What a contested election for a Fishtown neighborhood group reveals about development in Philly

Elections for the Fishtown Neighbors Association used to be sleepy affairs. To fill out the board, leaders sometimes had to beg candidates to run.

But two years ago, Jon Geeting decided to shake things up. One of the most visible champions of the local urbanist movement — which favors denser housing, better public transit, and less reliance on cars and parking — Geeting organized a miniature get-out-the-vote machine for a roster of chosen candidates dubbed the “Action Slate.”

The slate won handily and elected Geeting chair of the group, one of Philadelphia’s more than 250 registered community organizations (RCOs) meant to voice neighbors’ positions on proposed developments before the city zoning board.

His rise has brought in not just new leadership, but a new, more development-friendly attitude, Geeting’s critics say. It has also brought accusations of conflicts of interest from neighbors who believe Geeting and his allies’ ties to the development community undermine the group’s purpose.

And it has introduced new wrinkles to longstanding debates about the role of community organizations in land use decisions and the city’s process for handling zoning variances.

“FNA was created by its founders to help the residents, not profiteering investors,” said Venise Castañeda Whitaker, a Fishtown activist and staffer for Council President Darrell L. Clarke. (Castañeda said she was speaking for herself, not on behalf of Clarke.) “RCOs in Philly have become the new stomping grounds for investors and developers, using these community organizations as pied pipers to promote their ‘urbanist’ colonizer agenda.”

Geeting’s wife is an executive with OCF Realty, the firm of controversial developer Ori Feibush, and much of the work Geeting does in his day job as a blogger and political organizer is for groups funded in part by development interests.

He strenuously denied that his leadership of the group is compromised by those connections, noting that he and other FNA leaders recuse themselves when potential conflicts of interest arise. And he blamed opposition to him in part on Clarke, who lives near Fishtown and represents part of the neighborhood.

“I actually stayed completely out of the fray on zoning projects because I know I’ve got a target on my back from Venise Whitaker and Council President Clarke’s office on some of that stuff,” Geeting said.

A Clarke spokesperson declined to comment except to reiterate that Whitaker’s activism in Fishtown is not on behalf of the Council president.

Geeting said the zoning disputes that often become lightning rods of controversy in the neighborhood are just a part of what the FNA does, from hosting more community events to raising money for good causes and improving public spaces.

“My goal overall was to make this a more active organization in the neighborhood and try to live up to the potential I see for us to do good here,” he said. “There are people who would like to see us really zero in on zoning and make zoning politics the north star of the organization, and to me that’s just one thing that we do.”

Geeting took issue with the suggestion that the organization had become more development-friendly during his tenure and instead cast it as a change to a more pragmatic approach. The Zoning Board of Adjustment, he noted, approves a vast majority of variances when property owners or developers, for instance, ask for permission to exceed height or density limits in the zoning code.

For Geeting, community organizations’ best opportunity is not to fruitlessly oppose development, but to negotiate with builders to improve projects and address residents’ quality-of-life concerns around such issues as parking or noise.

“The task of an RCO is to try and ameliorate those problems,” Geeting said. “That’s the power that we have. We don’t have the power to turn back the clock and make Frankford Avenue not a commercial corridor.”

Typically, complaints about registered community organizations center on their resistance to development.

Some, such as the Society Hill Civic Association, are seen as tools for shielding wealthy white neighborhoods from projects that threaten to bring in diversity. Others in low-income neighborhoods such as Strawberry Mansion have been criticized as unreasonably antagonistic to development in their efforts to ward off gentrification. And a handful, such as the Southwest Philadelphia District Services, which worked closely with former Councilmember Jannie Blackwell, have been cast as shakedown artists, extracting contributions from developers while endorsing their projects.

It’s less common for a neighborhood group to be accused of being too cozy with development. But it was unavoidable once Geeting took the reins of the Fishtown Neighbors Association.

On his prolific and often combative Twitter account and in his work for the political action committee Philadelphia 3.0, Geeting is a leading antagonist of a local political culture that urbanists decry as NIMBYism, or “not in my backyard.”

“He ran a campaign to get elected to the FNA and there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Matt Ruben, a board member and former president of the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association. “But sometimes in communities there are some folks who find campaigning, if it’s done in an overt way, unsettling.”

Ruben said that although he sometimes disagrees with Geeting, he respects Geeting’s commitment to his beliefs.

“It’s really a difference in a fundamental attitude of: Do you see the community-developer relationship as fundamentally adversarial or fundamentally cooperative?” Ruben said. “If forced to choose one or the other, I would choose the adversarial. ... There are just objective conditions in capitalist real estate and the seeking of profit that give developers and residents an overlapping but different set of interests. That’s just a fact.”

In parts of Philadelphia such as the neighborhoods around University City, disputes over development inevitably take on a racial dynamic, with longtime Black neighborhoods fighting against gentrification fueled by predominantly white newcomers.

But in Fishtown, a historically Irish Catholic enclave inundated over the last 20 years with young urban professionals, the divide is more often a gap between “old Fishtown” and “new Fishtown.” Geeting, a Bethlehem native who moved to the neighborhood in 2016, has come to be a face of the new crowd.

One of the latest fights, over a planned restaurant and store called Burgers and Seltzers by the Philadelphia-based seltzer company Two Robbers, highlights the divide.

Some longtime residents of the area, at Frankford Avenue and Shackamaxon Street, say they are weary of seeing yet another alcohol-serving establishment spring up in an area that has in recent years become overrun by late-night partiers and short on parking.

The project needed a zoning variance, and the FNA’s zoning committee held a meeting in 2021 to determine the stance it would recommend to the Zoning Board of Adjustment. In the past, the committee simply polled Fishtown residents who attended public meetings on proposed projects. But during the pandemic, the committee began meeting virtually, and its stances were determined by votes of the committee members.

Opponents of the proposal seized on the fact that Ian Wilson, who was the zoning committee chair at the time and whose wife was also on the committee, is the property manager for a building developed by Roland Kassis, who is also the developer of the Two Robbers project.

Kassis, who also lives in the building managed by Wilson, declined to comment. Two Robbers did not respond to a request for comment delivered by Kassis.

Wilson and his wife recused themselves, and the committee voted narrowly to oppose the project after hearing from numerous residents who were against it.

But the Zoning Board of Adjustment approved a variance for the Two Robbers Hard Seltzer project anyway, and longtime residents contend that the FNA presented its opposition with an intentional lack of gusto.

A group of neighbors has hired a lawyer and is now pursuing an appeal to overturn the zoning board’s decision. Curt Chinnici and his husband are among the plaintiffs.

A 26-year Fishtown resident, Chinnici said he isn’t opposed to development, but doesn’t believe it’s right that the neighborhood has become “another South Street,” disrupting longtime residents’ quality of life.

“There used to be nothing here, and now everybody wants to be here. It was nice when all the restaurants came in, but now you have all the crappy bars,” he said. “I have the buy-in. I decided to stay here my whole life. What am I supposed to do?”

Wilson, who has since stepped down as zoning chair, said he had no stake in the Two Robbers proposal but recused himself from the vote to avoid creating the appearance of impropriety. Given the intensity of neighbors’ opposition to the project, Wilson said he likely would have voted against it anyway.

“The community was vehemently opposed, and the committee was swayed. Even though it was a reasonable proposal, the committee was swayed to oppose it,” he said. He decried the suggestion that the committee was “somehow in the bag for builders. “ We’re a community-centered organization. I’m a community-centered guy.”

Upset with the Two Robbers episode and other decisions, a group of Fishtown residents opposed to Geeting tried to oust him in the neighborhood association’s November 2021 election.

Geeting and the candidates he endorsed won every seat. But like many things involving the FNA these days, the election process was disputed, and backers of the unsuccessful candidates said Geeting had access to lists of potential voters that they did not.

Geeting denied that accusation, and said the reelection of his slate shows that most Fishtown residents want an organization that will improve the neighborhood by encouraging healthy development.

“Neighbors want us to take a moderate approach on this stuff. There is a lot of support for good businesses coming into the neighborhood,” he said. “We’ve gotten a lot more high-quality business and hospitality places that are opening.”