A History of Displacement: Penn’s Broken Promises to the Black Residents of “University City”

by the Coalition to Save the UC Townhomes

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated an already endemic housing crisis in Philadelphia, killing neighbors and destroying communities. The recent devastating fire in Fairmount took the lives of 12 people, including eight children. The 12 people were all members of a low-income, extended family squeezed into a four-bedroom apartment in a neglected building owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA). The family was living in unsafe, overcrowded housing with no smoke detector — an experience that resonates with many poor and Black residents. The fire is the latest evidence of a systemic assault on Black residents, of which housing inequity is just one of many forms of violence. As Penn grows its endowment to over $20 billion and develops real estate across the city, tens of thousands of Philadelphians are struggling to find housing and turning to friends for shelter or living on the street. Penn is not just complicit in this violent inequity; it is one of its foremost perpetrators.

As we write, 70 homes in University City and hundreds of Black and working-class residents are Penn-trification’s next target. Just blocks off campus, the University City Townhomes at 3900-3999 Market Street are a private development of federally subsidized homes, offering below-market rates to residents, some of whom have lived there a lifetime. Now, Brett Altman, Townhomes’ owner, is working to throw these residents out of their homes. This attack has led to months of organizing and coalition building, which is covered in depth in the following article. Neither natural nor inevitable, such forced displacements are the result of deliberate choices made by Philadelphia and Penn administrators. A closer look at local history reveals that Penn community members also have a vital role to play in resisting this violence. Indeed, the struggle to stop Penn-trification led to the creation of the University City Townhomes in the first place.

In 1959, the West Philadelphia Corporation, a coalition claiming Penn as its majority shareholder and Drexel and the University of the Sciences as junior partners, formed with a mission to brand West Philadelphia as University City. Working with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, the Corporation targeted the 105 acres between 34th St. and 40th St., stretching from Chestnut St. and Ludlow St. in the south to Lancaster Ave. and Powelton Ave. in the north, for “urban renewal.” This area was known as the Black Bottom, a vibrant Black working-class community that the Redevelopment Authority nonetheless labeled “blighted” to invoke the right of eminent domain in 1966. In the face of bulldozers and arrests, residents had no choice but to leave. A total of 2,653 people were displaced. Roughly 78% of them were Black. “I come from a place where I had no love… my whole community showed me love,” said long-time activist Gerald Bolling, who grew up in the Black Bottom before being forced out. He has insisted on reparations for his now-dispersed community for over 30 years. 

Anti-Black violence in Philadelphia has always been met with Black-led resistance. In the late 1960s, as the Black Bottom organized to defend itself, many Penn students refused to sit on the sidelines. In 1967, reporters Lawrence Beck and Stephen Kerstetter of The Daily Pennsylvanian explained the insidious term “urban renewal” as shorthand for “giant impersonal institutions like the University of Pennsylvania … devouring small homeowners, spreading segregation and prolonging social inequalities.” Two years later, some 800 Penn and Philadelphia-area students, faculty and staff, and local Black activists occupied College Hall over six days. They demanded affordable housing within the core of University City, specifically for displaced Black Bottom residents. They forced Penn’s president and trustees to the negotiation table, who on Feb. 23, 1969, resolved “a policy of accountability and responsibility that accepts the concerns and aspirations of the surrounding communities as its own concerns and aspirations.” 

Subsequently, the University created a commission consisting of faculty, students, trustees, and community activists who were empowered to review any further Penn development in the Black Bottom. A plan submitted to the commission in 1969 proposed four new science research buildings in the area alongside three dedicated low-income housing projects. The plan was approved, but the three affordable housing projects were never built, and the University simply waited out its promise. A decade or so later, the Altman Group bought the property at 3900 Market St. for $1 and committed to building affordable housing there. In the end, the affordable housing complex that the Altman Group built was small but nevertheless needed redress for the devastation of an entire community. Today, those very same homes are being targeted for destruction.

In July 2021, Brett Altman, the owner of the Townhomes, told the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), without informing or consulting residents, that he would not renew the federal contract and would instead sell the property. What Altman purchased for $1 is now worth over $100 million. By its sheer presence, Penn increases property value around its perimeter, or more bluntly, within its police patrol zone, incentivizing the sale of any and all land to the highest bidder and driving out the poor and working class while professing benevolence (see: Policing at Penn).

For centuries, Penn has routinely made decisions that enrich itself with no thought to the surrounding community. Penn benefits by creating more space for its buildings and science labs which will bring in more money. We, as Penn students, are able to be and live here because Penn violently displaced Black working-class community members. It is still doing that today. We demand Penn take responsibility for its harm to Philadelphia, starting with its direct impact on the displacement of our neighbors at the UC Townhomes (see: UC Townhomes). We urge you to support our neighbors in this struggle.