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Posted Dec 8, 2022, 6:17 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Dec 2015
Location: South Philly
Posts: 1,706
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Nice spotlight piece in WSJ today. On the front page of their website right now. Touches on crime but it's not a focus, and mostly fair.
Philadelphia’s Center City Sees Resurgence in Housing, Economic Activity
Quote:
PHILADELPHIA—This city’s downtown is showing fresh signs of renewed economic vitality, buoyed by strong housing demand, hospitality-sector growth and a return-to-work push led by employers such as Comcast Corp., despite ongoing concerns about crime.
Cities across the country have struggled to rebound from the affects of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a shift to working from home hollowed out many downtown cores. Residents, business owners, workers and local commerce officials say they see clear improvement in Philadelphia’s Center City as the pandemic begins to turn a corner into its fourth year.
The budding resurgence here shows how a downtown with large retail and tourism sectors and where many people live as well as work can jolt back to life more quickly than those more dependent on commuters, local officials say.
Abby Clouser, a 26-year-old area resident, bought Christmas gifts one recent afternoon at Glossier, a makeup boutique that is among the latest retailers to open along Walnut Street in Center City’s upscale Rittenhouse Square neighborhood.
“It’s exciting to see a lot of new places like this opening,” she said of the Glossier shop, which opened in late October. “Every time I’m walking down the street it seems pretty busy,” said Ms. Clouser, who manages client services for an auction house.
Some data back up the notion of a resurgence. Center City hotel occupancy was 67% in both September and October, the highest monthly rates since the start of the pandemic, according to data provided to Visit Philadelphia, the city’s marketing agency, by the firm Tourism Economics. Leisure and group travel accounted for nearly two-thirds of the stays, the data show.
Downtown pedestrian foot traffic in November reached 73% of November 2019 levels, based on anonymized mobile-phone data, making it one of the busiest months of the pandemic, according to the Center City District, a business-improvement district that spans 233 blocks. The group said storefront occupancy in September hit the highest level since June 2020, with 81% open for business, compared with 89% in 2019.
One of Center City’s newest residential projects is a 48-story condo and apartment tower in Rittenhouse Square by developer Southern Land Co. Rents for the 184 apartments range from $2,200 to $7,900 a month, and the 65 condos for sale start “in the upper $2 millions,” the company says. A few blocks east stands another recent arrival, Dranoff Properties’ 47-story Arthaus condo tower, whose 107 units cost between $1.6 million and $15 million.
Center City, like many downtowns, remains hampered by factors such as remote work’s enduring appeal and public-safety concerns. Foot traffic in October was down 25% to 30% from October 2019 in Center City, Chicago’s Loop, Boston’s Financial District and Midtown Manhattan, according to analytics firm Placer.ai. Boston’s Back Bay, which like Center City has a healthy residential population, had 10% less foot traffic; lower Manhattan dipped 36%.
“The recovery for all of this is happening more slowly than we would like, but the trends are pretty significant,” said Paul Levy, Center City District’s longtime president and chief executive.
Some economic indicators point to continuing headwinds in Center City, said Thomas Ginsberg, a senior officer with the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative. A Pew data set tracking Philadelphia’s pandemic-era economic recovery shows 5.6% of retail businesses were delinquent on non-rent bills in the third quarter, the second-highest percentage since late 2020, according to credit-reporting firm Experian PLC.
“It’s definitely still a mixed picture,” Mr. Ginsberg said.
One advantage for Center City, he said, is its large and fairly affluent residential population. Unlike in places such as New York City’s Midtown, many professionals work and live downtown Philadelphia, meaning they help the microeconomy even while working from home, he noted. The heart of Center City has about 70,000 residents.
Many office workers have yet to return to their offices, but some employers are bringing their people back to Center City.
Comcast delivered a boost to the area when it told employees in September they should be in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. The cable and entertainment company has about 8,000 workers spread over two office towers in the heart of Center City.
“You bring those people in three times a week, that’s like a small town,” said Anne Nadol, Philadelphia’s commerce director.
Victory Brewing Co.’s two-level taproom, which opened in October 2021 on the nearby Benjamin Franklin Parkway, has benefited from the influx of Comcast workers, said General Manager Conor Martin. “They’re in here multiple times a week,” he said, sometimes in groups of 45.
Late on a recent morning, Comcast IT engineer Pat Hochstuhl filed into Victory Brewing with more than a dozen colleagues for lunch. Mr. Hochstuhl, 30, who lives in a suburb a half-hour away, said the company’s Center City campus and surrounding areas were noticeably busier.
At the seasonal Christmas Village near City Hall, Charisse McGill said her French Toast Bites food stand drew 20% more customers on Thanksgiving than a year earlier, translating to a 36% jump in gross sales. Fellow merchant Chartel Findlater, who owns Gold + Water Co., said she has done steady business selling the soaps, room sprays and other products she makes.
“Especially on the weekends, it has been shoulder to shoulder here,” Ms. Findlater said.
Public-safety worries remain. Philadelphia overall has experienced elevated levels of violent crime in recent years, with a record 562 homicides last year. Though police department records show the violence has mostly occurred outside downtown, three people were killed in a shooting last June on South Street, a nightlife hub.
The Philadelphia Police Department said that since October 2021 it has boosted patrols in high-pedestrian traffic areas of Center City, based on police data and feedback from employers and commuters. Mr. Levy said the Center City District has doubled deployments of its unarmed safety workers on foot and bicycle.
Early in the pandemic, a period that saw civil unrest in Philadelphia after the 2020 murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, the ZIP Code that includes Rittenhouse Square lost the most households in the city, said Kevin Gillen, senior research fellow at Drexel University’s Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation.
He said new data are now showing a rebound, with home prices and rents higher than in 2019.
“Affluent households are not only willing to purchase properties in Center City, they are also once again willing to occupy them,” he said in an email. “This demonstrates not only an increased demand to live in Philadelphia, but also an increased optimism to invest in Philadelphia and its future.”
Derek Giannone’s family opened Paulie Gee’s Soul City Slice Shop last June in Washington Square West, attracted by the density of the Center City neighborhood. The retro-themed pizzeria’s bar was crowded on a recent afternoon as customers watched the U.S. men’s soccer team hang on to defeat Iran in a must-win World Cup match.
Mr. Giannone said someone broke into the slice shop earlier this year and unsuccessfully tried to crack a safe. But he said crime in Center City isn’t as bad as many people perceive, and he said everyone he knows who left town early in the pandemic had since returned. “All my friends who went to go live with their parents for a little while eventually came back,” he said.
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