As far as greater Center City goes, we’ve got a really good handle on neighborhood names, boundaries, and the different challenges of dealing with various community zoning committees. But when we head into West Philadelphia, we admit that our neighborhood geography gets a little shaky. And the farther west we go, the less we know. So we were pretty proud when, the other day, a reader told us about some upcoming construction on the 5100 block of Arch Street and we knew that this was in the Mill Creek neighborhood.

Except… it wasn’t. It turns out that this block is, in fact, located in the Dunlap neighborhood. This tiny neighborhood runs from Market Street to Haverford Ave, from 49th to 52nd Street. Wikipedia says the neighborhood was named after the Dunlap School, which was converted into senior housing in the early 1990s. It also suggests that the neighborhood is “generally known for low income housing with household incomes generally below the poverty level” and that there are “many dilapidated or abandoned houses” in the neighborhood. And from our brief visit to the neighborhood, we have to say that it seems Wikipedia’s onto something.

As for the upcoming construction, it’s planned for a sizable vacant lot at 5110-5116 Arch St., and developers are planning a row of four triplexes. This will be a by-right project, so it has that going for it.

Though most of our West Philly posts are about student housing, we can’t think of a student housing project that’s been built within half a dozen blocks of here. So we can’t imagine that’s the approach the developers are taking here. Could the developers be building new construction subsidized housing? That would certainly seem to fit in with the Wikipedia description of the neighborhood. Another possibility is that the developers are going to try to charge market rate rents and possibly make a minimal return in the next few years, taking a gamble on the neighborhood and hoping that its fortunes will improve in the coming years.

We may not know who the developers are targeting with these apartments, but we applaud that they’re treading into a neighborhood that gets so little attention. If this project proves successful, it’s possible others will consider investing in this area. Maybe the Dunlap neighborhood is on the cusp of a new era of recognition. Or perhaps more likely, this one off project won’t change much and Dunlap will remain relatively anonymous to people that don’t live nearby.