A $32 million makeover helped stabilize Hope Park. Could it be a model for Kensington as a whole?

Three winters ago, bonfires burned day and night in Hope Park.

A homeless encampment with dozens of residents sprawled across the half-acre green space a few blocks west of Kensington Avenue. Drug-fueled shootings and open-air dealing engulfed the street. Neighbors felt besieged by chaos.

“People wouldn’t even come out they houses,” said Guillermo Garcia, 52, who has lived next to the park for three decades.

Like many other Kensington residents, Garcia witnessed the opioid crisis push homelessness and addiction onto his doorstep, and as the pandemic raged the neighborhood seemed to be breaking.

Today, thanks to a $32 million public and private investment over the last two years, Hope Park is finally living up to its name.

An ongoing revitalization effort has converted a long-vacant textile mill into a 48-unit affordable-housing complex, provided emergency home repairs to 17 struggling homeowners, and cleaned up nearly a dozen vacant lots once piled with trash and abandoned cars.

At the residents’ request, both the lots — and most of Hope Park itself — have been fenced off to the wider public. And only neighbors hold the keys.

Garcia said crime has plummeted as a result of the comprehensive investment. An Inquirer analysis of police data shows that, within a roughly two-minute walk of Hope Park, reports of violent incidents fell in the six months after the mill development opened. Between August 2023 and February 2024, violent crimes dropped 36% compared with the same period in 2021, while property crime decreased 28% in that time frame.

While Hope Park is far from utopian, Impact Services, the community development nonprofit that led the revitalization effort, said it could provide a model for Mayor Cherelle L. Parker as she maps her plan to shut down Kensington’s infamous open-air drug market and stabilize larger swaths of the neighborhood.

» READ MORE: How Kensington Avenue’s open-air drug market went international — and the city’s fight to take back the neighborhood

The key, according to Impact’s CEO, Casey O’Donnell, was rooting change in a landmark redevelopment project while improving the quality of life nearby, with residents such as Garcia guiding the way.

“I’m not saying it’s Pastorius Park in Chestnut Hill,” O’Donnell said, “but Hope Park is dramatically changed, and that’s because it’s resident-driven and grounded with an anchor project. This is what happens when people are working together and there are substantial resources.”

Lawmakers are already negotiating how much more the city can invest in Kensington’s public spaces, including the much larger McPherson Square. It’s there, on the grounds of a Greek Revival library, where open drug use and overdoses have for years been commonplace.

Parker has proposed that the city spend more than $7 million to clean up parks and libraries across the city, with a portion of that funding earmarked to safely dispose of syringes in McPherson. Other improvements to the library are already underway, and members of City Council wrangled millions more in funding to remake the building and clean the park that surrounds it.

Whether such an investment could transform that troubled park remains a subject of debate — and could hinge on other nearby investments.

“Nothing gets done overnight,” Garcia said. “For other communities in this situation, all it takes is to have a little bit of patience — patience and money.”

Impact obtained the mill after Downs Carpet Co. fled the city in 1981, and while it was repurposed afterward as an office space, O’Donnell said, the 140,000-square-foot building had sat vacant since 2009.

The blueprint for Hope Park’s makeover dates to 2016. Seeing people openly using drugs and sleeping on an old ramp next to the mill, Garcia called O’Donnell and urged him to put the factory to work.

Construction broke ground in 2021 after Impact secured state and private funding. Last summer, the nonprofit began leasing the affordable units with vaulting ceilings, skyline views, and modern amenities. Units are leased to tenants who make 20% to 60% of the area median income, for as low as $300 a month. The restoration has brought dozens of families to the community — but that was only part one of the plan.

At the same time, Impact worked with local politicians and philanthropies to clean and green the surrounding area. The Neubauer Family Foundation contributed $750,000 to spruce up parks, paint murals, and provide home repairs.

With aid in hand, Garcia went door to door identifying long-term homeowners who needed help.

In this swatch of Kensington, 39% of homes are owner-occupied, with more than half of the residents living in deep poverty. The destitution that Garcia saw behind the front door of the homes broke his heart.

Families of up to nine people live in some two-bedroom rowhouses without functional roofs or floors.

“Their roof collapses, and they can’t fix that,” he said. “So they put up tarps, and just have the water run down through the tarp and out the back door. Some people, you go into their houses, and you see the basement right through the floor. As a human being, it hurts to see people living like that.”

Garcia jokes that neighbors now call him as the “mayor,” but he emphasizes that all he did was connect people to the available resources. The difference has been palpable.

“Everybody loves it,” Garcia said. “They see the changes in the last few years.”

Former 7th District Councilmember Maria Quiñones Sánchez, a Democrat, helped secure fencing around Hope Park. Restricting public space was a bittersweet trade-off, she said, but one that had become necessary in so many parts of Kensington.

“There’s a lot of debate among the community members, and some people get upset,” she said. “But if [the park] is not staffed, it’s very, very hard, and you could lose it really quick.”

As in other pockets of Kensington, the Hope Park area has seen drug traffic ebb and flow over the years, as police enforcement strategies shift and drug traffic moves around the corner.

A police cruiser now sits watch on the corner of Hope Park. A few blocks away, high-intensity drug traffic prevails.

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Work also remains to be done. Impact still needs to secure $1 million to finish building a gymnasium in the mill building. The nonprofit has struggled to find a tenant for the ground-floor commercial space, after residents rejected the idea of a methadone clinic.

But the hope is that the investments around Hope Park will build a bridge with other targeted areas in Kensington to come, creating greater stability.

“This is a billion dollar drug market, I don’t think we’re fooling ourselves,” said Dan Berkowitz, chief strategy officer for the the Neubauer Family Foundation. “But we can look at these pockets of progress and scale up over time, block to block.”

Each of Kensington’s parks has received $100,000 from opioid settlement dollars to spend on improvements chosen by community members. Opioid settlement funds have also been dedicated for 400 more home repairs in the 19134 zip code, up to $5,000 per project.

But that’s a pittance given the extent of the issues facing public space in Kensington.

City Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, who represents parts of Kensington and has led the effort to legislate changes in the neighborhood, said that the city has committed $8.5 million to renovate the library, but that the final cost could exceed $20 million. In addition, Lozada said, the city secured $1 million in federal grant support and has applied for more money through state grants.

Some construction on the library is already underway as part of the city’s Rebuild initiative, which was established under former Mayor Jim Kenney and aimed to remake dilapidated public spaces across the city. Rebuild spokesperson Joy Huertas said the work is largely repairs, including replacing the outside of the existing dome and restoring some of the masonry.

» READ MORE: As overdoses mount, a life-or-death deja vu at McPherson Square

A larger restoration is a longer-term proposition, and one of Lozada’s predecessors, Quiñones Sánchez, said she didn’t support it. She said that library officials did not have a long-term staffing and safety plan, and that she preferred to spend the millions of dollars available on securing the park itself and making it safe for people to live and work there.

“This is not about buildings; this is about people,” Quiñones Sánchez said.

But Lozada said she sees great potential in McPherson and negotiated this spring for additional renovations. As Parker’s administration sought approval from Council for funding its own priorities, Lozada asked Finance Director Rob Dubow to publicly commit to set aside money for improvements at McPherson Library through a planned bond issuance in June. He did so Wednesday.

The upgrades, Huertas said, could include the building’s mechanical and plumbing systems, the facade, and interior rooms. A community engagement and design process could begin by this fall.

Lozada said the transformation at Hope Park has been inspiring to watch, but cautioned that fencing off McPherson isn’t viable.

People who live near the park have said “overwhelmingly” that they want it to appear accessible, she said.

“Hope Park is an example of the possibilities when community residents come together and take over their spaces,” Lozada said. “If there’s an investment by the city [in McPherson], if there’s support poured into that space, and if we engage community residents to be a part of the cleanup process, imagine how that looks.”