New Temple student housing stirs a renaissance west of Broad Street

Students returning to Temple University for the fall semester heard the clatter of construction echoing through the North Philadelphia neighborhood just west of campus.

They saw crews putting finishing touches on new and rehabbed rowhouses, and a profusion of signs beckoning from windows and walls. "Apartment for Rent." "Luxury 2 & 3 Bedroom Apartments." "Student Housing, Newly Constructed, Must Rent."

But what they might not have recognized was a renaissance in the works, though they themselves are the force driving it. A long-blighted swath of about a quarter of a square mile is being reinvented, however frenetically, by dozens of developers. The largely poor and black neighborhood is being infused with thousands of diverse, mostly middle-class, youths. And it is all occurring at a pace that, in Philadelphia, feels supersonic.

"There are not a ton of examples" of renewal progressing "that quickly," said Ira Goldstein, a policy director at the nonprofit Reinvestment Fund, which supports urban revitalization.

He cited Northern Liberties - about a mile southeast of the campus - as "probably the nearest place that over the last few years has changed as dramatically."

West of Temple, the transformative boom in student housing has happened more by default than design.

During the last decade, as the university shed its commuter-school image and courted out-of-town applicants, enrollment on the main campus - undergraduate, graduate, law, and medical - swelled by almost half, from nearly 20,000 to more than 29,000. The five residence halls couldn't absorb the surge, and in 2004 the administration decided that going forward, only freshmen and sophomores could live on campus.

Today, about 5,000 students occupy the dorms. As many rent in the surrounding community.

"The strategy was that the private market would provide the housing" for the ousted upperclassmen, said Kenneth Lawrence Jr., senior vice president for government, community and public affairs.

That assumption was spot-on.

Lured by an abundance of barren lots and a guaranteed clientele, an estimated 45 developers have worked on at least 600 mostly bite-size pieces of the neighborhood, from 15th Street west to 18th Street and Susquehanna Avenue south to Girard Avenue.