Non-profit West Powelton Community Council took possession of the lots at 4055 and 4057 Powelton Ave. in the late 1990s, after the properties were owned for several years by City agencies. The community group quickly cleaned up the lots and built a playground on the site, offering a wonderful amenity for a neighborhood that had plenty of open lots but no play areas nearby. We can’t begin to guess how many kids played here over the last couple decades.
Privately owned playgrounds make sense if you own a daycare or a pre-school, but we can’t think of any other examples of community-based non-profits owning playgrounds. With land prices skyrocketing as student housing development has proliferated north of Market Street over the last several years, the group understandably decided to cash out. They listed the properties for sale in 2018 and they were under contract in less than a week, ultimately selling for $500K in early 2019. The Inquirer included this sale in a story earlier this year about how the City has lost out on tens of millions of dollars by selling properties for $1 over the years. At least, compared to many other such transactions, the West Powelton Concerned Community Council did something truly worthwhile with these properties during the time they owned them.
The developers that bought the properties consolidated them into one lot and are now well along in a project to build a by-right three-story building which will contain 11 units. We have to think that these units will target students, just given the types of projects we’ve seen in this part of town and the seemingly unquenchable demand in the area. Given the progress on the project, we can get a pretty good idea of what the building will look like when it’s done.
The building will have a fairly utilitarian look to it. And while we commend the developer for using brick on the whole facade and not cheaping out on the southern facade with siding or paneling, we do find ourselves wishing for an accent or two to break things up. West Philly is renowned for its architectural heritage, and we get it that nobody is building homes today like the neighboring structures on Powelton Avenue, but we still wish that contemporary development would at least look to the palette of surrounding architecture in this part of town.
Ordinarily, we’re cheered to see any vacant land redeveloped into new construction, but it feels a little funny, in this case, with student housing replacing a playground. While we appreciate the efforts of the non-profit to enrich the community with a play space, we’re also nonplussed that the City got a dollar for these lots back in 1998 and the non-profit sold them for half a million bucks twenty years later. Fortunately, it’s much more involved to buy City land today than it was back then and these situations are not nearly as common as they once were. But as we’ve reported over the years and the aforementioned Inquirer story expressed, it still does happen and the City has sadly lost out on a tremendous amount of revenue due to the previous policy.