Changes at Temple and Drexel over the last couple decades have had a dramatic impact on their surrounding neighborhoods. Both schools have seen enrollment rise and at Temple, the number of commuting students has dropped considerably. As such, we've seen a ton of student housing construction occur on and around

Bella Vista is such a settled neighborhood, it hardly sees much development activity these days. When it does, most projects are one-off homes getting renovated or rebuilt after longtime owners move on, in one way or another. It's precisely because the neighborhood is so settled that any slightly underused property

The Kensington Methodist Episcopal Church is one of the more historic churches in Philadelphia and it's likely you've never laid eyes on it. The church is located at 300 Richmond St., on one of the three blocks of Richmond Street between Frankford Avenue and the place where I-95 and Delaware

We've long loved the Keystone National Bank building at the corner of Juniper & Chestnut, admiring its amazing bones and wondering how such a marvelous building at such a tremendous location could have found itself in such a state of blight and disrepair. This edifice is more commonly known as the Hale

Between 2003 and 2013, the Althea Gibson Community Education and Tennis Center at 1000 W. Girard Ave. provided a safe space to neighborhood children at a tennis facility that might have felt more at home in the 'burbs then on this West Poplar corner. The community center ultimately closed due to lack of funding, and developer Michael

At 1305 N. 27th St. there was once an industrial building which contained a leather business back in the early 1900s, according to a historic map. More recently though, as Brewerytown went through some incredibly difficult years, the sizable property was sitting vacant and unused, like so many other properties in the

If you stand at 8th & Poplar, the first thing you'll notice is the Quaker building, an old warehouse originally built for Strawbridge & Clothier in 1918, just a block to your the west. The building not only catches the eye because of its size, but also because of its poor condition,

If you read this blog with any regularity, you're probably at least generally familiar with the concept of zoning. But for any first timers out there, please allow us to provide a very basic bit of background. Every property in Philadelphia has an underlying zoning designation that dictates what its

The diagonal Point Breeze Avenue was once the commercial heart of the Point Breeze neighborhood, allowing residents to shop for most of their needs without straying too far from home. Like the rest of the neighborhood, the corridor fell on very tough times over the second half of the 20th

In the years just before the founding of the school that would eventually be known as Temple University, wealthy Philadelphians were building spectacular mansions for themselves in the neighborhood which Temple would eventually come to occupy. While the greatest homes were probably located on North Broad Street, there were some pretty