New grocery store shows progress in $750 million North Philly revival plan, but housing lags

Standing in front of a new supermarket on Ridge Avenue, the first in the neighborhood since the 1960s, Kelvin Jeremiah was practically giggling with excitement.

“Our residents here are deserving of amenities, of access to opportunities that we should be providing right where they live,” Jeremiah, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, told the crowd massed last week for the first day of the new Grocery Outlet supermarket. “You don’t have to go to Center City or over to Broad Street to go to a grocery store. You can walk over. You deserve that.”

The store is the retail cornerstone of PHA’s $750 million revitalization effort in North Philadelphia’s Sharswood neighborhood. The project is a throwback to an era when public housing authorities commanded far more resources and remade whole swaths of America’s cities — for better and worse.

The plan began with the demolition of two old-school public housing towers in 2016, the relocation of hundreds of tenants, and the seizure of 1,300 lots by eminent domain. The ultimate goal is to build and rehabilitate more than 1,200 homes in this long-divested corner of North Philadelphia while rejuvenating the adjacent stretch of Ridge Avenue, where the new shopping center is located.

As Jeremiah and his team take a victory lap after the opening of the Grocery Outlet, it’s worth taking stock of how far the project has come — almost nine years after PHA first announced major changes for the neighborhood.

“By the end of this year, all 1,200 units will either have been completed or under construction,” Jeremiah said. “We’re more than 50% done. … This project has turned out to be a complete blessing, not just for PHA but also for transforming this once forgotten part of the city.”

Not everyone is so sanguine.

Some blocks where PHA and its partners are planning to build hum with activity. A walk down Master Street in the middle of Thursday afternoon revealed as many construction workers as residents.

Sixty housing units closer to Ridge Avenue are completed, half of which will be offered first to families from the Blumberg complex, where 446 households were displaced by the demolition. A refurbished historic public high school now hosts the Vaux Community Resources Center, which offers education, health care, and workforce development services.

But many of the lots that PHA acquired by eminent domain are still empty. The site where the two demolished Blumberg public housing towers stood remains a moonscape, although zoning permits are in place for 38 units of owner-occupied affordable housing.

Just to the west, between Jefferson and Oxford Streets, nonprofit affordable housing developer Pennrose has yet to break ground on more than 200 units. Pennrose hopes to meet with the community and secure permits in the fall, then break ground by year’s end.

By PHA’s estimate, 309 units have been completed, or a fourth of the final goal; 94 are in the remaining Blumberg tower earmarked for seniors, with those who were displaced getting first claim. Besides those rehabbed units, there are 215 new, completed units and 275 under construction.

That means PHA and its partners would have to break ground on more than 600 homes in the next five months to have every unit begun by Jan. 1, 2023, as Jeremiah hopes.

“To have all of it under construction by the end of the year doesn’t seem realistic to me,” said Jenna Collins, a lawyer with Community Legal Services who has followed PHA’s plans in Sharswood closely. “Given all of the challenges for anyone who’s trying to do any kind of construction project right now, I’m surprised he’s that optimistic.”

Jeremiah said PHA faces the same challenges that all developers are struggling with. Supply-chain issues have eased in some quarters of the economy, but many construction materials, including basics like windows and drywall, are still snarled. Rising interest rates, increases in steel and lumber costs, and a shortage of construction workers have taken their toll. The supermarket itself was originally meant to open last winter.

For Collins, delay is particularly painful because of all the families who were moved out of the neighborhood and have first claim on the new units.

“Even if the world had been in perfect shape throughout, this project has been really slow going,” Collins said. “We’re talking about loss of these units, displacement of residents from their communities. I fear we are missing the big picture.”

On the narrow rowhouse blocks of Harlan, Sharswood, and Stewart Streets, where PHA seized a handful of occupied homes along with much vacant land, there are signs of activity. Building materials are piled on one of the lots behind the former Reynolds public elementary school, staging for the beginning of construction. To the south, across the street from Vaux, ground is already broken.

In between the two historic school buildings on Thursday, men from the neighborhood were sitting in lawn chairs under a canopy of trees in a PHA-owned lot. Although all support the new shopping center, they are skeptical of the housing authority’s larger project. They knew people who lived on these blocks, or in the towers, and were moved out to make way for the project. All these years later, they’re not convinced affordable housing is coming.

“Everybody’s gone, they moved them somewhere,” Mikal Scott said. “They bought all of them out. They’ve been gone four or five years. Nobody’s been back in these houses. That invites squatters, the homeless.”

PHA is much further along on the nonresidential aspects of its plan. In addition to the Vaux Community Resources Center and its school, which opened in 2017, PHA unveiled its new headquarters on Ridge Avenue in 2019, moving hundreds of employees out of Center City.

The retail spaces facing the commercial corridor have been hard to fill during the pandemic, Jeremiah said, and the agency now plans to use at least one of them for community-facing services instead of private businesses.

Then there is the supermarket, which wins praise even from skeptics like the men who lost land and friends to eminent domain. (It was also the site of an Occupy PHA encampment in 2019 that ended with the agency agreeing to turn over a handful of vacant houses to the activists.) An urgent care and a Santander Bank are moving into the other retail spaces in the shopping center. Another space is earmarked for Barkley’s BBQ, a popular shop in Strawberry Mansion.

But most of all, Sharswood residents are excited to have the new grocery store with fresh produce and affordable products.

For Ha-zel Davis, the new Grocery Outlet means she can save money on car fare. Before, she shopped at the Fresh Grocer on Broad Street, near Temple University’s campus.

“I would usually walk and take a hack cab back,” said Davis, standing in line with a pint of blackberries and a cantaloupe. “I think it looks really awesome here, though. And I walked here; now I can walk home.”