Philly’s Logan Triangle, infamous for sinking homes, could soon become a place that builds them

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Mayor Cherelle Parker announced Wednesday she wants to bring a modular home factory to the Logan Triangle — an infamous slice of North Philadelphia — as part of her $2 billion plan to preserve and create 30,000 housing units.

If approved, the factory would sit on a 35-acre site near Roosevelt Boulevard where nearly 1,000 homes once stood. In the late 1980s, the city began demolishing them because the properties were sinking into the unstable soil below — and had been for decades.

The land has remained vacant ever since, largely because building on it would likely require expensive environmental remediation.

Parker now hopes to change that legacy as part of a larger vision to create new homes and manufacturing jobs in the city.

“We are all moving in a unified way to attempt to do what has never been done in the city of Philadelphia before. And that is to create a manufacturing hub for housing,” Parker said during a news conference at the site.

To that end, the city is seeking information from industry experts with hopes of eventually soliciting bids from private companies interested in building one of these factories in Philadelphia. Parker said Wednesday she wants to bring several facilities to underutilized sites across the city. The potential list of locations includes the Triangle and “persistently” vacant school buildings.

A request for information posted online states that the city is seeking “site parameters, facility requirements, operational considerations and financial models to successfully build and operate modular construction housing factories.”

Companies will have 60 days to respond.

“We have to gauge from the private sector, from those who run the factories, exactly what it is that they need,” Parker said.

The homes that once populated the Logan Triangle were built in the 1920s on top of a creek bed filled with ash and cinder. In subsequent decades, the mixture behaved like slow-moving quicksand, causing the homes to sink.

The investigation that followed a 1986 gas main explosion revealed just how bad things had gotten. By the following year, the city started condemning the properties and offering volunteer buyouts to residents.

The work was projected to take three years. In the end, it took the better part of two decades, with the last family moving out around 2003.

Since then, the city has tried redeveloping the land to no avail, while the site became popular for short dumping. The condition of the land presents the biggest obstacle: Only about half of the site is suitable for redevelopment.

On Wednesday, longtime residents applauded Parker’s push to put the Triangle to use.

“Some people see a problem and they run away from that problem. But we have a mayor that sees a problem, and she says ‘Let me find a solution to the problem,’” said Cecil Hankins, who has lived in the neighborhood for roughly 40 years.