BUILDERS PROFIT. THEN NEIGHBORS PAY.

Each year, 50 Philly rowhouses are compromised or destroyed by reckless construction next door. That damage is concentrated in formerly redlined communities — with the greatest impact on those who can least afford it.

Crumbling City is an Inquirer series about how Philadelphia’s surging housing redevelopment has led to construction safety issues in a city that has the nation’s most rowhouses and some of the oldest housing stock.

On what turned out to be the last morning in her family home on Ellsworth Street, Olivia Flamer had trouble leaving for work: The front door was stuck in its frame.

Her husband, George, a retired trash collector, put his shoulder to it and, after jostling it open, walked Olivia to the bus stop.

On the way back, he heard a horrible groan. It was coming from their three-story rowhouse, where his teenage grandson was sleeping.

“I heard the cracking getting louder,” he’d tell TV news cameras that day, “and then the whole wall just collapsed.”

The Flamers had owned the rowhouse in Point Breeze for 41 years, buying it with a $2,200 mortgage in 1971, when white flight left behind abundant urban housing at rock-bottom prices. It collapsed on Sept. 21, 2012.

A decade later, they sometimes still feel as if they’re in free fall, living in grim rental units or crashing with family. They have no expectation that they will ever be homeowners again.

The Flamers’ story is one that has been repeated in gentrifying neighborhoods across Philadelphia where construction has swept through an aging rowhouse city with sometimes disastrous results.

Though it’s the nation’s poorest big city, Philadelphia has an abundance of affordable rowhouses that have supported a higher homeownership rate than other Northeastern cities. But that rate has been declining for 30 years as prices became inflated and investor money flooded into gentrifying neighborhoods.

Today, those who held on through the decades of white flight are the ones most harmed by reckless redevelopment, an Inquirer investigation has found. Because the city’s rowhouses were built to stand together, one decaying vacant house or one careless excavation or demolition can threaten neighboring houses up and down the row.

The episodes most closely covered in the media have affected white residents – but the impact across communities of color has gone underreported. Using data drawn from city records and the most recent U.S. Census, an Inquirer analysis found that:

• Residents of majority-Black neighborhoods are five times more likely than those in mostly white areas to live in a rowhouse adjoining an unsafe building.

• They are four times more likely to live next to a derelict, unsafe building, such as one with a collapsing roof or fractured walls.

• They are five times more likely to live next to a construction site where the city has identified unsafe practices.

A review of city records identified about 300 occupied rowhouses that L&I deemed unsafe or imminently dangerous during neighboring construction since 2018.

Maps

Where ‘construction destruction’ has impacted a city of rowhouses

In Philly, 50 rowhouses a year were rendered unsafe during neighboring construction. Of those, 81% were in formerly redlined areas, impacting residents who stuck through decades of disinvestment.

“The fact that we have this aging housing stock of attached homes means those homes are at particular risk of being undermined,” said Emily Dowdall, who has studied gentrification and housing affordability for the Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia-based financial institution. “That’s particularly true in areas that have undergone disinvestment, where properties have undergone deferred maintenance and where people may have trouble accessing the equity to do repairs to their homes.”

And the rise in construction on rowhouse lots, including infill on vacant land and teardowns to make way for small apartment buildings, has added to that threat.

In interviews and lawsuits, residents describe the toll of construction next door: Cracks opened along walls and ceilings; mice, roaches and raccoons found their way in; and leaks nurtured mold and mildew.

In other cases, the structural damage was severe and sudden: Residents’ facades separated, their foundations cracked, or parts of their homes collapsed.

Many don’t have the resources to fix those problems. Even if they have insurance — which thousands can’t access because they don’t have clear title — it may exclude construction damage.

There are no public resources to assist residents facing that kind of damage, said Jill Roberts, director of advocacy for Clarifi, a nonprofit financial counseling agency that administers a city program that offers affordable loans capped at $50,000. The city’s Basic Systems Repair Program, which offers grants to low-income homeowners, is even more limited, offering up to $18,000 for emergency repairs.

“If you have a house that has been damaged structurally, $50,000 is going to just touch it,” she said. “That kind of repair is really, really expensive … sometimes more than the maximum loan amount folks can be approved for.”

Some residents have no choice but to abandon their homes and find a new place to live in a city where half of households are considered “cost-burdened” by unaffordable rents.

Others, said Dowdall, end up selling — accelerating a trend of turnover from homeowners to investors that, she found, is happening twice as fast in Black neighborhoods as in white ones.

“If someone’s house is starting to fail and they can’t access capital for the repairs, they’re primed for folks who come in and say we buy for cash,” she said. “Even if the offer is a small fraction of what the home is worth, if you’re living in a house without running water, or the roof has a hole in it, you’ll seriously consider that offer.”

In the Flamers’ case, the house had belonged to Olivia’s grandmother and had served as the family’s foothold in middle-class life — even if the block was not an easy place to live.

The area had been a battleground in the deadly 1918 South Philly race riots, sparked by white outrage after blockbusting real-estate agents began using fear tactics to buy homes at a discount and sell to Black homebuyers at inflated prices. In the 1930s, it was labeled “hazardous” to lenders on red-lined federal mortgage maps, based substantially on the race and ethnicity of residents.

By the 2000s, Point Breeze was deeply segregated: 79% of households were Black, and 35% of residents were living in poverty. It was also besieged by blight. The Flamer house had a vacant lot on one side and a crumbling, abandoned house on the other.

But the house itself remained a safe spot for kids to hang out all summer and a landing place for family members in need of shelter.

It was also a reserve of equity that could be tapped in response to emergencies or opportunities.

It was, at least twice, the key to freedom — securing bonds for bail as high as $150,000 that otherwise would have resulted in lengthy jail stays while someone awaited trial.

By 2011, the neighborhood was poised to transform: Over the next decade, the median household income there would nearly double. The percentage of homeowners who were Black would fall from 73% to 43%. As the result of a building boom, from 2012 to 2019, one in 10 new construction permits in Philadelphia was in Point Breeze.

That trend arrived on Ellsworth Street when a wholesaler bought the abandoned rowhouse adjoining the Flamers’ at sheriff’s sale for $2,400 and flipped it to AGA Developers for $49,000. AGA demolished it to rebuild.

The work, the Flamers said, destabilized their house. “It left my house just drifting sideways,” said Olivia, now 71.

She called City Council members, and the Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I). “I was a committeewoman for 31 years,” she said. None of those calls yielded any help.

By the time the house next door was sold in May 2012 for $323,000, the Flamers were dealing with their insurance company about needed repairs.

Then came the September morning when Olivia’s grandson Rimeek was startled awake.

“I just woke up and seen the whole house collapsing. My first thought was, ‘Where is my grandmother?’ I seen a hole in the side of the house and I jumped out the hole,” he said.

The Flamers had no money to hire an engineer and try to prove that the work next door caused their century-old home to collapse. Former AGA partner Frank Mazzio said “the collapse had nothing to do with the construction,” noting L&I issued no violations.

Of the damaged homes identified by The Inquirer, 80% were in neighborhoods once labeled “hazardous” to creditors on federal redlining maps, which explicitly warned lenders away from neighborhoods with Black and immigrant populations. Many of those areas endured decades of disinvestment as a result of those discriminatory practices.

This problem intersects with an array of other disparities in a deeply segregated city where communities of color face higher rates of incarceration, deeper poverty, worse educational outcomes, elevated risk of crime victimization, and greater health challenges. And those disadvantages compound one another — the way mold and pest infestations in neighborhoods with deteriorated housing stock lead to elevated rates of childhood asthma hospitalizations, which in turn can lead to school absenteeism with all its correlations to dropout rates, criminal-legal system involvement and unemployment.

The Flamers are all too familiar with how those disparities can interact — how the financial ruination of losing their home rippled across every facet of their lives.

When the house collapsed, their adult son Marvin, who had recently started a janitorial company, was not able to help them get back on their feet. He learned of the crisis when he saw his parents on the evening news, while he was in jail awaiting trial in the slaying of his cousin, Allen Moment Jr.

Marvin and Moment had grown up together in the Ellsworth Street house.

“To me, they were like brothers,” said Rimeek, who is Marvin’s nephew. He said he was at home in Point Breeze, playing video games with Marvin, when Moment was shot. Olivia was downstairs when someone called with the news.

But that alibi was not presented when Marvin was tried in 2014, alongside his nephew Nafeast.

The case was peppered with claims of coercion centering on a homicide detective, James Pitts, who is now facing perjury charges related to a wrongful conviction. But there was extensive circumstantial evidence, and a murdered prosecution witness. Detectives also said Moment had implicated his cousins on his deathbed.

The lawyer Olivia had hired planned to use evidence in the police file to argue a case of mistaken identity.

“I paid him up until the house fell in 2012,” Olivia said. “I could do a lot then.”

But after the collapse, she said, she couldn’t pay anymore. The lawyer ended up dropping the case before trial.

A neighborhood under assault

For years, Migdalia Mendez’s 19th-century rowhouse on West Hewson Street in Norris Square was the block’s lone survivor.

Mendez had arrived in the late 1980s just as others were fleeing the area with its flourishing open-air drug markets and as the city was undertaking a policy of demolishing abandoned houses to shut down shooting galleries. But for Mendez, a $500 rowhouse of her own was worth the hours of cleaning trash off the block. She fenced off the vacant lots on both sides of her house, carving tranquil yards out of the blight.

But now that developers have turned her North Philadelphia neighborhood into a bustling construction zone, Mendez is the one bearing the cost.

The transformation of her block started when one of her side yard lots went up for sheriff’s sale. Mendez couldn’t match the winning $4,500 bid. The buyer flipped the lot for $26,000 to a wholesaler, who sold it for $75,000. Then, in 2018, machinery rumbled in and construction started.

Mendez, 64, said in Spanish that the fallout was almost immediate: “They actually broke into the exterior wall of my house, and it left a big gaping exposure in the brick.” She discovered new cracks in her basement, in her bedroom, even on the opposite exterior wall, running “all the way from the top to the bottom.”

A city L&I inspector visited, but cited the developer only for construction debris. Mendez contacted a lawyer, but just the retainer was $7,000, she said. “I told him if I had that kind of money I would start fixing my house.”

Today, the house next door is complete, and Mendez’s house is still standing. But she worries that, if construction comes to the lot on the other side of her already-compromised house, it might not withstand further damage.

It’s a rational fear: She’s seen houses buckle and tumble all around her.

Her neighbors around the corner, Michael Gonzalo Moran and Windelin Adorno, propped up their home with wooden bracing after it began to shift and sag a few years ago, during construction next door. They’ve been living in fear it could collapse, though Moran said that, after an Inquirer article in June highlighted their plight, the neighbor did begin making repairs.

A block away, a family had to evacuate their home for four months in 2019 after a contractor working next door fractured the wall of their rental.

And two blocks north, yet another building was going up that year next door to the home of Mendez’s 87-year-old aunt Emilia Correa. Correa’s grandson, Octavio Rodriguez, who also lived on the block, watched excavators work in the rain, their machinery sticking in the mud, next to Correa’s rowhouse. The workers didn’t have proper permits, according to violation notices.

Correa’s walls began to crack, the front steps slumped, and the doors jammed. Then, Rodriguez said, “The house opened up all of a sudden.” Correa’s partially collapsed house had to be demolished.

“This was the only thing my grandmother knew,” said Rodriguez, 53. “She was planning to die there.”

By some measures, the construction boom in Norris Square is a city success story.

The neighborhood has seen median incomes increase by at least 80% since 2011 — driven by an influx of high-income households. A decade ago, just six households earned more than $150,000. Today, there are 430.

In just the last five years, more than 326 new construction permits were granted in Norris Square — meaning there was new construction on about one in 15 parcels in the neighborhood.

But by other measures, the quality of life there remains poor. L&I has issued violations at more than 660 addresses since 2019 for unsafe or open vacant buildings, or for unmaintained, weed- and trash-strewn vacant land — meaning that most residents lived on a block with at least one blighted property. That, in turn, affects public safety, as researchers have found that abandoned houses drive elevated crime levels. Inspectors also fielded more than 900 construction-related complaints in the last five years, and issued construction violations at more than 300 properties.

Other pockets of rapid development across the city have endured similar hardships, The Inquirer found. Communities where the median income has risen by 50% or more over the last decade saw stop-work orders — indicating L&I had found serious safety concerns — issued at three times the citywide average.

Across the city, contractors were cited for unpermitted work at nearly 8,000 properties since 2019 — more than two-thirds of them in communities of color.

Those numbers present an incomplete accounting of construction chaos. City code enforcement, particularly of unpermitted work, is driven by residents’ complaints.

Residents in majority Black and Latino communities made about twice as many 311 complaints as residents in mostly white neighborhoods. But L&I data show that complaints in communities of color were more likely to be founded: L&I issued one violation on average for each complaint in a community of color — compared with one violation for every two complaints in white neighborhoods.

Akira Drake Rodriguez, an assistant professor of urban planning at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, said that indicates a relative reluctance to call unless a concern becomes critical. On the other hand, she said, white residents might be more inclined to use the “tactic of flooding 311” to address hyperlocal construction concerns.

Fierce citizen advocacy around construction damage has been led by such groups as River Wards L+I Coalition, named for the majority-white neighborhoods running from Fishtown along the Delaware River waterfront into South Philadelphia where construction has surged over the last decade. Repeated complaints at least get L&I’s attention: One construction project on Salmon Street, the subject of more than a dozen 311 calls since 2019, was cited 89 times over the last year for not setting up a protected walkway.

“People who are used to using the city for their benefit are going to be more aware of what they can do with 311,” she said, “and have the knowledge of what illegal construction looks like.”

In recent years, though, Norris Square, Kensington and neighboring areas have been increasingly impacted, Andria Bibiloni, then working as a lawyer with Philadelphia Legal Assistance, said this summer. But legal aid groups have no funding to handle those cases. (The city recently agreed to fund a pilot Rowhouse Protection Project through Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, but that contract has not yet been finalized.)

For now, legal aid groups help where they can, such as by going to court to help Migdalia Mendez secure title to the remaining empty lot next to her home to prevent further construction damage. Often, Bibiloni said, even preservation advocates “see side yards as just a luxury. But when people lose them, there’s serious risk to their personal property. All of a sudden people have cracks running up the side of their house, and they have no way to recover.”

For homeowners dealing with structural damage, calling L&I can feel like a gamble — because the homeowner’s house might be deemed unsafe along with the neighbor’s.

Some residents have reported positive outcomes: Edward Cardona, who lives in Fishtown, said he faced a crisis this year when workers digging a basement next door undermined his house.

“All of a sudden,” he said, “my house is literally in the air with nothing holding on to it.”

He was grateful that an inspector ordered the contractor to shore up and repair his home.

But more often, advocates say, residents have to sue to get that kind of redress.

That’s what happened to Correa, who had no insurance and a $10,500 demolition bill. She sued both the property owner next door and the contractor, Streamline Commercial Development.

But with lawyers charging $300 an hour, Correa’s grandson urged her to settle quickly. He wants to get out, too, and move to Florida.

Folding his arms, which have his grandparents’ names tattooed across them, Rodriguez looked out in disgust at the vacant lot where the family home once stood.

“They build, they move on, and you’re just stuck with damage,” he said.

Toward ‘a culture of compliance’

In Philadelphia, lawmakers have passed more and more legislation to address this problem. Yet, residents say they are still vulnerable without stronger enforcement and additional resources to hold developers and contractors accountable.

In North Philadelphia, Jacqueline Jones watched with alarm last year as a shell company called A&P Iconnic Estates bought the rowhouse next door and demolished it, leaving her party wall exposed to the elements.

City code since at least 2014 has required anyone demolishing part of a shared-wall structure to apply a permanent covering such as stucco to the exposed wall. But that did not happen. Alisha Curry and Phillip Baxter, listed as A&P Iconnic Estates’ owners on public records, did not respond to calls or a note left at their home.

The city issued A&P a site violation notice, akin to a ticket, which carried a $300 fine. But it has not been paid. Jones, 59, who bought the house seven years ago through Project HOME’s first-time homebuyer program, said she has given up on reaching A&P. But she can’t afford the repairs. She has discovered that she earns too much working nights as a nursing assistant to qualify for a grant — but her credit is too poor to qualify for the city’s loan program.

“It’s about to be winter again,” she said, “and I don’t have the funds to get my house fixed.”

In South Philadelphia, Ronald Lewis, 63, described the nightmare that began in 2021, when the city deemed his home unsafe during construction of a $480,000 three-story rowhouse next door.

“I was afraid that the city was going to take me to court and I would lose my home,” said Lewis, who grew up in the house. “Real-estate folks were approaching me with low-ball offers and telling me my home was going to be demolished anyway, so I should take a deal.”

Lewis was testifying in September regarding a package of state laws that would create an Adjacent Neighbor’s Bill of Rights, a Residential Construction Lemon Law, and more accountability for house flippers.

Experts and advocates say that legislation is among a number of measures that would provide important consumer protections. Other proposed solutions center on more resources dedicated to code-enforcement, stronger accountability for property owners, and increased funding for repairs — paired with innovative thinking to direct resources to those who need the most help.

• Stronger accountability. The city has strengthened laws around construction safety. Now, a question is how well they’re being enforced. L&I, which brings in $66 million in a year but has a budget of only $43 million, has struggled to retain inspectors. Those on staff say there is an urgent need for more inspectors, for stiffer sanctions, and for action to shut down bad actors. A first, necessary step, according to those familiar with L&I data, would be to improve tracking of contractors’ violations, for instance, in order to prevent them from obtaining new permits while old violations remain unresolved.

• Targeted, proactive inspections. In recent years, scores of tenants have been rendered homeless due to building collapses, some due to construction damage, and many more due to neglect and deteriorated conditions. Experts say routine inspections of rental properties on a three- or five-year cycle — as opposed to Philly’s current complaint-driven process — would do more to keep residents safe and to preserve affordable housing.

• Pairing inspections with resources, not just sanctions. Philadelphia already has repair grants and low-interest loan programs, but those who need them can face numerous hurdles. Advocates and experts say inspectors could be armed with the ability to refer low-income homeowners and small landlords to those resources, instead of just issuing fines and violation notices.

• Targeted help for neighbors. This year, Philadelphia began requiring contractors to notify neighbors and assess the impact of any work affecting their properties. But those are first steps, advocates say. They argue that more support for legal aid would help residents exercise those rights and hold developers accountable. Others argue that when developers undertake dangerous work, such as knocking down part of a rowhouse group or digging below an old foundation, they should be required to obtain insurance covering vulnerable adjacent properties.

All of those measures require political will — in a state where a hard-won new funding stream, the Whole Home Repair program, has been tied up for months during budget negotiations. This year’s $34 million budget for emergency repairs is roughly triple the budget from two years ago — yet it still covers about 1% of what the Federal Reserve says are $3.7 billion in repair needs in the Philly region.

And, a years-long staffing crisis at L&I has rendered adding such new responsibilities as routine rental-unit inspections almost unthinkable.

But Dowdall, of the Reinvestment Fund, argues that an infusion of resources into enforcement could pay for itself.

“It’s possible to collect fines from landlords and, over time, if you build a culture of compliance, you’ll have fewer violators. It’s a matter of increasing resources and seeing it as an investment in our housing stock,” she said. “We should be looking at code enforcement as something that can support the preservation of existing naturally affordable housing.”

Far from home

Today, Point Breeze doesn’t look much like the neighborhood that Olivia and George Flamer left behind — except in one regard. It continues to be an epicenter of construction chaos.

The rate of violations there for unsafe, unpermitted or illegal construction since 2019 was the highest of any neighborhood — four times the citywide average rate per 10,000 housing units. Inspectors issued more stop-work orders there than anywhere else. And one in seven homes rendered unsafe during adjacent construction was in Point Breeze.

In the decade since the family was abruptly rendered homeless, they have bounced between relatives’ spare rooms and rented apartments. A $10,500 bill from the city for its demolition of their collapsed house added to their debts. They lost the lot itself at sheriff’s sale in 2014.

That same year, their son Marvin went to trial, with a court-appointed defense lawyer.

But the defense was brief and his alibi witnesses, including Olivia and Marvin’s nephew Rimeek, never got to testify.

Olivia, barred from the courtroom because she was a possible witness, was not present when her son was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

Recently, she received some promising news. Marvin received a hearing on new evidence in his case, including testimony from a witness who claimed she’d been coerced and bribed. His four alibi witnesses finally got the chance to testify that Marvin had been home, in the long-vanished Ellsworth Street house, when his cousin was shot. And the lawyer who had to drop the case after the Flamers ran out of money described the defense he never got to present.

But the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is defending the conviction. And by the end of that hearing, Olivia and Marvin were losing faith that his latest, busy court-appointed lawyer was presenting his case adequately — and he asked to have yet another lawyer review it.

Olivia listened, her face creased with exhaustion, for the next court date.

After court, she made the long journey home to the small rowhouse she now rents, in a deeply segregated and impoverished section of Southwest Philadelphia.

“I have nothing,” Olivia said. “They took everything.”