Sharswood rising: PHA’s ambitious plan to revitalize the North Philly neighborhood is winding down and paying off

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Near the corner of 23rd and Sharswood streets, a few minutes’ drive from Center City, construction crews are busy rebuilding an entire city block.

The modern apartment units sit across the street from the former Norman Blumberg Apartments, a notorious public housing development where drug dealing and gun violence were commonplace for decades.

The high-rises that defined the site are gone now, and Sharswood, a North Philadelphia community that was once emblematic of the city’s most entrenched social issues, is on the rise thanks to what may be the most ambitious neighborhood revitalization effort in the country.

From the back window of her three-bedroom apartment just around the corner, lifelong resident Bonita Hall has watched heavy machinery rumble up and down Sharwood Street. While the noise over the last year has annoyed her at times, she knows this construction site, and the several others across the small neighborhood, are part of something big — something potentially transformative.

“My thing is the aftermath,” said Hall. “I’m just hoping to keep the peace.”

A peace between new and old that will soon be tested when the long-hatched plan — to turn Sharswood into a thriving, mixed-income neighborhood — is completed by the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

To date, PHA has invested $750 million in Sharswood. The effort, which includes the apartment buildings near Hall’s home, is believed to be the largest of its kind to be undertaken by a housing authority.

Today, Sharswood is unrecognizable. And while the community still has its challenges, there are already signs that PHA is delivering on its ambitious promise.

There’s less violent crime, fewer people living in poverty, and the neighborhood is now home to an economically and racially diverse population.

“You are, by the way this was done, ensuring that those things that pretty much everybody wants will be available to people who might not otherwise, just based on the amount of money in their pocket, be able to afford that and to be there,” said Ira Goldstein, senior advisor of policy solutions at the Reinvestment Fund.

A fall from grace

Sharswood covers an arrowhead-shaped set of blocks east of Brewerytown, less than two miles from Center City. The neighborhood sits directly above Girard College, stretching to Cecil B. Moore Avenue and between Ridge Avenue and 25th Street.

The footprint of PHA’s transformation plan extends just beyond those boundaries.

In the late 19th century, Sharswood was a working-class neighborhood packed with modest row houses, mostly belonging to German immigrants. By the late 1930s, the area had become predominantly African American as families migrated north for industrial jobs created by WWII. The influx made Sharswood a hub for Black culture, particularly jazz music. The thriving neighborhood was further shaped by the Civil Rights era.

But in 1964, an infamous race riot, partially stoked by “long-brewing resentments” among Black residents, led to the destruction of dozens of white-owned businesses along the neighborhood’s main commercial corridors and, ultimately, decades of disinvestment in Sharswood after many of those businesses left town.

When PHA started its work in Sharswood around 2015, the neighborhood was considered one of Philadelphia’s most disadvantaged — a community of last resort. Poverty and crime were at levels far above citywide averages. There was also staggering unemployment and almost no amenities, forcing residents to travel outside the neighborhood for basics like groceries.

At the center of the neighborhood stood the Norman Blumberg Apartments. Built in the 1960s, the massive public housing complex became, by PHA’s own admission, an “obstacle to neighborhood renewal.” The 8-acre site was home to a large crack cocaine operation and frequent gunplay, making daily life treacherous for the hundreds of PHA families who rented at Blumberg.

It was also common for people to be robbed or assaulted in the stairways of the two family towers, where nearly 500 households with very low incomes lived.

“I did not let my children play outside,” said Sharrie Speight, a former Blumberg resident who now works for the Brewerytown Sharswood Community Civic Association.

It was all deeply troubling to PHA President Kelvin Jeremiah.

Amid an affordable housing crisis, he was also concerned that Sharswood appeared poised for rapid gentrification, given its accessibility, its assortment of vacant land and abandoned properties, and its proximity to Brewerytown and Francisville, where private real estate developers were already investing heavily.

Soon after joining PHA, Jeremiah announced plans to overhaul not just the Blumberg complex, but the entire 40-block neighborhood.

“We didn’t want to have concentrated levels of poverty. We didn’t want to have what some social scientists have called ‘warehousing the poor.’ We wanted to give our families opportunities to live in neighborhoods of their choice where they can thrive and where they can live with dignity and respect. The old Blumberg did not afford residents to live that way,” said Jeremiah during a recent tour around the neighborhood.

‘Not your grandmother’s public housing’

Jeremiah’s vision — backed by public, private and philanthropic dollars — was multifaceted and drew a healthy dose of skepticism and considerable concern from residents, preservationists and others.

PHA had created other so-called Choice Neighborhoods, but it had never attempted to deliver anything so massive, comprehensive and potentially transformative. But Jeremiah insisted that a project of this scale and scope was necessary to make lasting change in such a neglected community.

“We built beautiful homes but it wasn’t accessible to the broader community. Families couldn’t walk to the supermarket. The schools weren’t particularly good or closed. And crime was still a real issue,” said Jeremiah.

Under the plan, the authority would demolish and replace nearly all of the units at the Norman Blumberg Apartments, condemn and seize more than 1,300 properties through eminent domain, revitalize the Ridge Avenue commercial corridor and reopen Vaux High School, among other initiatives.

Today, about 60% of the neighborhood is regulated in such a way that it will remain permanently affordable. The units, most of which are subsidized rentals, were developed either by PHA or in partnership with a private developer.

PHA owns the rights to all of the land, which is deed-restricted for 15 years. This arrangement almost guarantees that these developments will remain affordable housing in perpetuity.

The rest of the neighborhood’s new and rehabbed units are market-rate, and they are purposely indistinguishable from the affordable ones.

“This is not your grandmother’s public housing. In no way, shape or form,” said Jeremiah.

On the commercial side, PHA has developed more than two dozen properties along Ridge Avenue, including its new headquarters. Directly across the street, a new shopping plaza includes a supermarket, an urgent care facility and a bank.

In another neighborhood, these businesses would be considered unremarkable.

In Sharswood, they are physical markers of a community on the rise. The Grocery Outlet, for example, was the first full-service supermarket in the neighborhood in more than 50 years. The day it opened, hundreds of people woke up early to get inside.

Jacinda Scott, another former Blumberg resident, said the grocery store was one of the main reasons she returned to Sharswood three years ago.

The market is a five-minute walk from her two-bedroom place on Oxford Street.

“It’s convenient,” said Scott, who works as a janitor at a Jewish day school in the suburbs.

At first, Scott hesitated to come back. Former Blumberg residents were all guaranteed housing if they decided to return, but Scott wasn’t convinced it was a good idea until she toured some of the new homes and got a feel for the neighborhood again — now that the towers were gone.

She’s now sure she made the right decision.

While she still has to be aware of her surroundings, Scott said the neighborhood feels less dangerous than it used to, in part because it’s quieter. She rarely hears gunfire.

When Scott left, Sharswood was home to more than 1,000 vacant lots. Today, nearly every inch has a structure. And one of the only visible pieces of the old neighborhood is the Blumberg senior tower, which PHA gutted and rehabbed.

Many of Scott’s former neighbors at Blumberg have also decided to return.

“It’s just wonderful just to be back,” Scott said. “It’s well worth the wait.”

Below the surface

The investment in Sharswood has also contributed to changes that go beyond what the eye can see.

The median sale price for a home in Sharswood, for example, is now about $220,000 — four times what houses were selling for in 2015, according to the Reinvestment Fund. Experts say the jump is dramatic but not indicative of rapid gentrification.

Instead, the data help illustrate that Sharswood has successfully transitioned from a neighborhood with concentrated poverty to a stable mixed-income community — one that could remain that way for the foreseeable future, even as some longtime homeowners raise concerns about rising property values.

“Neighborhoods that have a lot of place-based subsidy are able to stay more economically diverse when gentrification arrives. And so I think when we start looking at some other examples in the city, it looks like Sharswood does fit the type of model where subsidy is going to help keep the neighborhood more diverse over time,” said Emily Dowdall, president of policy solutions at the Reinvestment Fund.

PHA’s work has also coincided with a decrease in the volume of violent crime in Sharswood.

Police data show that the number of aggravated assaults, a category that includes non-fatal shootings, has dropped from 52 incidents in 2015 to 23 as of October 2024. Homicides largely remained flat during that span.

Other than 2020, when police recorded six homicides, the neighborhood averaged roughly two murders a year during those years.

Capt. Michael Goodson, who leads the 22nd District of the Philadelphia Police Department, said that has helped yield a community that is less fearful and apathetic than in the past, in part because he said more residents believe they deserve to feel safe.

Goodson, who patrolled Sharswood as a beat cop at the beginning of his career, said more people are showing up to district-led community meetings — meetings that were not well-attended before.

“The face of that community is hope,” said Goodson, who became captain in 2021. “There’s a good feel to it.”

PHA expects to complete construction on all of its rental properties by the end of summer and all of its homeownership units by the end of the year.

By then, Sharswood may be completely repopulated — and well on its way to writing the next chapter in its history.

From her home on 23rd Street, Hall is optimistic that Sharwood’s future will be bright. So far, she said the newcomers she has met have mostly been polite and courteous. And so, she continues to view the neighborhood’s transformation with a sense of optimism and hope.

“It feels good to be able to walk with peace and to see that things can change for the better,” said Hall.