Blight

How do you define blight? Tell us of a place in Philadelphia or the surrounding Pennsylvania or New Jersey suburbs where you've seen blight. What needs to be done about it? Send essays of about 150 words by June 3, including a phone number for verification, to Voices/Blight, The Inquirer, Box 41705, Philadelphia, Pa. 19101. Send e-mail to inquirer.letters@phillynews.com or faxes to 215-854-4483. Questions? Call Kevin Ferris, readers' editor, at 215-854-4543.

THE MOST important issue in the mayor's race might be the blight of Philadelphia's enormous inventory of derelict property. This blight has many causes and many effects. Policies that make suburbs more attractive than cities as places to live and work (like wage taxes, mortgage interest deductions and exclusionary zoning), technologies that make those places possible (like cars, cell phones and Wal-Marts), and the preferences that many Americans share and that many others have been taught to value (like the desire to grow grass, avoid black folks and raise children in isolation from influences outside the home)

PREDATORY lenders take advantage of low-income homeowners by offering easy loans for home repair - but at high interest and with hidden costs. A relatively new, but little heralded program supported by city Neighborhood Transformation Initiative money could help change that. About $2 million in NTI money was pumped into the Philadelphia Home Improvement Loan program to buy down interest rates at banks participating in the program. PHIL loans offer up to $25,000 in loans to combat blight and promote home repairs at dirt-cheap interest rates.

Name one of the most influential lobbying groups in Washington. Hint: It despoils the landscape. (It's not the mining lobby.) It managed to turn a federal program to control its excesses into a multi-million-dollar subsidy. (It has nothing to do with military hardware.) It's the outdoor advertising industry - the folks who have dotted America's landscape with thousands of unsightly billboards. The 1965 Highway Beautification Act, designed to limit billboard blight by compensating owners for billboard removal, is a failure.

THE PEOPLE who laid out Francisville two centuries ago didn't care much for the city's plan. So they angled their little village away from Philadelphia's 100-year-old grid and cut their streets to run parallel with and perpendicular to Ridge Avenue. If you turn your head sideways, it's easy to spot it in the middle of the city's checkerboard grid. But you have to take a walk to really see Francisville's off-kilter layout. Narrow, tree-lined streets like Shirley, Vineyard, Francis, and Edwin that don't exist anywhere else in town are contained by the neighborhood's main borders: Corinthian Street and Ridge, Girard and Fairmount avenues.

BISHOP Kermit L. Newkirk is frustrated. From his perch at Harold O. Davis Memorial Baptist Church, in Logan, on the edge of the infamous "Logan Triangle," his view features more than 35 acres of empty lots edged with overgrown weeds, concrete barriers and piles of garbage, chip bags, soda bottles, old tires and sofas. And he's had roughly the same scenery for more than two decades. "This may be the largest blighted area in the city of Philadelphia, and, after 25 years, we're still looking at it," Newkirk said.

The mission was no secret; in fact, parts of the target area already looked like a war zone. Census Tract 175, home of some of the worst urban blight in the city, was besieged yesterday by uniformed workers in the first stage of a massive cleanup effort.

Mayor Street's proposal and Mark Alan Hughes' plan share the same laudable goal of eliminating blight conditions. There is even agreement about the need to streamline and reorganize housing and real-estate functions, and set up a land bank. But demolitions and lot-cleaning are just the back end of the problem of private disinvestment and population loss. If we approach existing building stock as an asset, not a liability, we attract new homeowners and entrepreneurs. Population loss is not a certainty - population is growing in some cities.

Mayor Street, act now. Stop talking about blight and take real steps to end it. I am a leader of Philadelphia Interfaith Action. My fellow PIA leaders and I live and work in the city's "blight zones" - stretches of North and West Philadelphia whose chief physical characteristic is thousands of dark, dangerous and unsightly buildings. The recent massacre of seven people in West Philadelphia was the latest in a long line of violent and criminal acts in these neglected structures.

IHAVE A solution to the blight-removal stalemate between Street and Verna: Evacuate all hard-working, taxpaying, law-abiding, licensed and insured, honest, decent citizens and then call in F-16 airstrikes to eradicate all the things that make this city a bad place to live. After the dust settles, then we can all move back in and "rebuild. " It's working in Afghanistan, so I'm sure it would work here. James J. Dowling Jr. Philadelphia Not so fast, Eddie Ex-Mayor Ed Rendell is attempting to subject the entire state to another Rendell administration.

THESE DAYS I'm feeling a lot like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day. " Back in 1999, the Inquirer ran an op-ed of mine that opened with the line: "The future of Philadelphia rests on our ability to manage decline. " The key point of the op-ed was this: "Coordination - even if we could pull it off - is simply not a strong enough response. We're attempting to coordinate agencies designed for an era of growth and oriented to the obsolete land uses that abandoned properties had 10 or 50 years ago. All these agencies are busy with core missions that have nothing to do with managing the effects of depopulation; vacant land is not their priority.

A proliferation of place-specific apps can help you catch a bus, stop blight, or drop the dime on municipal fraud. Many cities have released "311" apps that help individuals report potholes, illegal dumping, and the like to the proper authorities without a lot of phoning, running around, and filing of forms. There are NYC 311 , Baltimore 311 , Grand Rapids 311 , and so on. Philly311 is a free app for Android and Apple devices. Its maker, PublicStuff, has a roster of apps for municipalities around the country under titles such as Fix It Plano for that North Texas suburb and DigiTally for the good citizens of Tallahassee, Fla. With Philly311, if you spot an eyesore - say, graffiti on a building or a mattress by the roadside - tap the "New Request" icon on the menu screen.

Rats, fleas, and roaches thrive in the city's abandoned, tax-delinquent properties. Often loaded with garbage inside and out, the structures are more prone to fires than occupied buildings. They harbor drug dealers and their stashes. And they soak up precious city resources, such as the taxpayer money ultimately required to demolish the most dangerous of them. Beyond their extensive costs to public health and safety, these properties rob the city of millions in tax dollars that could be used to improve city services and help the drowning School District.

Sam Rappaport's empire of blight once extended clear across Center City's midsection, from the Schuylkill to the Delaware, and beyond. But since his death in 1994, his heirs have shed his holdings, shrinking his domain to an archipelago of surface parking lots and shuttered stores. Some of Rappaport's most notorious architectural victims, such as the Victory and PSFS buildings, have even gone on to lead productive lives again. Much of what does remain of Rappaport's kingdom is now controlled by Richard Basciano, a close friend and business associate who served for a time as executor of his estate.

A new Pennsylvania law allows local governments to take control of blighted properties and cancel tax liens and bank foreclosures so the land can be sold to responsible owners or developers willing to improve hard-luck neighborhoods. Gov. Tom Corbett signed the Land Bank Act late last month to streamline the cumbersome process of returning delinquent properties to tax rolls in towns struggling to boost their tax bases. More than 300,000 vacant properties are scattered across the state, including about 40,000 in Philadelphia.

PHILADELPHIA HAS been awarded a $100,000 grant to address blight and literacy, a national nonprofit organization announced Monday. The organization Cities of Service, funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, helps cities use volunteers to tackle local issues. The grant will be used to support PhillyRising CREATES, which will help volunteers in 10 neighborhoods clean blighted spaces, create murals and hold community activities to revitalize various areas; and Technology Today Tutors, which will help volunteer tutors assist adults in developing literacy and digital skills.

ON A SWELTERING, sunlit summer afternoon, Vincent Kennedy marched through the community garden at the end of his North Philadelphia block, proudly showing off crops that he cares for. "We had corn, but it went fast," Kennedy, 53, said, nimbly stepping around beds of flourishing plants that brighten the corner at 27th and Silver streets. "The only rule of the garden is, you can come get as much as you want, as long as you leave some for the next person. " Kennedy and his neighbors say that their block - historically plagued with drug activity and violence - has gotten better since the PhillyRising Collaborative started work in the neighborhood last fall, targeting the area from 22nd Street west to 27th, and Lehigh Avenue north to Indiana.

Developer Eric Blumenfeld is attempting to buy the derelict Divine Lorraine Hotel either directly from the current owners or at sheriff's sale in the fall, sources familiar with the negotiations say. Blumenfeld, who has been credited with sparking a revival along North Broad Street, has had crews in the building to examine its condition since late July. If negotiations with the owners fail, sources said, Blumenfeld will work with the city and the bank that holds the debt on the Broad Street landmark to acquire it at a sheriff's sale in October.

Cheers to the Nutter administration for clearing some of the bureaucratic impediments that have paralyzed Philadelphia's ability to manage its wealth of properties, much of which is stuck in a hellish cycle of abandonment and blight. Using an interactive database accessible to anyone, a potential property buyer can key in an address, a block, or a neighborhood, find a piece of city-owned property, and start negotiating to buy it. The hope is that transfers of city land to private owners will speed up and help stabilize neighborhoods trying to fight blight.

The 40,000 parcels of vacant, often neglected properties in Philadelphia are a non-stop emergency — and not just because of awful events like the fire at the Buck Hosiery factory that claimed the lives of two firemen. According to a 2010 report from Econsult, these parcels reduce property values citywide by $3.6 billion. City government spends $20 million each year just to "maintain" the 12,000 parcels it owns. (That's the cost of a lot of cops, which, ironically, we need more of, since vacants invite trouble into neighborhoods.)