawyer Richard Vanderslice agreed the ordinance is making a difference. Vanderslice represents many of the landlords, and although they’re griping about the fines, many end up spending more money to develop property.
“They say, ‘How do I fight this?’ and I say, ‘Fix it. It’s going to cost you more to fight it, and by the way, why not just replace the door, rent it out and make some money from it?’ And sometimes a light bulb goes off,” he said.
The new code is working. Inspectors have probed 13,000 vacant properties and cited 9,000 of them for being in violation of city code. Property tax collection has increased in the areas investigated and the city is receiving more permit and licensing fees as building owners are starting to pay more attention, Swanson said. Owners are tearing down dilapidated property or selling it to developers rather than paying the fines. Philadelphia, which has lost more than a half million people since its peak of 2 million residents, has seen a slight uptick to 1.5 million in recent years.
As more cities cut back on budgets and look for new ways to revitalize blighted areas, Philly’s example reveals that sometimes all it takes is a little incentive.
Tag: philadelphia
Could 3-D Printing Help Find A Cure For Cancer?
Imagine if you had a cancerous tumor, and your doctor could determine the best course of treatment by printing a three-dimensional (3-D) replica of the mass. You’d probably sign up immediately, right?
Thanks to researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia this could soon be a possibility.
Dr. Wei Sun and his staff have discovered new research on expediting the process of testing cancer drugs through the use of 3-D printers. The technology means doctors can print a living tumor (or a mixture of cancerous and healthy biomaterial) at such high resolution that the cells can be examined with extreme precision, according to Fast Company.
Typically, the drawn-out process requires testing drugs on cancer cells in a Petri dish, then on 3-D tumors in animals and — with a comprehensive record of trials — eventually on humans. But this process is far from ideal. Why? First off, what works in two-dimensional form may not work in 3-D. Not to mention that what works on animals may not always work on humans. Formulas can fail when switching test subjects, which is why developing cancer drugs can be such a costly venture, according to Sun.
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“Doctors want to be able to print tissue, to make organ on the cheap,” Dr. Sun said. “This kind of technology is what will make that happen. In 10 years, every lab and hospital will have a 3-D printing machine that can print living cells.”
By using 3-D printing technology, doctors can speed up the process of drug development but also potentially use it to personalize cancer treatment. The accuracy to print out multi-shaped tumors of different sizes means that a doctor can determine what drugs would work the best by simulating it with the printed version.
With cancer being such a costly and widespread disease, Sun’s venture has the potential to revolutionize treatment and save countless lives.
This Generous Photographer Makes Low-Income Families Smile
Many of us parents have enough photos of our kids to paper our walls five times over. But for low-income families, having professional portraits taken of their children typically is not even an option. So that’s where Sheila Hudson comes in.
While volunteering at Abington Hospital (located in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia), Hudson, a photographer, realized these families might lack of pictures. “Since photography is kind of a hobby of mine, I thought these parents would probably appreciate having no-cost portraits done of their babies,” she told Ukee Washington of CBS Philly.
So Hudson set up a portrait session at the Montgomery County’s Nurse-Family Partnership, an organization that works with first-time moms, visiting them when they are pregnant until their children are two years old, providing mentorship and parenting education. She calls her photography project “Giving Smiles.” With each session, parents leave with $200 worth of prints, a framed portrait, and digital picture files. “We’re trying to promote healthy moms and families,” Susan Vukovich of the Nurse-Family Partnership told Washington. “Photos of the baby are a nice family memento and help to reinforce that bond.”
Hudson spends about $40 per session on equipment and supplies and in order to fund her work, she accepts donations to sponsor one, two, or three “smiles.” Hudson also partners with the Maternity Care Coalition to reach low-income parents like Stephanie Major, whose nine-month-old Marcellus enjoyed a recent photo sessions. “We’ll be able to remember him forever at this age, which is so fun, and it’s going so fast already,” Major said.
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Can a New Approach to Treating Vets Keep Them Off the Streets for Good?
This week the Department of Veterans Affairs opened a new residential treatment center in San Diego, designed to help veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who are in danger of slipping into homelessness. The Aspire Center has rooms for 34 men and 6 women, and is unique in its focus on only veterans from these two wars. Directors of the Aspire Center hope that grouping together veterans of similar ages who’ve had similar experiences will produce better results.
The Aspire Center’s 28 staff members will offer vets therapy for PTSD, treatment for substance abuse, and occupational counseling. These types of services proved to be life-saving for Kris Warren, an Iraq Marine veteran who sought help from the VA in Los Angeles and after counseling was able to reunite with his family. Warren will be on staff as a social services assistant at The Aspire Center. “I know what it’s like to walk up those stairs, prideful, and ask for help,” he told Tony Perry of the Los Angeles Times.
The VA plans to open four more such residential facilities over the next two years in Atlanta, Denver, Philadelphia, and West Palm Beach, Fla. They will serve veterans of all ages, but if studies prove an advantage of grouping veterans with similar experiences together, the VA may expand the San Diego approach in the future. An estimated 286 veterans in San Diego are homeless or at risk for becoming homeless, and VA officials will be watching that number and the veterans who stay at The Aspire Center closely to determine if this approach can make a difference. So will Kris Warren. “Where they go, I’ll go,” he told Perry.
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How All These Snowstorms Could Make for Better Roads and Cities
Public planners studying street traffic patterns have long known that the wider the street, the more likely drivers are to speed and drive recklessly. This winter, many of them are tweeting photos of the patterns cars have left in the snow, revealing spaces where sidewalks could be widened, making it easier for pedestrians to cross the street and enhancing driver safety. The patterns are called “sneckdowns”—a combination of the words “snowy” and “neckdowns,” curb extensions that can calm traffic.
The piles of snow are keeping drivers from attempting aggressive passing maneuvers, just as wider sidewalks would if they were built. Planners in favor of these curb extensions point to the photos to show that drivers aren’t using these swaths of street anyway, so why not widen the sidewalk there? In other words, these annoying snowstorms are creating a free way to study traffic patterns to guide future street planning.
Philadelphia has already implemented this idea, widening sidewalks based on snow patterns in 2011. Prema Gupta, the director of planning for Philly’s University City District, told Angie Schmitt of Streetsblog USA that snow pattern photos “quickly made the case that there’s right-sizing to do here. For us it was just a really compelling way of showing there was way too much street and not nearly enough place for people.” So these relentless snowstorms that have made much of the country difficult to traverse this winter just might help everyone’s commute become easier in the future.
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This Father-Daughter Duo Ingeniously Solved a Major Problem at Marathons
If you’ve ever stuck around at the end of the marathon, the race route looks like a graveyard of discarded hoodies, hats, gloves and long-sleeve shirts. It’s not unusual for anyone who runs for 26.2 miles under the beating sun to shed some layers, but if the owners don’t come back for their clothes, it’s a big problem. When Michael Resnic and his 9-year-old daughter Madeline noticed this at the 2007 Philadelphia marathon, they came up with something simple yet brilliant—they collected the discarded clothes and donated them to a homeless shelter.
Inspired by their experience, the father-daughter team started their Philly-based nonprofit called Clothes-Pin (Clothes for People in Need) and have since shown up at 12 to 15 races a year, including ones in Washington D.C., Atlantic City, Baltimore, Bethlehem, Pa. and San Francisco.
According to the Clothes-Pin site, the Resnics and their team of volunteers have collected more than 100,000 discarded items including hats, gloves, hoodies, sweatpants and shirts, and thousands of pairs of sneakers. Now 16 and a high school sophomore, Madi recently told MNN, “It’s not like I’m someone special. I’m just like anyone else who saw something and decided to do something about it. Everyone has that power.”
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This Clinic Is Saving Immigrants’ Lives, No Questions Asked
Being an undocumented immigrant nearly cost Mery Martinez her life. Martinez, 38, was recently diagnosed with leukemia, but because she lacked legal status — and health insurance — she was unable to find consistent treatment to fight the disease. That is, until she relocated from New York to Philadelphia and visited Puentes de Salud, a nonprofit clinic run by volunteer doctors, nurses and med school students. Puentas de Salud, or “bridges of healing”, was created in 2006 for the sole purpose of providing health care to the area’s low-income, undocumented, and uninsured Latino community, Dr. Steve Larson, one of the organization’s cofounders, told the New York Times. The group also pinpoints social determinants of health in the community and focuses on prevention as much as treatment. “It’s not about me writing prescriptions,” Dr. Larson says. “This is an underground health system.”
So far, Puentes de Salud, which operates only two evenings a week, has treated about 3,300 patients. Initial visits to the clinic cost $20. Each follow-up visit costs $10. Since the Affordable Care Act doesn’t provide assistance to illegal immigrants, and this group is generally ineligible for Medicaid, people like Martinez are often forced to either forego medical care or take advantage of inexpensive or free clinics like Puentes de Salud. With a growing need for such operations, Dr. Larson is seeking funding to open a 7,000-square-foot clinic devoted to medical services and health education, so even more immigrants like Martinez can take control of their care.
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When People Said Minorities Weren’t Interested in Science, This Guy Proved Them Wrong
When physicist and engineer Stephen Cox first began encouraging minority students to study science and technology more than two decades ago, he faced plenty of doubters. “Many of the people just refused to believe that people of color can be involved in science and technology at this level,” Cox told Matt Erikson of Drexel University. But Cox proved them wrong through fifteen years of work as the director of the Greater Philadelphia Region Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP), an organization that brings together the resources of nine Philadelphia-area universities to provide outreach, mentoring, and encouragement for African American, Latino, and Native American students to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
The National Science Foundation-funded LSAMP has plenty to boast about, helping students earn 12,000 degrees in STEM fields since 1994, with 350 those being PhDs. According to LSAMP’s website, students nurtured by the organization earn more than 500 bachelor’s degrees each year. Cox believes part of the secret is recruiting students early in high school and encouraging them to take lab classes during their freshman year. LSAMP also focuses on introducing minority students to careers they might never have heard of. For his tireless work, Cox will receive the College-Level Promotion of Education award at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards in Washington, D.C. next month. Cox told Erikson, “The award thing is not as important to me. My reward is seeing students walk across the stage, dispelling any previous misconceptions.”
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She Went From Hero to Homeless. Now This Simple Government Program Is Helping Her Get Her Life on Track
Even heroes need help sometimes. When Philadelphia’s Megan Bergbauer finished her service in the Marine Corps, she discovered that her skills as a field radio operator didn’t translate to the civilian job market. With no way to afford a home, the young mother was forced to sleep in her car or stay in shelters until the Veteran’s Administration Medical Center in West Philadelphia came to the rescue, part of its “housing first” approach to helping homeless vets.
Researchers at the National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans, a government think tank in Philadelphia, have been studying how to fight homelessness among veterans, and here’s what they’ve found: providing vets with a place to live before connecting them with caseworkers, psychological counselors and employment advisers yields the best results. Some vets need assistance for the long haul, while others are able to bounce back on their feet after only a few months of rent assistance. But housing is key because it provides stability while vets get back on their feet. The VA will help 80,000 veterans nationwide with “rapid rehousing” this year, and 60,000 more will receive rental subsidies.
For Bergbauer, getting a VA rental subsidy made all the difference. She now lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her daughter and newborn son, and plans to resume studying forensic science at Drexel University in the future. “I definitely needed the help,” she told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I would have been in deeper trouble.”
This Clean Energy Program Is Investing in Much More Than Just the Environment
Students at YouthBuild Charter in Philadelphia are going green — and they’re taking other schools with them. Through the Philadelphia Solar Schools Initiative (PSSI), students are not only learning the basics of business and entrepreneurship in the green-energy industry, they’re simultaneously putting their new skills to use by helping to develop, design and install nearly 5,000 solar panels on 20 local schools starting in 2014. This multipronged program, which is the brainchild of renewable-energy companies Clean Currents and Solar States, will make green energy available to local schools at no upfront cost, in exchange for the schools’ business. The solar panels will provide about 30% of each school’s energy use, while the remaining 70% will be sourced through Clean Currents’ wind power.
The PSSI goes beyond a clean-energy deal. By providing the charter students, many of whom have dropped out of traditional high schools, vocational training in the area of sustainable energy, the program prepares them for “green collar” careers, while at the same time allowing them to help their communities.