How speculators fueled a nightmare for Kensington residents — and could soon cash in

When Lauren Bruce moved to Hart Lane, in February 2023, she was ready to embrace her new neighborhood. She and her partner shared a vision of starting a community garden on nearby vacant lots.

Instead, the couple found themselves in an all-out Kensington turf war.

For them, the front line was their front steps, where nearly every day they tried to chase off drug dealers hustling bags of fentanyl. The dealers would tell them defiantly, “This is a drug corner” — and a few times tagged the couple’s car with graffiti, or smeared it with ketchup and mustard.

But ground zero sat just 100 feet away.

Neighbors knew it as “Triple X,” a fenced-in compound that encompassed two vacant lots and an empty storefront that once housed an adult bookstore and alleged prostitution front, with a fading “XXX” sign above the door. A real-estate speculator, Adam Ehrlich, had bought the empty building in 2020, adding it to a portfolio of more than 125 properties in Kensington, and close to 800 citywide.

Dealers set up tables in the lots outside, as if for a farmer’s market, to sell illicit narcotics. They even pitched tents that their dozens of daily customers could rent for $5 to get high in private.

“It was the kind of place that could only happen in Kensington,” Bruce said.

One day last year, she confronted Ehrlich about the chaos.

His reply, Bruce said, echoed what the drug dealers on the block often told her: Kensington is a rough neighborhood. If they couldn’t handle it, they should leave.

“It’s a rough neighborhood because you’re making it that way,” Bruce, 40, shot back.

City leaders have sought solutions to Kensington’s narcotics crisis either through public health measures or policing. But, as the situation at Triple X demonstrates, stabilizing the neighborhood also will require a reckoning with predatory and negligent real-estate practices. Absentee landlords and real estate speculators such as Ehrlich have fueled Kensington’s degradation for decades, often with little intervention from City Hall.

» READ MORE: Police patrols flood Kensington as part of the city's plan to shut down drug markets

Now, even as residents root for Mayor Cherelle L. Parker to succeed in shutting down the area’s notorious drug market, some fear a perverse plot twist: Cleaning up Kensington could pave the way for surging development and soaring property values — leaving the same speculators who enabled the disorder and disrepair poised to cash in.

The stretch of Kensington south of Lehigh Avenue has demonstrated how rapidly redevelopment can remake a neighborhood: There, the Fishtown boom has pushed north to Lehigh, where luxury townhomes now fetch more than $500,000.

But upper Kensington — a neighborhood of defunct textile mills and modest rowhouses of roughly one square mile running from Lehigh Avenue north to Tioga Street — has seen fewer major developments. Some ambitious factory-to-loft conversions and self-storage bunkers have been completed. But many developers are deterred by the concentrated gun violence, deep poverty, and high vacancy rate.

» READ MORE: Chaos and crime followed Kensington encampment clearing

Even so, upper Kensington has undergone a transformation, but a less visible one: from a neighborhood of homeowners to one increasingly owned by investors. More than half of single-family home buyers there from 2020 to 2022 were corporate entities, buying more than 700 properties, according to Reinvestment Fund data. That’s compared with about a quarter of purchases citywide.

Bulk buyers such as Ehrlich — just in the last decade — have amassed thousands of rowhouses, vacant lots, storefronts, and warehouses. Corporate owners with at least 20 parcels now hold about one in five properties in upper Kensington, an Inquirer analysis found.

Some of those properties, such as the Triple X, have had outsized impact on their surrounding communities, attracting crime, drug sales, and gun violence.

On one residential block of Hart Lane, a burned-out rowhouse became a haven for drug sales. Neighbors, who saw people climbing into the charred and collapsing shell, called the police and city Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) for years. It was eventually demolished — leaving an overgrown vacant lot that attracted more of the same.

Not far away is a former Catholic church that was once notorious as a shooting gallery — and, three months ago, the site of a horrific death. After what neighbors see as years of neglecting the property, the building’s longtime owner recently listed the building for sale, for more than four times what it paid 10 years ago.

And then there are the many run-of-the-mill drug houses — places where dealers stash narcotics or conduct sales, or where users can stay the night or stop in to get high — that have tightened dealers’ grip on upper Kensington.

» READ MORE: Drug deaths and overdoses plague Philly jails, where many are denied drug treatment

Deborah Dangerfield, who lives near Bruce on a block of Hart Lane that’s seen 20 shootings since 2019, said such properties enable the violence.

“There are four houses that I can think of that are drug houses on the block,” she said. “The owners would abandon these houses and people would just move in.”

Clearing the dealers off the corner — or hassling people in addiction by forcing them to move, as the city has done in recent months — won’t have lasting impact without problem properties also being addressed, she said.

Since 2019, the city has hit more than 1,000 of upper Kensington’s roughly 12,500 properties with five or more code violations, sealed more than 800, and cleaned more than 2,500 vacant lots. But city lawyers have taken only about 200 owners in Kensington’s 19134 zip code to Common Pleas Court to force them to fix the code violations.

And city properties are part of the problem. More than 200 vacant properties owned by the city or the Philadelphia Land Bank are among Kensington’s sources of blight. Three such lots near Triple X on Hart Lane, alongside another lot owned by Ehrlich, have become magnets for drug sales and tent encampments. Neighbors were forced to raise money to fence off the lots last year.

In June, one debris-strewn Land Bank-owned lot on the 3200 block of Hartville Street in June caught fire — forcing neighbors to evacuate. A spokesperson said the Land Bank, whose staff inspects the properties, was unaware of the fire until The Inquirer asked about it in July. Officials are now investigating, the spokesperson said.

» READ MORE: The Philadelphia Land Bank is a mess. What is the city's plan to fix it?

Bridget Collins-Greenwald, who heads L&I’s new Quality of Life Division, said the agency will step up enforcement in problem corridors across the city that have been identified by City Council members. For the first time, code inspectors will patrol local beats — spotting problem properties rather than waiting for 311 complaints to roll in. The city, on average, is sealing problem properties more quickly, she said — within 10 days, down from 35.

“We believe we’re catching a lot of these things before they’re even being reported to us,” she said.

L&I also recently ran a program to educate businesses along Kensington Avenue about code requirements, and teamed up with police on sweeps in Kensington, where workers towed cars, cleaned lots, and sealed abandoned houses.

But plans to target landlords whose properties cause repeated problems are still being developed.

Some residents say that the city needs to hold owners to account, in addition to boarding up properties, which all too often are pried open the next day to become home to a new set of squatters.

“We were just out there!” an exasperated city official told Dangerfield when she called to report another break-in.

Ehrlich acknowledged buying Triple X with an eye to speculation.

The 48-year-old Center City resident, who does business as Good Bet Trading, has become a familiar, and controversial, presence in Kensington.

A former stock trader and jewelry merchant, he moved into real estate as a professional sheriff sale buyer in the 2000s. He said his strategy is to buy properties no one else wants, hold them until they appreciate, and avoid paying taxes and fees until he’s ready to sell. Development, he said, is not for him.

Properties in Kensington fit the bill: Land is inexpensive. Taxes are low. And he doesn’t have a maintenance staff. It’s cheaper to ignore violations for trash or weeds, he said — shifting the burden to the city to clean up his properties and send him the bill.

His properties in Kensington alone have racked up some 500 code violations since 2014.

Ehrlich described himself as both an opportunist and philanthropist. He recounted going to McDonald’s, buying 50 items on the $1 menu, and handing out McChickens or burgers to people on Kensington Avenue.

He said he took the time to ask people about their lives and tried to help them connect with their families or treatment.

“I’ve always considered myself a problem solver,” he said. “If you have 100 people in a room trying to think of something, I won’t guarantee that what I come up with is the best, but there is a very high likelihood that I will come up with something nobody else has come up with.”

He paid just $66,100 for Triple X building and two adjacent vacant lots. Soon afterward — attracted by the brightly painted mural on one wall and the allure of the building’s seedy history — he came up with an unorthodox approach to some of the misery he encountered on Kensington’s streets.

“I had these buildings and they’re warm and they’re dry,” he said. “How in good conscience do I not let people who are particularly at risk come in?”

Within months, Ehrlich acknowledged, the complex was overrun by drug activity.

He went to the police, and in August 2022, they sent officers and city workers to clear the lots at Triple X. But by the next day, the drug sales were booming once again.

“This place was a public safety concern for every civic, friends group and resident in the neighborhood,” said Bill McKinney, executive director of the New Kensington Community Development Corp. “It was the most egregious operation on the Avenue.”

For Jaymie, a neighbor living within eyeshot of Triple X, it was a daily nuisance. She had been homeless in Kensington, clawed her way out of opioid addiction, and stayed in the neighborhood as a renter. By May 2023, she was five years sober. But, she said, Triple X was also a source of temptation. One day, amid a personal crisis, she walked down the street and went inside.

Jaymie, who asked that her last name not be used because she fears being fired from her job over her drug history, was terrified of the xylazine infiltrating the drug supply, which can cause huge open sores. But in the organized drug market at Triple X, one dealer assured her his product was xylazine-free.

So she bought some. Then, she went back — every day, for months.

Jaymie saw little to distinguish the dealers from the property owner. Both, she said, were “cashing in on other people’s misery.”

By the time Ehrlich started buying properties in Kensington about 10 years ago, the former manufacturing hub was in deep decline, its commercial corridor under the Market-Frankford El a ghost town.

But for those looking to invest in real estate on the cheap, it presented an opportunity.

New York investors were starting to take notice. Some compared the ailing postindustrial neighborhood to parts of Brooklyn in the 1980s — undervalued, close to transit, and primed for gentrification.

Paul Marcus, who runs affordable housing and lending activities for Impact Community Development Corp., a Kensington nonprofit, called it “a gold rush kind of attitude.”

“People looked at what was going on in Fishtown and felt, like, ‘OK, the natural progression is up north into Kensington.’”

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Over the last decade, nearly a third of the 68 buildings bigger than 20,000 square feet in upper Kensington changed hands.

That rise in investor purchases is squeezing out some would-be homebuyers. It has also degraded the rental housing stock, said Emily Dowdall, policy director of the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit lender in Philadelphia.

In her analysis of investor purchases, the “vast majority” showed no subsequent permits or rental licenses — meaning that the owners aren’t rehabbing the buildings, or legally renting them.

“We think in some cases investors realized they can actually raise rents without providing higher-quality housing,” she said.

One bulk owner, composed of assorted LLCs linked to two local men, John Ross Jr. and Evan Graham, accounts for 221 properties, more than 1,200 complaints from the public, and 1,500 L&I violations over the last decade.

Many of their rentals are licensed, and among the listings are crisply renovated units. Asked about the hundreds of complaints, Graham said managing Kensington rentals is challenging.

“Case in point, I got a call this morning from somebody that a tenant who was evicted before is squatting in another vacant place of ours. They break in,” Graham said. “It’s a tough area.”

Ross didn’t return calls.

Meanwhile, neighborhood leaders have watched with anxiety as portfolios of dozens of single-family homes are marketed for sale, because such portfolios can then be flipped in bulk to out-of-town investors, or bundled into complex financial instruments.

Almost one in five properties in upper Kensington is owned by someone using an out-of-town mailing address, an Inquirer analysis found.

For those investors, $50,000 for a property in Kensington may be pocket change. For neighbors, that same property can become a source of daily agony.

Joan Dansette said that after Triple X became a drug market, she took long detours to avoid walking past it with her three children.

But there was another nuisance property she couldn’t avoid: a vacant, fire-scarred rowhouse across the street from her home.

“People started going in and out, and eventually the whole side of the house started collapsing,” she said. With its missing windows, it was easily accessible and attracted drug dealers and users who created mayhem on her residential block.

She contacted the police repeatedly, she said. And her landlord even printed huge “STOP SELLING DRUGS HERE” signs to post around the eyesore.

Finally, in 2022, the city condemned the property and demolished it.

The owners, Abduvakhov Alimbaev and Hamza Sumrain, sued the city over the demolition. Alimbaev said they had been in the process of stabilizing the building, with plans to renovate and rent it out, when the city razed it and sent them a $20,000 demolition bill.

High weeds there continue to attract trash, Dansette said, and provide cover to stash drugs or weapons.

Alimbaev said he won’t rebuild until the area improves.

“Money talks,” he said.

Not long after Ehrlich bought Triple X, he said, a frail woman asked him whether she could sit in a chair, just inside the doorway. He said she’d been beaten up and robbed, so he let her stay.

Soon, others came: a sex worker, who coordinated visits by mobile wound-care vans; an artist, who added to the building’s mural; and a woman whom Ehrlich described as a “street healer.” One resident, Mary Beth, said Ehrlich helped her work toward getting clean.

“If somebody needed stuff, they knew that if they went to Triple X, there were people who could help in case of emergency,” Ehrlich said. “It didn’t mean, ‘Please bring your drama here.’”

But the drama was inevitable.

The boundaries he set, such as barring drug dealers, didn’t work. Mary Beth said many drug users have sold a bag or two at some point to survive.

“Where do you draw the line? If I have some friends who are homeless and really need a safe place, how do we go through and pick?” she said.

As drug dealers took over Triple X, Ehrlich said, he was afraid to confront them, fearing they might be armed.

Neighbors had little sympathy.

“It was totally disgusting and ridiculous,” said Ashley Aviles, who felt unsafe going to work at her auto tag shop, Perfect Touch, next door. She said she lost track of all the complaints she made to authorities.

On top of that, Ehrlich dumped chickens there. They frequently escaped, or were found dead, according to six eyewitnesses.

Ehrlich defended the birds as “emotional support animals” for the community.

Then, in August 2022, the problems at Triple X escalated: A man shot and killed a person inside a nearby corner store on Kensington Avenue, then fled into the storefront of the former adult book store.

To Aviles, the chronic chaos next door was infuriating.

“This is happening all over Kensington,” she said.

The century-old Ascension of Our Lord Church — a soaring stone structure once known as the Cathedral of Kensington — looms large over Westmoreland Street. It was one of the largest Catholic parishes in the city, and many neighbors attended its grade school.

But by 2012, its congregation was dwindling, and needed repairs pushed $3 million. In 2014, the archdiocese sold the registered historic building to New Phila Investment LLC, run by an accountant named Kim Ling, for $800,000.

For neighbors, it’s been a terror ever since.

In 2017, after an Inquirer column described it as a long-standing shooting gallery, the city and owners both pledged to clean it up.

The property manager George Groves recently said it took 30 Dumpsters to haul out the trash from the chapel. But after the cleanout, New Phila Investments stopped paying him.

“There was a lot of things they could have done with the church,” Groves said. “But Mr. Ling didn’t want to.”

» READ MORE: From Cathedral of Kensington to heroin shooting gallery

In 2020, Ling’s company tried to cash out. He inked a lease-to-purchase deal with a New York investor worth $1.8 million — a 125% return. But after the property was vandalized, resulting in $264,000 in damage, the investor backed out. As owner and investor fought it out in court over who was responsible for adequately insuring the property, it once again sat vacant.

“Neighbors are pretty outraged and sad at the state of it,” said Shane Claiborne, an evangelical activist and author who lives two blocks away. “I think the owners should be fined every day and every week they let it deteriorate.”

The city has issued New Phila Investment more than 90 code violations, and the company has made some repairs. Other violations remain. The city could sue the owners to force them to either fix the violations or pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines — but has not done so.

At about nightfall on May 13, police said, a 37-year-old Philadelphia man believed to be high on narcotics entered the shuttered cathedral, and climbed up into the bell tower as officers pursued him.

Police called it a barricade situation — and ended up negotiating with him in the tower for an hour.

Then, to the horror of onlookers, he jumped to his death.

The shell of the church and its traumatic events there have cast a long shadow over the block.

“It’s like a horror movie in there,” said block captain Jeremy Chen, 35, who stewards a nearby community garden. “If a church shut down in other neighborhoods, you would never see it get to this point.”

Ling, of New Phila Investments, said the building is under contract to be sold.

He heard about the death — but rejected any responsibility.

“Even though it was a very secure building,” he said, “anybody can get in.”

The woman who plans to buy the full-block complex, a South Philadelphia-based singer named Connie McKendrick, said her plans include a day-care center, community center, and sports facilities.

Neighbors have been impressed seeing her working on the property. But she declined to share detailed plans. City records show that no permits have been issued for the property.

As the mayhem at Triple X engulfed their block, Bruce and her partner, Tony Bolante, considered moving away.

But they stuck around, inspired by longtime residents, such as their next-door neighbor, Linda Mottolo, 56, who has lived on Hart Lane since the early 1990s.

Day after day, Mottolo said, she called the police. She reported Ehrlich’s properties to L&I, urging the city to take action. She confronted him while he was releasing chickens in a nearby lot. She got her church, the nearby Rock Ministries, to lobby city officials and organize neighbors to shut down Triple X for good.

“I’ll never give up on Kensington,” Mottolo said. “It’s where I live, and I love it here, and I don’t like what’s going on.”

But Triple X’s days were numbered. The August 2022 incident in which the gunman fled into the former storefront, had made shutting down the complex a city priority.

The next day, L&I sealed the building — and, according to Ehrlich, trapped a woman inside. The electricity to the building was cut off, he said. And he was hit with a stack of code violations.

He spent months making repairs, he said. But the complex was still a drug hotspot in May 2023, when Jaymie started visiting.

That July, the city sued Ehrlich, filing an emergency petition to demolish what it said was an unsafe structure and a public nuisance.

Bruce went to City Hall with a few other neighbors in September to show support for the planned demolition. She was appalled by Ehrlich’s defense — that the Triple X amounted to affordable housing for artists. She works in public health, and her partner, Bolante, is a theater artist.

“Adam could literally create affordable housing for artists,” she said. “But he doesn’t do that.”

In October, the city knocked down Triple X.

To Jaymie, it coincided with a return to sobriety. She stopped using not long after and is now seven months clean.

To Aviles, who runs the business next door, “It was the most triumphant day ever.”

“But,” she added, “you shut that nuisance down and there’s always the next spot. They find another vacant building, another vacant lot. … It never ends.”

Indeed, the next spot may be another Ehrlich property.

He declined to say how many Kensington properties he’s allowed people to stay in, but within months of Triple X’s demise, a group of people moved into an 11,600-square-foot warehouse he bought last year near McPherson Square.

Neighbor Glory Domenech, 57, said trash and needles have piled up outside. Dealers come and go all day long, and she can smell raw sewage.

“I’m scared for my kids,” Domenech said, in Spanish. “I don’t want them to see that.”

Police and building inspectors visited Ehrlich’s property several times, court records show, and one morning in April issued 19 violations.

The city has yet to take him to court.

Staff writer Michelle Myers contributed to this article.