Good Neighbors

A Southwest Center City neighborhood doesn't like the PHA's plans.

by Tom Dreisbach

Neal Santos ALL THAT REMAINS: Richard Gliniak stands outside the burnt shell of a PHA house that went up in flames last August, killing an 11-year-old girl.

[ nimbyisms ]

It was just before 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 13, 2009, when Richard Gliniak, 48, working in his third-floor home office on 19th and Carpenter streets, first heard the loud crashing noises.

"It must be kids," he thought.

Then came the screams. He dashed to the window, and saw streams of flame gush from the windows of the house next door. Neighbors flooded the streets and watched as residents of the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) units jumped out of the burning house and into the backyard and street. Later, firefighters would remove the scorched, lifeless body of an 11-year-old girl.

For the neighborhood, this trauma felt like a brutal reprise: Just two years earlier, on the same block, another fire destroyed another PHA-owned house. Another young girl, just 5 years old, died in that fire.

In this section of Southwest Center City, this block largely defines the image of public housing in Philadelphia. The fires were the result of accidents, the fire marshal determined, not structural deficiencies. But the PHA has left the burnt-out houses untouched, unrenovated and only partially boarded up. When neighbors look at the block, they feel abandoned.

"These kids are as good as dead and forgotten to PHA," says Lisa Parsley, who lives about a half-mile away, near 23rd and St. Albans streets, "but not to those of us who lived through these fires and worry about the next one."

Now, the area — 20th and Carpenter streets — is the planned site of a brand-new, federal stimulus-funded PHA development: two attached four-apartment buildings on a currently vacant lot that would house some of Philadelphia's disabled poor. Advocates say there are some 59,000 poor, disabled Philadelphians who need this type of housing. This is one of 25 such projects the PHA proposes to spread across the city; everywhere else, PHA designers and representatives received broad-based neighborhood cooperation.

Here, not so much. In this neighborhood, where the previous fires' damage is still visible, the PHA's proposal poured salt into an already gaping wound. The blowback caught the Authority completely off-guard. In fact, PHA officials were so confident that the project would be well-received that, in October 2009, they obtained building permits — two months before alerting the community about the new development. But on Dec. 16, when PHA officials met with the local neighborhood organization, the South of South Neighborhood Association (SOSNA), their plan was unanimously, and vehemently, rejected by the 62 people present.

"It's a one-size-fits-all design," says George Leon, a member of SOSNA's zoning committee. "And it doesn't fit our neighborhood."

Some of their complaints were superficial — the proposed building had two stories, not three; it had a brick-and-stucco façade, not just brick; it had front-facing balconies, unlike any of the other homes in the area. They also voiced concerns about the lack of parking, which they said could create a traffic hazard. But for many of SOSNA's constituents, the meeting served more as a referendum on years of perceived PHA mismanagement. They spoke of the Carpenter Street fires, unresponsiveness from PHA's police department and lowered property values. They argued that PHA should either renovate or sell their abandoned and blighted properties before moving on to new projects. City Council President Anna Verna, who has represented the area for more than 30 years, later declared her opposition.

As they exited the meeting, PHA representatives were shell-shocked. "It was enlightening, to say the least," says Michael Johns, the project's lead architect.

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PHA representatives made several concessions to SOSNA: They changed the façade to just brick, and added three parking spaces. But, the Authority maintains, the neighborhood's demands were insatiable. "It felt like nothing we could do was going to accommodate the desires of the residents," Johns says.

So, the PHA doubled down. Before a Dec. 23 hearing in front of the Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA), the Authority called on Liberty Resources, a Philadelphia nonprofit that advocates on behalf of the disabled. The nonprofit turned out nearly 30 employees and advocates, many of them wheelchair-bound, to back the PHA plan at the ZBA hearing. No one from Liberty Resources testified, but their message was clear: SOSNA and its allies were the only obstacle to affordable housing for the disabled, and they were only doing it because they didn't want the poor and disabled in their backyard.

"No one ever admits that they're NIMBYs," says Liberty Resources CEO Thomas Earle, using the common acronym for "not in my backyard."

The project's critics take umbrage with that characterization. SOSNA's Leon says he supports affordable housing, and contends that the PHA rebuffed efforts toward cooperation: "It's really a question of who's being obstructionist," he says.

Council President Verna added in a Dec. 22 letter to the ZBA, "I have no tolerance for opposition to housing for the frail and elderly based on a NIMBY ... syndrome."

But NIMBY arguments aside, no one disputes that the neighborhood harbors a lingering distrust of the PHA. "If you live in a neighborhood, and you've seen two PHA houses burn, I completely get why that's your impression of PHA," says PHA spokesman Kirk Dorn. The authority, he adds, is seeking bids to rehab the two burnt-out houses, and construction could begin within six months. He wishes residents would look at PHA success stories, pointing to MLK Plaza, a housing project in Hawthorne.

"We're good neighbors," Dorn says. Once the house is built, he says, "Residents are going to be wondering why they raised complaints in the first place."

And it will, most likely, be built. On Jan. 26, the ZBA approved the PHA's proposal, though SOSNA has vowed to appeal.

Richard Gliniak has been PHA's neighbor for nine years. After last August's fire, smoke damage made the upper floors of his house uninhabitable. In the fire's aftermath, PHA representatives never contacted Gliniak. Instead, he received two letters from the Authority's insurance companies denying his claims. For the last five months, during renovations, he's slept on a futon in his kitchen. When he stands in his backyard, Gliniak can see the burned-out shells of those PHA houses. The site of the new PHA development is just half a block away. If the house ultimately gets constructed, he says, it's doomed to fail.

"Once it's built," Gliniak says, "it'll just be forgotten."

(thomas.dreisbach@citypaper.net)