The below was tweaked from testimony given before the House Democrat Committee on Urban Affairs:
Testimony of Joseph
J. DeFelice,
Chairman of the Mayfair
Community Development Corporation (CDC) and
President of the Mayfair
Civic Association
Before the City
Council Committee on Public Safety and
The Philadelphia City Council Committee on
Licenses and Inspection
Wednesday June 20,
2012
10 AM
Philadelphia City
Hall
Dear Members,
My name is Joe DeFelice and I am
the newly elected Chairman of the Mayfair Community Development Corporation
commonly known as the Mayfair CDC. I
have been a board member with this organization since last May however have
been involved at the community level for quite some time serving as President
of the Mayfair Civic Association and a Board member of the neighborhood Townwatch
and Business Association. Nevertheless
my roots in this community go back to my birth and upon marriage I bought a
house a block and half from where I grew up.
The neighborhood is not the same as it was when I grew up but change
isn’t always a bad thing; it is how one affects that change that is the often difference
maker.
In the 1990s Mayfair was a
community that saw an extreme majority of home ownership made up by a mostly
blue collar parochial population. In
order to salvage that identity, Mayfair sought to get ahead of the curve by not
waiting for decay to meet it, as it did so many other communities in the lower
Northeast, but rather to begin revitalization before bottoming out. The Mayfair CDC covers an area between
Harbison Avenue to the South to Rhawn Street in the North to Roosevelt blvd on
the West side and Frankford Ave to the Eastside North to Cottman then to the
river North to Sheffield Ave centered
around the Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood known as Mayfair. It was created in the late 1990s to combat
blight before it began. The concept was
that, rather than investors coming in and taking advantage of our premier
housing stock of rowhomes and twins with parking spaces and yards ranging from
1200 – 2000 sq feet just a short car/public transportation ride from Center
City, the neighborhood would invest in for sale properties thus keeping them
off the market. The neighborhood would
renovate these properties and sell them to family members of other Mayfair
community members thus making our neighborhood more tight knit and family
centered. Thus the Mayfair Community
Development Corporation was founded and for the first half decade of its
existence it operated at high functioning level thanks in part to grants from
former House Speaker John Perzel.
The Mayfair CDC has been a
successful neighborhood partner for years and renovating and rehabbing houses
has only been a small part of their efforts.
Since our inception, we have renovated the Devon Movie Theater,
renovated a pocket park known as Mayfair Memorial Park, built the Mayfair
Community center which is a state of the art recreation center at the heart of
our neighborhood, rebuilt, with the assistance of the Mayfair Civic Association
and brand new playground at Lincoln High School valued at $80,000, we have
taken over operations of local neighborhood establishments such as Schaaf’s
Market, started a cleansweep program that maintained our residential and
commercial corridors and planted hundreds of trees and flowers in and around our main thoroughfares
such as Cottman and Frankford Avenues. This
type of neighborhood improvement has stabilized Mayfair while other communities
in the area saw much more drastic change.
In the mid 2000s, housing prices
began to skyrocket and the Mayfair CDC’s ability to keep up with and be able to
pay for the amount of properties for sale began to lag. The average home price in Mayfair rose from $80,000-$100,000
to between $140,000-$200,000. These
prices presented a conundrum for our stable neighborhood: longtime home owners began to jump at the chance
to nearly receive double their home value and the Mayfair CDC couldn’t keep up
with the high level of buying and selling.
As we all now know, the mid 2000s were high times for investors and
Mayfair was not spared. The amount of
investors changed the landscape of the neighborhood, blocks that were once
almost entirely owner occupied began to see an increase in renters and vacant
homes. In our community that has lead to
a significant amount homes that were not properly maintained or cared for by either
the renters or the home owners.
Since the influx of renters, the
issues related to these renters have risen abundantly. No longer could a neighbor, in many cases,
simply knock on a door and ask the person who answers the door to fix their
sidewalk, put lids on their trash cans, turn their music down etc. This became difficult because the amount of
turnover in these rental properties produced new faces quite regularly. Gone were the days when you would see that
familiar face. Gone were the days that
the person responsible for fixing the sidewalk lived in the house of the door
you knocked on. When you went to lodge
complaints to a property denizen, it fell on deaf ears so you had to try and
contact the landlord and many times those calls were made to area codes in
North Jersey or New York City normally to someone who spoke none or very little
English. This has been extremely
detrimental to our community. Many
neighbors, who were here for several generations are beginning to or have
thrown their hands up and sought housing elsewhere; it seems that we contact
our local state representative or city councilperson almost daily with issues
that deal primarily with negligent or reckless tenants or absentee landlords.
I personally spent my time recently on the
phone with a landlord from Montgomery County about getting his tenants to be
more respectful to their neighbors on the 3100 Brighton Street. This has lead to both the landlord and our
Townwatch president staking out the house and documenting the issues which rain
from loud music, to abundant dog feces, to using the back bedroom window as a
trash shoot into the backyard. However,
this landlord has been exception, atleast he returns the calls or makes it look
like he cares what his tenant is doing to our community. It is the other kind, the absentee landlords,
whose behavior or lack thereof eats through the fabric of our neighborhood and
we have plenty of them.
On the 3400 block of Cottman Ave
nearly half the block is comprised by renters many of whom last a year or less
in that property. Their block is one of
the gateways into our neighborhood repairs to fronts and facades are few and far
between. On the 3300 block of Guilford
Street, for three years the block was under siege by two renters who
disregarded common decency and engaged in regular illegal activity, it wasn’t
until these tenants beat their landlord for rent that the landlords threw up
their hands from New York City and put the houses back on the market;
thankfully those houses were sold to Mayfair residents and an Iraq war
veteran. In a twin on the 3100 block of
Nesper Street, a neighbor has had to call an exterminator atleast five (5)
times in the last six (6) weeks to combat roaches from his nextdoor neighbor,
when knocking on the door was no longer an option, we had to call Councilman
Henon’s office in order to send out Licenses and Inspection as well as the
City’s Health Department. On the 2800
and 2900 blocks of Unruh Avenue Street, longtime neighborhood residents are fed
up after having neighbors allowing animals to defecate across all their lawns,
blast their music, deal drugs, etc.
Thankfully former Councilwoman Joan Krajewski’s office interceded on
several occasions finally leading the landlord to issue an eviction
letter. However, decent hard working
people should not have to live like this and we shouldn’t need our elected
officials to intervene for the purposes of decency and cleanliness.
Now, thanks to the efforts of
Councilman Henon and his City Hall App, we have become more vigilant in
tracking and identifying negligent property owners and tenants. This App has allowed us to gain insight into
the real problems confronting the community and his staff has been bulldogs in
tracking down and resolving the issues; which have been the types of complaints
we have received in the last three years.
I personally handle anywhere from two to five complaints a week that somehow
comes back to an absentee landlord or a laissez faire tenant. We are here to help and hope that our example
will show our new neighbors the type of behavior that we expect in our
community. We are committed to combating blight and
quality of life issues and will strive, through many difficulties, to continue
to make Mayfair a great place to live, work and play. Thank you.
