A new use for industrial sites: Industry

Philadelphia's old industrial buildings, like those in many cities in recent decades, have enjoyed a renaissance, as anything but industrial buildings.

What were breweries, clothing mills, tire plants, and electronics factories have been turned into hip apartments and condominiums, airy office buildings, and upscale restaurants.

That's if they weren't bulldozed entirely.

Now comes a movement to reverse that trend, as Philadelphia economic-development advocates hope to revive the city's manufacturing muscle, in part through the national push for more energy independence and the jobs to make that a reality.

The Community Design Collaborative, a volunteer group that promotes revitalization of older, urban neighborhoods, is joining the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. (PIDC) on an 18-month initiative to improve job opportunities and restore underused industrial buildings and land to what they call "a competitive market standing."

Put more simply: "Let's focus on industrial for industrial for a little bit," said Elizabeth K. Miller, executive director of the collaborative.

Acknowledging that the task is complicated - including the need to secure financing for renovation, bring very old buildings up to code, and clean up environmental offenses - Miller said the time could not be more opportune.

"It just feels like a perfect storm," she said. "Jobs and the green economy: It's the perfect nexus."

Add to that, Miller said, local, state, and national support for "the idea that urban areas are good," and that roughly 20 percent of the city is zoned industrial.

"I think Philadelphia has the best chance of any city" to pull off an industrial renewal, she said. "Philadelphia has it in its bones."

With most open tracts of industrial-zoned land on the city's periphery already spoken for, largely for use as industrial parks, the Infill Philadelphia initiative will focus much of its work, as its name implies, on neighborhoods dotted with factories or vacant sites where plants once stood.

Soon, gauging how many sites there are, and where, will be more than guesswork.

PIDC, with the city Planning Commission and Commerce Department, has spent the last year taking inventory of Philadelphia's industrial sites as part of a comprehensive study on how to improve employment and development opportunities at them.

The resulting Industrial Market and Land Use Strategy will be released in the fall, said Thomas J. Dalfo, vice president of real estate services at PIDC.