At tense meeting about proposed Callowhill improvement district, request for a restart fails

It was hot inside the hearing on the proposed Callowhill Business Improvement District on Tuesday.

Hot temperature — the air-conditioning was malfunctioning on a 90-degree day — and hot tempers, as neighbors argued about the BID process and whether non-English-speaking property owners had been sufficiently included in discussions.

The improvement district, which promises to clean streets and add greening to empty lots and street lighting through a tax on property owners, is planned for an area generally from Vine Street to Spring Garden Street, and the Rail Park to Broad Street. Its proposed board comprises business owners, including Craig Grossman, a general partner in Arts & Crafts Holdings, a developer in the neighborhood that’s purchased more than 20 buildings in the last four years.

Sarah Yeung, a former employee at the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp., which has proposed its own BID that would extend from the Callowhill area south to Cherry Street and east to Eighth, described the meeting atmosphere as one of anger and hostility toward those who oppose the Callowhill proposal.

“There are people who would want to live in this community, but they can no longer afford to live here," Yeung said to the packed room of about 100 people. She asked the group to pause all action on the BID and start over.

Sarah McEneaney, president of the Callowhill Neighborhood Association and an artist who has lived and worked in Callowhill for 40 years, said there was “frustration” on both sides.

As a proponent of the BID, she said, she is sympathetic to the Chinatown North community, which thinks the Callowhill group didn’t do enough to include people who speak limited English — although an interpreter was available at the meeting, and in the past, PCDC rebuffed Callowhill’s request for help.

“But the Callowhill folks are saying, 'Why are they so negative toward us and calling us gentrifiers and outsiders?" McEneaney asked. “The people behind Arts & Crafts are not outsiders, but people who live in Philadelphia who have helped the neighborhood by providing commercial and office space, not luxury condos.”

When it was his time to speak, James Morton, an African American photographer who owns a condo at the Beaux Arts Lofts at 12th and Callowhill Streets, stirred up the crowd with rhetoric about “gentrification” and “white economic imperialism.”

“I can’t vote,” Morton said after the meeting. “Only the condo association boards can vote. You have 84 condo owners in the building, but all they had to do was convince the half a dozen people on the condo board to go along with it.”

In his statement, Philip Browdeis, owner of a condo on Buttonwood Street, said: “If this municipal authority goes forward, it will be a win for the rule by a cartel of real estate developers and a loss for representative democracy."

Property owners and condominium associations have 45 days after Thursday’s meeting to write letters to oppose the BID, which puts the deadline at Aug. 9, said McEneaney. If more than one-third object in writing, the BID won’t go forward.

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A letter the PCDC sent to the Callowhill group Friday, asking to postpone the discussion and work together on developing a new BID proposal, will not be taken up.

“We were already too far along in the process,” McEneaney said. “We changed the boundaries to not include the PCDC office and the tower behind it because they didn’t want to be a part of that. Frankly, it was disrespectful to ask us to stop now."

Community members bemoaned that many people impacted by the BID don’t understand the process. Yue Wu, a community planner at PCDC, gave the predominantly white crowd data on the neighborhood’s diversity in terms of race, culture, and income. “I wanted them to think about who was not there,” she said later.

Based on a 2017 census, the neighborhood is 56 percent white, 23 percent Asian, and 8.5 percent African American, she said. About 30 percent of the total population speaks a language other than English and almost half cannot speak English well. She also said that about 22 percent of households in Chinatown North and Callowhill live on less than $30,000 a year.

“Imagine that you are a non-English speaker living on less than $30,000 a year,” she told the group. “You mostly likely do not have internet access, and thus cannot access the survey and the translation, which are all only online. You do not understand the English notice on the BID, which means you wouldn’t even know there were community meetings held."

In addition, Wu said in an interview later, “there is a culture in China where people tend not to participate in civic meetings, and don’t want to stand out and speak up.”

At this point, McEneaney said, the Chinatown North community should continue with its own BID. As she stood outside her building at 11th Street and Ridge Avenue on Wednesday, McEneaney said the Callowhill BID is needed “because I’m looking at two mattresses on the empty lot next door right now.”

The mattresses were dumped about two weeks ago, she said, after a garage had been torn down a month ago.

“If we can have two BIDS working side by side, that would be great,” McEneaney said.

Kevin Dow, executive director of the Friends of the Rail Park, said he believes the BID would be beneficial to the entire community, but tensions around such improvement districts are to be expected.

“It’s natural and, I think, appropriate tension that needs to take place so all parties — all groups of people and organizations — can be heard and their issues resolved in a balanced way,” Dow said.

“I think the community, as a whole, is going to speak, and I will see what the outcome is going to be. Whatever the outcome is, we will support it.”