Big Visions, Too Little Foresight

The big dig: a worker with the JPC Group works on clearing a Sprague Street lot. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

NTI is moving along ...slowly.

by Amy L. Webb

Eighteen months into Mayor John Street’s effort to eradicate blight and unsafe streets under his Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, it’s clear that progress has been made. People can walk along entire sections of Broad, Germantown and Lehigh where, in the past, drug lords ruled every corner. Homes along Cecil B. Moore seem inviting now that dangerous overhangs and graffiti have been removed. In South Philly, treacherous lots have been cleared of trash and dilapidated brick shells, enticing developers to build new market-rate housing.

Few would argue that NTI has failed to deliver on its promise to rid the city of decay and stimulate -- at least in theory -- investment in housing and development.

But many -- including City Council members, residents and city planning officials -- say that Street’s broad vision for renewal lacked practical foresight. With more than three years left in NTI’s five-year plan, close to half of the money originally allocated is already gone. The important computer-mapping programs and databases to help track NTI’s progress still aren’t in place. And only a handful of firms so far have signed on to develop new projects on lots demolished and cleaned under NTI.

The question now is how NTI will continue for the next three and a half years. If Katz wins, will the program be obliterated? And if Street retains his office, will the resources left be enough to lure big developers?

The 5000 block of Sprague Street in East Germantown used to be lined with rowhomes bowing out from the center, their windows blown, old rainwater forming dirty pools in shallow crevices along warped flooring. They were unsafe. And they remained in that condition because potential developers would look at that block -- surrounded by even more streets in disrepair and a city with a declining population -- and decide not to take a risk.

"The appeal of a neighborhood is the second most important element in attracting people [to a city]," says Cynthia Bayete, NTI assistant director. "NTI prepares neighborhoods for developers to come in and renovate so that new residents will come in. It’s a pre-development program."

The lots on Sprague Street are some of 5,000 parcels of land the city has acquired for redevelopment, and some of the 7,000 dangerous buildings across the city. During the summer of 2000, more than 200 buildings like those on Sprague collapsed without warning, endangering the lives of nearby residents.

Now, demolition is under way -- as it is elsewhere in East Germantown, Brewerytown, Mantua and along sections of Cecil B. Moore -- though many of the projects are taking longer than expected and ultimately costing more money than originally planned.

Street unveiled NTI in April 2001 and secured financing, in the form of municipal bonds, that June. NTI’s primary source of funding is supposed to come from a $275 million bond initiative.

When a city issues bonds, it is borrowing money from corporate and individual sources. Moody’s Investors Service rates NTI’s bonds at Baa1, which is "neither highly protected nor poorly secured. … [They] lack outstanding investment characteristics and have speculative characteristics as well."

City Council said that NTI could use up to $275 million in bonds over a five-year period. So far, Council has signed off on a total of $189.3 million.

This year, NTI will also use the bulk of a $68 million federal community-development block grant in addition to various other development grants. It is estimated that the total cost of NTI and all of its related programs and services is about $1 billion.

"We are taking a risk, but it’s a calculated risk," says Patricia Smith, NTI director. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If we continue to neglect the neighborhoods to the degree they had been neglected, that will ruin the vitality of the entire city."

Acquiring, demolishing and cleaning a property under NTI isn’t like going to the mall to buy a pair of blue jeans. There’s no price tag hanging off the side. No one stands at a cash register to look at the property, scan it, take money and print out a receipt. The process is complicated, and prices tend to change.

A survey was done -- inspectors walked through sections of the city with clipboards and log sheets -- to determine which lots the city would try to acquire and clean. It was originally estimated that the city would demolish 14,000 buildings, develop 16,000 new housing units, remove garbage and hazardous trees, tow abandoned cars and green several acres of vacant land in five years.

Those numbers have changed. So, too, have the costs. Smith now says that NTI will realistically demolish between 7,000 and 9,000 buildings, which should claim about $140 million of the program’s budget, including greening. Of the properties NTI has acquired, it has demolished 573 buildings in 18 months.

There were between 1,000 and 2,500 properties slated for renovation at a cost of $30 million under the original plan. NTI now plans to renovate 2,000 for the same amount.

The city planned on divvying up demolition work on a geographic basis. But much of the preliminary decision-making on which buildings to demolish and where to green was done before the city had its own geographic information systems specialist, who gathers and analyzes land, aerial photographs and other information to pre-plan big citywide development projects.

Planners assumed that entire strings of buildings could be demolished at once. But a few months into the project, when parcels of land were more closely examined, it became clear that many buildings would have to be demolished by hand, a costlier endeavor undertaken to ensure the safety of nearby residents.

NTI also didn’t have it’s own comprehensive database set up when it first started. Two local companies, Hill International and Gannett Fleming, were hired to set up the initial GIS tracking and databases, but it was never intended for those databases to be permanent. Smith says that it was more important to get the acquisition and demolition under way so that Philly residents could see the results of NTI.

Now, the Redevelopment Authority and the Office of Housing and Community Development -- where those records are kept -- aren’t sure of exactly how many properties have been earmarked for demolition, where they are located and where they are in the process.

"We just don’t have the system up and running yet, which makes things difficult," says Carolyn Brown, assistant director of urban renewal at the RDA. "We’re supposed to be online soon, I’m told."

Hundreds of properties have already been acquired and slated for demolition, but so far only 10 developers have come on board. To be sure, there was only one company interested in doing any kind of major development until NTI began. The process takes time -- but that’s also part of the risk: NTI assumes that if the city prepares neighborhoods, investment and new development will follow.

A lot depends on how the economy is doing. Since employment peaked during 2000, the city has lost 17,300 jobs. People have been leaving, too: There are 1.7 percent fewer Philadelphians now than there were three years ago. Developers may not be willing to invest in a property -- no matter how un-blighted it is -- if people aren’t sticking around to see how NTI turns out.

On the other hand, it is too early in the game to condemn NTI’s future.

To date, 33,000 tons of debris have been removed from the city’s 31,000 vacant lots -- and all of those lots will be re-cleaned if they haven’t been already. The city has taken more than 185,000 abandoned cars off the streets and removed graffiti from 189,394 buildings and signs. NTI has also completed 2,258 units of affordable housing and 2,870 units of public housing.

The ambitious program has garnered international attention. City planners in Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Lexington, Ky., are hoping that Street’s NTI program succeeds and can be used as a model to help their own neighborhoods.

"This is by far the most ambitious initiative to deal with neighborhood blight in a strategic way," says Bruce Katz, who is the urban policy director at the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan economic think tank. "If development is going to happen, it’s going to happen on land assembled for that purpose."

Katz (who is not related to mayoral candidate Sam Katz) also says that the full impact of NTI won’t be realized before the first five years of the program are through. "These sorts of programs don’t take hold as quickly as people would want. NTI is a long-term strategy. Of course there are always issues in the execution and there may be bumps along the road. But [NTI’s] initial theory was right, and it’s one being mimicked already in other cities."

Even Japan is watching to see how NTI succeeds, hoping that similar approaches might be applied in outlying areas of Tokyo. A film crew from NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting station, is in Philly now making a documentary about the decline -- and potential rise -- of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods.

If Street wins the mayoral election next Tuesday, NTI will continue to press ahead on its slow but steady course. And mayoral challenger Sam Katz told City Paper in a recent interview that if he is elected, parts of NTI will continue, depending on the city finances.

For now, City Council has legislated a budget, established an office and approved the acquisition of land. After all, NTI is a process -- a very big, costly process -- that may just be starting to bloom.