Posted Mar 3, 2020, 8:15 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Posts: 1,227
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cardeza
that project is moving SLOWLY. When I pass by in the morning I see like 5 guys on site.
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It's unsurprising. This building has been through litigation hell.
Trade union politics derail N. Philadelphia apartment proposal
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When the board rejected a developer's proposal last week to build apartments in a vacant West Poplar warehouse zoned for industrial use, it didn't merely condemn a blighted building to stand empty. Its 4-to-1 vote also killed an innovative agreement that would have created dozens of good-paying jobs for minorities.
Unlike the deal Kenney arranged, this one was reached directly between the community association, Richard Allen Homes New Generation, and the developer, Post Bros., specifically for the conversion of the massive Quaker warehouse and Ninth and Poplar. Post's owners, Matt and Mike Pestronk, pledged that 50 percent of the construction crew for the $100 million project would be black, Hispanic, or Asian, and that 10 percent of the total workforce would come from the West Poplar area. The outcome thrilled the largely African American neighborhood, said Bruce Crawley, a former neighborhood resident who helped found the civic association and helped broker the agreement.
The catch is that Post would need to employ significant numbers of nonunion workers to meet those ambitious hiring targets because so few minorities have been admitted into Philadelphia's insular building trades.
The deal did not sit well with the five-member Zoning Board, which is dominated by union officials, including Anthony Gallagher, business manager of Steamfitters Local 420, and Confessor Plaza, a field representative with Laborers' Union Local 57.
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A few months late:
Court Strikes Down Zoning Board's Political Ruling in Quaker Building Case
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In this case, the No vote was entirely political. The building trades have a controlling vote on the ZBA, and at the hearing, things started going south for the Quaker proposal after a project supporter brought up that Post had struck a minority hiring agreement as a condition for receiving support from one of the RCOs, Richard Allen Homes. The project supporter saw this as a selling point, but for the ZBA it was a major demerit since the building trades members are mostly white men from the suburbs of Philly and South Jersey. ZBA members discovered a newfound sentimentality for industrial uses and voted it down.
The Board was nearly embarrassed into holding a rare revote after they received a lot of critical media attention, but then they declined to do that, leaving the issue to the Court of Common Pleas to decide. Now the Court has decided, and they reversed the ZBA's decision.
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