Spruce Hill Historic District is facing opposition from student housing companies

An effort to designate West Philadelphia’s Spruce Hill neighborhood as a historic district faces serious opposition from the student housing companies that operate in the neighborhood.

David Adelman’s Campus Apartments LLC and Michael Karp’s University City Housing, along with unnamed other property owners, have submitted a letter to the Historical Commission arguing that the historic district effort is illegitimate.

The historic preservationists plan to submit their application in four parts, and the property owners argue that such a fragmentary approval process would be illegal.

“This unprecedented decision to consider the nomination of a proposed historic district in a piecemeal fashion runs contrary to the Philadelphia Code, the commission’s rules and regulations, and fundamental notions of fairness and due process,” wrote Michael V. Phillips, a zoning and land use attorney with the law firm Klehr Harrison, who is representing the property owners.

This corner of University City, just to the west of Penn’s campus, is home to one of the largest collections of Victorian architecture in the country. Preservationists want to create a historical district to make it difficult to demolish the buildings that anchor this unique heritage.

Opposition from student housing providers, who own many of the area’s architecturally notable townhouses, have scuttled two previous efforts.

The Spruce Hill Community Association, which is behind the latest push for a historic district, has sought to divide the approval process for the would-be Spruce Hill Historic District into four sections. They argue that with almost 2,000 properties covered in the new district, the staff of the Historical Commission could be overwhelmed if the whole thing were considered at once. The full district would be the largest considered in over 20 years.

In October 2023, the neighborhood group submitted the southeast quadrant of their would-be district. It includes many of the properties used as student housing. The two companies own 150 properties across the proposed district, and a third are within the southeast quadrant.

Last year, representatives of Spruce Hill Community Association said they were concerned that the student housing companies might seek to demolish some of their older properties to accommodate changes in the market.

Since the pandemic, group houses and shared apartments have become less popular, and studio apartments are in higher demand. New construction, the neighborhood group feared, could better accommodate that demand.

Phillips, the lawyer for the property owners, argues that the real reason the preservationists started with the quadrant that affects his clients most was that they wanted to foil any plans to raze older homes.

“It appears that the nominator’s concern for the administration burden on the PHC staff is merely pretext and that SHCA’s true motivation is to prematurely halt or slow the demolition, alteration or construction of any building or structure within the SE quadrant during the pendency of the commission’s consideration of the nomination,” Phillips wrote in his letter to the Historical Commission.

The companies argue that Spruce Hill Community Association hasn’t prepared the necessary materials to protect all of the properties throughout the proposed district, which means many property owners are still unaware of the larger plans.

They also say their properties are being targeted first for optical reasons.

“I think they chose the southeast quadrant first because the owners are larger commercial landlords as opposed to the more sympathetic, single-family owners in say the northwest quadrant,” said Adelman, CEO of Campus Apartments. “A determination that the southeast quadrant meets the criteria could unfairly prejudge the whole of the district before owners in the other ... quadrants have an opportunity to weigh in.”

Representatives from Spruce Hill declined to comment on the letter. The city’s Law Department also had no comment on Phillips’ legal argument.

The application for the southeast quadrant will be considered by the Historical Commission’s advisory Committee on Historic Designation on Wednesday.

The full commission will then weigh the Historic Designation panel’s advice, possibly as early as the May meeting, and vote on whether to add the southwest quadrant to the city’s Register of Historic Places.