Grid Magazine May 2022 [#156]

■

■

■

Union League axes acres of trees. Lax laws make it possible

The ups and downs of construction recycling

Tiny market, big impact p. 16

p. 28

p. 18

M AY 2 0 22 / I SSU E 1 5 6 / G R I D P H I L LY.CO M

T O W A R D A S U S TA I N A B L E P H I L A D E L P H I A

our way to a carbon neutral future — p.22

RETROFITTING

ORGANIC LOCAL FAMILY–OWNED Kimberton Whole Foods is your one-stop shop for organic produce, raw dairy, local meats and cheeses, specialty items, baked goods, supplements, body care and more.

NEWLY EXPANDED STORE! COLLEGEVILLE 222 East Main St

DOUGLASSVILLE 1139 Ben Franklin Highway West

DOWNINGTOWN 150 East Pennsylvania Ave

KIMBERTON 2140 Kimberton Rd

MALVERN 429 East King Rd

OTTSVILLE 4010 Durham Rd

kimbertonwholefoods.com

Looking for ways to save energy and money?

PECO has energy answers.

Saving money is easier than you think with advice that leads to comfort and energy savings all year long. Learn more ways to save at peco.com/waystosave.

© PECO Energy Company, 2022. All rights reserved.

M AY 20 22

G R I DP HI LLY.COM

1

EDI TO R ’S NOTES

by

alex mulcahy

T publisher Alex Mulcahy director of operations Nic Esposito managing editor Alexandra W. Jones associate editor & distribution Timothy Mulcahy tim@gridphilly.com art director Michael Wohlberg writers Mariyn Anthony Bernard Brown Nic Esposito Constance Garcia-Barrio Starr Herr-Cardillo Sophia D. Merow Claire Marie Porter Lois Volta Russell Zerbo photographers Chris Baker Evens Troy Bynum Drew Dennis Rachael Warriner illustrators Anne Lambelet Lois Volta published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850 G R I D P H I L LY. C O M

2

GR ID P H IL LY.CO M

M AY 2022

he city of philadelphia is not serious about climate change. Yet many people who work for the city are incredibly serious about it. They are dedicated, talented and passionate civil servants. Leadership, on the other hand, is lacking. The result is a mishmash of positive programs trying to methodically tackle the challenges we face colliding with massive, ill-advised, shortsighted development diametrically opposed to the city’s own stated goals.

So many people were appalled at the deforestation perpetrated with the blessing of Parks & Recreation—and the mayor—by the Cobbs Creek Foundation. If you have visited the site or seen pictures, you recognize it for what it is: a crime scene. Witnesses to the destruction wondered: surely, this can’t be legal?

This month, on the heels of yet more wanton destruction of trees for yet another golf course, this time by the scofflaw plutocrats of the Union League of Philadelphia, Bernard Brown explores the city’s laws protecting trees. His conclusion: the loopholes are so big you can drive a logging truck through them.

For example, an owner or developer of a single-family lot is allowed to cut down a heritage tree (one that is equal to or greater than two feet around at chest height) without any permit or plans to replace it. On the other hand, an owner of a commercial property, like an apartment complex or office building, would generally not be allowed to cut down such a tree without a permit and a replacement plan.

The shocking law—or lack thereof, really—is for land designated for “recreation,” which is what all of the city’s parks are. On those lands, the trees have no protection.

Developers don’t even need to plant replacement trees. The forest felled at the Cobbs Creek Golf Course was totally unprotected.

If you illegally cut down trees, like the Union League did, you will probably go

unpunished. The Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I), who enforces the rules, does not have an arborist on staff. If all they see when they visit is a stump, they are stumped, and no violation is issued.

The 2018 Tree Canopy Assessment, published by the city, says that while planting trees is a process, cutting one down is an event. I’m sure the Philly Tree Plan, due out next month, will be ambitious and forward thinking. How does that square with the Cobbs Creek clearcutting?

The mindset that it’s more cost effective to cut down and start anew is no different in our built environment than it is in our natural environment.

When it comes to buildings, even the greenest of architects, such as Scott Kelly at Re:Vision, feel a pang of regret when they create the coolest, most energy-efficient buildings, because once you start using new materials, you have an energy deficit.

The city has 600,000 single-family homes, according to Christine Knapp, director of the Office of Sustainability. Much of that housing stock is in desperate need of improvement, and all of it could be more energy efficient. Engineers, architects and contractors could and should be working around the clock to tighten up our buildings so that we can sustainably work with what we have rather than demolishing for a “clean slate.”

How we take care of our trees and our housing now will have an outsize impact on what Philadelphia is like in the decades to come. It’s time to empower the civil servants who know this to be true, and to hold accountable the public officials who fail to lead.

ALEX MULCAHY Editor-in-Chief alex@gridphilly.com COV E R IL LUSTRATIO N BY AN N E L AMBELET

I L LU S T R AT E D P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

Time to Get Serious

M AY 20 22

G R I DP HI LLY.COM

3

by

lois volta

DEAR LOIS,

What does restoration mean to you?

B

efore restoring anything, it’s important to examine what can stay as-is and what needs to be repaired, replaced or given a good scrubbing. It’s also important to have a strong end-vision. It takes belief to bring something back to life. To build it up, to improve and strengthen it. If you can’t envision it, how can it come to fruition?

If we were to look at the physical structure of a home, and examine something problematic, the first thought might be, how can I repair this the best way possible?

What needs to be done? How much can I do with the resources available? And what is the responsible thing to do?

It’s easy to parallel this with our lives within the home. What parts of ourselves and our homes can stay as-is, and what parts need healing?

Vision is key. It is easy to get swept up in the motions of everyday life, which can cause us to lose our creativity and drive.

When we operate out of a place of domestic non-creativity there is a tendency to feel trapped by going through the motions. This causes us to become indifferent about things that could cause a problem in the future.

Indifference is usually what causes most problems around the house. For instance, what if I don’t want to pull everything out of my kitchen cupboards and address how messy they have become? If I take a good look at what’s inside I might find out that I am wasteful, sloppy and not as careful as I’d like to think I am. Why would I do that 4

GRID P H I L LY.CO M

M AY 20 22

when indifference has been serving me?

I know what it’s like to push through being sulky or moody about doing proper maintenance on my home and myself. I know that instead of holding on to indifference I can envision beauty, balance and flow. I can put my heart and soul into something trivial—why not? If I can have a good attitude about my daily priorities wouldn’t my subconscious be affected by that? When thriving and good health become part of the equation, our homes reflect it.

Going through the motions is its own unique gift. We learn that good form and the right tools makes the ride a bit smoother.

Being able to turn off our minds, relax and

breathe while we wash the dishes gives us a different avenue to creativity. The trick is being able to get past whatever emotional hang ups we have about domesticity. Get past, or establish new outlooks that change what our everyday motions feel like. Whatever we call it, it does take effort to restore.

The major issues that I have seen in people’s homes have little to do with the actual structure of the building, and more with cultivating an environment worthy to be cared for, inside and out. This takes self respect, diligence and style.

My restoration style involves chocolate chip cookies, gardening and keeping the house feeling put-together. Maybe an epsom salt bath, too. Overall, I want the place where I rest to be one where there is plenty of love and care to go around.

There will always be a laundry list of things to do, but if you’ve got a little vision and put in the effort, you’ll be able to enjoy the restoration with peace in your heart. ◆ lois volta is a home life consultant, artist and founder of The Volta Way. Send questions to info@thevoltaway.com.

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

TH E VO LTA WAY

IL LUSTRATIO N BY LO IS VOLTA

CAMP

AT KIMBERTON WALDORF SCHOOL Rising 1st through 6th graders Outdoor Games Arts & Crafts Swimming/Splash Farm Animals Organic Afternoon Snack

June 20th - August 12th

Weekly Registration Available Discount Available for All 8 Weeks

io

rat Regist

en!

w op n is no

Learn more at: kimberton.org Or email :

camp@kimberton.org

Honoring Childhood * Connecting with Nature

GROW LIKE A BOSS™ with

Born from working on organic farms, our soils are earth-friendly to the core. From starting seeds to container gardening to planting a raised bed, we have the perfect organic soil for you. This spring, let’s GROW LIKE A BOSS together!

Our products are:

100% Organic

Peat-Free

Locally made in Chester County, PA!

OrganicMechanicSoil.com M AY 20 22 OM_ThirdPageAd-Updates.indd 1

2/14/17 9:37 AM

G R I DP HI LLY.COM

5

BUILDING BETTER

Within Our Power The city can and must protect residents from the many environmental dangers of development by russell zerbo

T

h e c h a l l e n g e s o f climate change can seem overwhelming, but the city can take clear steps to protect the most vulnerable renters and homeowners while enforcing existing development standards. To do this, we need to look inside and outside of the home.

When construction or demolition is taking place, dangerous substances like asbestos and lead can be absorbed in the respiratory system.

There is shockingly little research in regard to the amount of outdoor air pollution that comes indoors. Indoor air quality is almost entirely unregulated by governments with the exception of vapor intrusion studies that are conducted when sites with large amounts of soil and water pollution, like the former South Philadelphia refinery, are redeveloped. So many petrochemicals have been spilled at the site since the 1860s and continue to produce dangerous air pollution. Even 50 to 100 years from now, any structure built in the former refinery’s footprint will have to test their indoor air for dangerous vapors.

6 GRID P H IL LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

Philadelphia is also in the midst of a mold epidemic that is damaging indoor air quality and creating structural risks. And unlike New York City, Boston or Los Angeles, indoor mold is not explicitly banned in Philadelphia’s landlord-tenant code, which puts renters in extremely difficult positions.

First, Philadelphians need public health-focused development standards and more capital programs to help renters and homeowners maintain their homes. Landlords should not be able to rent units containing indoor mold and it should be easier for tenants to make housing complaints.

Next, the city should expand the Basic Systems Repair Program, which currently provides free emergency repairs for eligible homeowners. The homestead property tax exemption should be expanded so that older homeowners can save money on property taxes and invest in their aging homes.

The city’s current practice of rewarding new construction with a property tax abatement while raising property taxes for existing homeowners is completely backward. The

Philly First Home Program, which supported new homeowners with down payments and closing costs, should also be reopened to assist new homeowners with down payments and mortgages to equitably encourage housing stability without raising property taxes.

Climate change and increased precipitation has made it attractive for developers to raise properties using a practice known as “cut and fill.” This strategy lifts individual properties out of the floodplain, but poses serious threats to environmental justice because raising individual properties simply pushes water into lower lying neighborhoods.

Another way the city can combat this injusGreen roofs on a row tice is by expanding and house in South enforcing open space rePhiladelphia’s Hawthorne quirements. If the Zoning neighborhood Board of Adjustment conkeep the buildtinues to allow new develing’s roof cooler and reduce opments to break open the urban heat space requirements, the island effect. effects of increased heat and precipitation will worsen, causing the greatest damage in areas where existing housing stock is already poor and vulnerable to damage from extreme storms.

Alternatively, the zoning board could more aggressively require developers to use existing height bonuses gained from positive environmental amenities like green (or blue) roofs. Within the existing code, developers can add 36 to 72 feet to current height restrictions on some properties for using green building techniques, adding transit improvements, building trails or improving stormwater management, all of which would have public health benefits. But these height bonuses are only useful if the zoning board requires these amenities, rather than granting simple exceptions to height restrictions, which is extremely common.

Lastly, new development must take place with great concern for surrounding communities, particularly the air and water pollution issues that come with development.

Older homeowners and renters can and must be protected from these public health hazards. It’s all within our power. ◆ russell zerbo is an advocate at the Clean Air Council. For assistance with local public health issues, reach him at rzerbo@cleanair.org P HOTO BY J UL IA LEHMA N

Let us custom design the perfect cake for your Wedding!

Artisan baked goods for 30 years

7725 Germantown Ave 215.248.9235 NightKitchenBakery.com

2022 PRESERVATION ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

TOGETHER AGAIN WEDNESDAY JUNE 8, 2022 5:00 - 8:00 PM Vie, 600 N. Broad Street Philadelphia

Celebrate the finest in historic preservation. All tickets include a lavish buffet-style reception and open bar.

For more information and tickets visit

PreservationAlliance.com

M AY 20 22 G R I DP HILLY.COM 7

TREES

Tour of Destruction Residents and environmental advocates survey the damage done by the Cobbs Creek Foundation by

constance garcia-barrio

T

he sun shone bright on a landscape cross-hatched with felled trees on a walking tour of the Cobbs Creek Golf Course on April 4. The Cobbs Creek Restoration and Com� munity Foundation, the organization over� seeing the revamping of the golf course, had the trees cut down, said Dana Henry, the tour guide and a spokesperson with the Cobbs Creek Ambassadors Program. The ambassadors encourage volunteers, ideally local residents, to adopt and help maintain sections of Cobbs Creek Park.

“The trees have been clear cut all the way to City Line Avenue,” said Henry, standing within sight of SEPTA’s 69th Street Transportation Center. “This tour will give you an idea of the results,” she told the approximately 45 participants. They included community members, environmentalists, Philadelphia Parks & Recreation commissioner Kathryn Ott Lovell and City Councilmember Curtis J. Jones Jr., along with some of his staff. Jeff Shanahan, president of the Cobbs Creek Foundation and other foundation employees also took the tour, as did Maura McCarthy, executive director of the Fairmount Park Conservancy.

Some attendees remarked on changes before the tour began.

“It’s heartbreaking to see these trees cut down,” said Simone Scott, who has lived nearby for many years. “I have a stepson, 11, who’s always on his phone, but he liked coming here. It was gorgeous.”

Miguel Chavarria’s memories stretch back even farther. “I grew up near 60th and Market,” said Chavarria, 69. “We would 8 GRID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

It’s heartbreaking to see these trees cut down.”

— simone s cott, neighbor of Cobbs Creek walk to the creek, swim in the creek. Now it’s devastated. It’s as if the area was raped.

It wasn’t necessary what they did. Somebody jumped the gun.”

When the tour began, Henry led the group to Indian Creek, a tributary of Cobbs Creek. “The banks are collapsing because the trees that anchored them were cut,” she explained. “The banks need to be stabilized.

I’ve stood out here in storms and seen them be washed away.”

Shanahan mentioned efforts to shore up the banks.

“We left the stumps in to help stabilize the banks,” he said, “and we’ve put socks [mesh tubes about one foot in diameter packed with what looks like wood chips] along the bank. We’re leaving the stumps in.

Nobody’s going to take out the stumps. We also can put in used Christmas trees here to help prevent erosion.”

Changes in the waterway go beyond the bank, another Cobbs Creek Ambassador pointed out.

“Invasive plants like duckweeds have begun to grow [along Indian Creek]” he said.

“That’s not good for the stream bank.”

Henry also called attention to another area where once free-flowing water had become stagnant.

“The foundation is spending $15 million to fix the creek,” said commissioner Ott Lovell.

Even so, the foundation stands to gain, noted tour participant and near neighbor Timothy Reimer.

“With the foundation claiming a cost of $15 million for the creek restoration and getting $15 million in DEP [Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection] credits, $800,000 from the NFWF [National Fish and Wildlife Foundation] and $3 million from the city, that leaves them coming out ahead a minimum $3.8 million on the creek restoration,” Reimer said.

Other possible grants for restoring the creek could boost that gain to as much as $6.8 million, he noted.

As Henry led the group to higher ground for an overview, one participant asked if a plan had been developed for the area.

“We submitted a plan in 2020,” Shanahan

said, “but it wasn’t complete.”

The participant asked why trees were cut down with the plan unfinished.

“It was 90% complete,” Shanahan said.

Yet, there’s still no final plan on record, Henry noted.

Another participant asked if, given that Cobbs Creek is a public area, meetings open to the public were held to discuss the plans.

“We had more than 100 meetings to tell the community about the plans,” a foundation spokeswoman said. Questioned further, she said that in some cases only one person attended the meetings.

“Send us your questions,” she added.

“We’ve responded to everything that’s been submitted to us.”

“I’ve sent emails,” said a tour participant and member of the Overbrook Park Civic Association, “but my concerns were never addressed.”

From the higher ground, one could see better the clearcut patches amounting to 100 acres of once-forested land. “There was black walnut, sycamore, oak and maple, many of them 80 years old or older,” she said.

“The cutting included heritage trees [large, exemplary trees considered irreplaceable],” said Cobbs Creek environmentalist Lawrence Szmulowicz. “Those woods provided habitat for a pair of great horned owls and pileated woodpeckers. They’re protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. I’m not aware

of any efforts to take their protected status into consideration [when the trees were cut].”

“I’ve lived about a mile from here all my life,” said Steve Lockard, 73, who often takes part in Cobbs Creek cleanups. “[The clearcutting] was too much, too soon.”

“They’ve called for my resignation [because of the clearcutting],” Ott Lovell mentioned to a Neighbors and companion, “but it’s going to environmental advocates take more than this to bring attend the tour me down.” of the deforestAs the tour crossed Cardation at the Cobbs Creek Golf ington Road, some attendees Course, which is noted that there was no sideon public land. walk, but neighbors often cut across the golf course to reach their destination. The proposed fence around the golf course would force people to walk at the edge of the road near traffic.

Councilmember Jones, whose district includes the golf course, agreed.

“Number one, the first saw should never have hit a tree without a complete plan,” Jones said. “Now we have to work to mitigate what’s happened. What can be done to replace trees. Give us recommendations to prevent further damage.”

Some participants promised to do so.

Maura McCarthy, of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, which works to care for the city’s parks, suggested that work on the creek bank could bring unexpected benefits.

“The creek bank [nearest SEPTA] could be restored in a way that helps remove heavy metals that might come from the [adjacent] bus maintenance facility,” she said.

Henry concurred with the necessity of a solid plan.

“We need to put together a protection plan,” she said, when the group stood on the other side of Cardington Road. “We’re hoping for an opportunity to maintain valuable trees.

Trees that remain on the creek bank are more vulnerable now. Trees affect our daily quality of life. It will be hotter without them.”

Neighbors spoke of the loss of intangible benefits, too.

“It was wonderful just to get away and relax here,” said Karen Moore, who has lived near North 75th (near Haverford Avenue) for 20 years. “It was so peaceful when the trees were here.”

Henry pointed to a swath of magnificent felled trees and said: “This feels like Exhibit A. I don’t want this to ever happen again in the City of Philadelphia.” ◆ M AY 20 22 G R I DP H ILLY.COM 9

urban naturalist

Bernard Brown participates in the 2020 City Nature Challenge, in which citizen scientists explore their cities to log natural observations in an app.

Natural Course Our columnist reflects on how the urban wilderness has changed and how he’s changed as well by bernard brown

O

ver the last decade I have searched abandoned riverfront properties for skinks and black rat snakes, spooking deer and watching warblers, as I climbed over riprap shorelines and picked my way across the rotting timbers of overgrown piers.

A city in decay offers the naturalist unlimited opportunities, while a city on the rise takes them away. I have seen several of these spots developed into proper park spaces, opening them up to the general public in a way I can’t argue with, even if it takes 10 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

away what felt like private spots. Solitude is an unjustifiable luxury in the urban outdoors, even if I still pursue it.

Recently, though, I have found myself avoiding perfectly good and decrepit wildlife habitats because there are too many people. About seven years ago I was tipped off to a population of black rat snakes on abandoned railroad land and coal piers in Port Richmond.

There I would see a few anglers carrying rods to the edge of the water. I did my best to ignore the occasional couple in a car

as I passed by, but mostly I was alone as I searched under singing indigo buntings and stuffed my face with wineberries. Redspotted purple butterflies, their wings colored a shimmering electric blue, rested amid similarly brilliant colors spray-painted on the columns of the piers.

“Graffiti Pier,” though, is now a must-see stop on any tour of picturesque Philly urban decay. I don’t bother to go anymore.

I blame social media. That sounds like a knee-jerk response by an old fogey, but I genuinely believe that the ability to quickly share images with thousands of strangers makes it hard for any interesting spot to stay quiet for long.

When I first started herping in Philadelphia, I frequented a tract of land held by the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC). The grass and mugwort grew waist-high, and innumerable piles of construction debris, dumped furniture and old mattresses sheltered oodles of brown snakes. It was a blast.

Pieces of that PIDC land remain, but much of it has been sold off and developed.

A uniform company facility now stands where I found hundreds of brown snakes under old doors and railroad ties.

Most recently I explored the closed Cobbs Creek and Karakung golf courses, getting to know the animals that for more than 100 years had found a home in between the fairways. It was better for birding than herping.

I never found any snakes, but there were at least six species of raptors to watch, and in the fall the fairways hosted nighthawks as they filled their crops with insects plucked out of the air, ahead of their long migration to South America. The golf courses were only just getting popular with other naturalists. Now their woods are being razed.

We tend to overestimate the stability of our landscape. In a decade we can gain the sense that a meadow, or a forest, or even a vacant lot has been there forever. Seen through the longview of a 340-year-old city, any space is constantly changing.

Farming and hunting Lenape are pushed out. European crops and livestock flourish, only to be replaced by row houses and factories, which themselves crumble into vacant lots occupied by brown snakes.

I’ve got a new spot—don’t ask me where. I intend to enjoy it until everybody else does. ◆ P HOTO BY RACHAE L WARRI NER

We all live downstream.

So how do we keep that water clean? From fish to factories, swimmers to sewage, insects to instruments, learn how we've protected our water in the past—and the challenges we face tomorrow. sciencehistory.org/downstream Museum of the

M AY 20 22 G R I DP HILLY.COM 1 1

water

Knot in My Backyard

T

he canadian high arctic is a great place to raise a family—if you’re a bird like the red knot.

Bugs are everywhere, and the summer sun stays up pretty much all day, which means you can eat nonstop.

Thanks to the long and brutal winter, there isn’t much competition from other sorts of insect-eating animals like frogs and lizards. The key is having somewhere else to go when winter comes.

For the red knot, a robin-sized sandpiper, that place is on the other side of the planet, along the shores of southern South America.

“It’s an ideal lifestyle except for the commute,” says Dr. Jean Woods, volunteer and team leader with the Delaware Shorebird Project and former curator of birds at the Delaware Museum of Natural History.

12 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

Flying 9,000 miles each way takes a lot out of a bird, so the red knot needs to take a break and refuel.

For red knots heading north in the spring, the shores of the Delaware Bay have been one of the most important rest stops—their final chance to eat before they take off for the last leg of the flight to their arctic breeding grounds.

Human marathon runners might snack on sugary gels or energy drinks, but red knots like horseshoe crab eggs. Horseshoe crabs, which are more closely related to arachnids than to crustaceans, look a little like a helmet with a long spike for a tail. Every spring the horseshoe crabs converge on the beach for a breeding aggregation. The lumbering females dig into the sand to lay their eggs, but in the process they dig up

by

bernard brown

some of the eggs laid by previous females.

So it goes until the sand is littered with crab eggs, a bounty for birds like the red knot.

At least it was until the 1990s.

Dr. Larry Niles, a wildlife biologist involved with horseshoe crab conservation advocacy, recalls the scene on the sand in the 1980s when he was taking part in shorebird research.

“There were actual piles of eggs on the sand,” he says.

Those piles made it easy for red knots to eat their fill.

According to the Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition, horseshoe crabs weren’t heavily caught for anything besides hog feed and fertilizer up until the 1970s, when synthetic fertilizers became popular, relieving the pressure on the crabs. In the 1990s,

F L I KC R P H OTO S C O U R T E S Y O F S H E L L GA M E , PAU L W I L L I A M S A N D A N N M A R I E M O R R I S O N

Overfishing of horseshoe crabs has affected the shorebirds that eat them

Red knots stop in the Delaware Bay to feed on the eggs of horseshoe crabs (like the one seen above) during their migration. The bird’s numbers have gone down as the crabs have been overfished.

Their populations went way down in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 2005 was about the bottom.”

— dr. jean woods, Delaware Shorebird Project volunteer and team leader

though, they became popular as bait for animals that people like to eat, such as crabs and conch (a marine snail). Populations crashed as a result of intense harvesting Along with their use as bait, humans catch horseshoe crabs for their blood, which contains a chemical called Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), useful in testing pharmaceutical products for bacterial

contamination. The result is an industry in which fishers catch female horseshoe crabs (the females are larger than the males) to be bled and then return them to the water.

Government regulators assume that 5% of bled crabs survive after release, but that rate might be as high as 20%.

Around the same time that horseshoe crab populations were falling, red knot

numbers saw a steep decline, so much so that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed red knots as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2014.

“Their populations went way down in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 2005 was about the bottom,” Woods says. “There was a lot of action at that point in terms of limiting the harvest of horseshoe crabs and numbers came back up.”

Woods mentions several reasons red knot numbers declined, including recreational use of beaches scaring them away. The reduction in Delaware Bay horseshoe crab eggs seems to stand out as a major cause.

The horseshoe crab industry is regulated by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which sets limits for their use for bait as well as for the biomedical industry. How well the commission does its job is a matter of debate.

Niles and the Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition argue that the commission sets fishing targets that keep the horseshoe crab population too low to provide the abundance of eggs needed to feed red knots, not to mention aquatic life that feasts on the eggs washed into the sea. The coalition argues for lower horseshoe crab catch targets, along with habitat preservation and more attention to how the crabs are killed as bycatch when people fish for other species.

They also argue for increased use of a synthetic LAL alternative in drug manufacturing, which is already approved for use in Europe, Japan and China.

Due to global warming, more horseshoe crab eggs might not be enough to save the red knots, Wood says. Rising seas will cover the beaches the horseshoe crabs and red knots currently depend on. And as the poles heat up, their breeding and wintering grounds will change as well.

2020 was a tough year for the red knot.

Horseshoe crabs breed based on water temperature and wave action, Woods says, and relatively cold temperatures and heavy storms meant that the birds showed up and didn’t find very many eggs to eat. In 2021 conditions were better, but red knot numbers didn’t bounce back.

“Some people have interpreted this to mean numbers crashed,” Wood says. “They might be more resilient than that, though.” ◆ M AY 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 13

healing city

A Great Sign Mount Airy native had prolific career in science, thanks to his years at historic deaf school by constance garcia-barrio

W

hen a fire truck shrieked past mere feet away from Jay Basch at two years old, his mother noticed he didn’t react.

He kept looking at a store’s window display. Jay’s parents soon had him tested at the Shriners Children’s Hospital.

“The doctor told them, ‘Your son is healthy in every way, except he can’t hear,” Jay signs to me, while his daughter, Shari, who has some hearing impairment, interprets. “’Don’t waste money on quackery.

Spend it on education.’”

At the time, so-called “cures” included pilots taking deaf persons to high altitudes and then nose-diving to produce a fast change in pressure on the ears.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Early Hearing Detection and Intervention “estimates [that] 8.6 percent of newborns screened are diagnosed with a permanent hearing loss.” This number translates into about 1.1 million Pennsylvanians with hearing impairment.

Jay’s parents listened to the doctor. Despite his deafness, Jay, now 89, earned a doctorate in chemistry, and, through his discoveries and volunteering, continues to help many Philadelphians.

Fate lent a hand. The Basch family lived on Mount Airy’s West Gowen Avenue.

“Our house was right across from the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf [PSD],” Jay signs. The third-oldest such school in the country, it accepted students at age six, Shari says of the school, founded in 1820 by David Seixas (1788-1864), a crockery maker-dealer alarmed at the deaf and impoverished children on Philadelphia’s streets.

“When I was three, my parents hired Miss Ruthven, a PSD teacher, to come to the house after school [hours] and teach me,” Jay signs.

“He has some speech skills because Miss Ruthven trained him using a piece of paper,” Shari says. “For example, if you say the letter ‘p’ correctly, the puff of air makes the paper 14 GRID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

move a certain way. Some people understand him when he speaks and some don’t.”

Ten years at PSD gave Jay a strong educational and emotional foundation.

“PSD built up my self-confidence … and prepared me for challenges in the outside world,” he signs. “[Before I graduated] my father took me to different high schools. The public schools were too big, and some private schools rejected me because I’m deaf.”

Ultimately, he settled on Friends Select because it welcomed him and had small classes.

“The teachers were great, but in the 1950s the technological aids in today’s hearing and deaf communities—email, text messages, closed captions, videophones and sign language interpreters—didn’t exist,” Jay signs.

It was a challenge.

Later at the University of Pennsylvania, where Jay majored in zoology, he used the strategy of sitting beside girls and copying their notes. “Girls were better note takers than boys,” he signs.

“He had to convince the girls that he wasn’t flirting,” Marilyn, 88, Jay’s wife of 65 years, who’s hard of hearing, says and signs.

Once, a girl whose notes he’d copied got a lower score on an exam, Marilyn recalls.

“After that, Jay wouldn’t reveal his grades to anyone.”

TIPS FOR THE HEARING The Basches’ tips for hearing people on communicating with people who are deaf or hard of hearing: ➤

Face a deaf person when you speak.

➤

Don’t assume that every deaf person reads lips.

➤

Be aware that face masks or a beard can present an obstacle to reading lips.

➤

Speak slowly and articulate clearly.

➤

Use pen and paper to communicate if problems arise.

Majoring in zoology threw Jay in with pre-med students. “We became friends and communicated well,” Jay signs. “We had fun in the cat anatomy class.”

Jay finished a bachelor’s degree in five years. In time, with night and weekend courses, he earned a master of chemistry from Drexel and doctorate from Temple.

After graduating from Penn, Jay interviewed with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Personnel staff brought in someone who, though not a sign-language interpreter, could understand and communicate with Jay. USDA’s Eastern Regional Research Facility in Wyndmoor, Montgomery County, snapped him up.

“I was stationed in the Animal Protein Pioneering Section,” Jay signs. He zeroed in on dairy products. “They had cows at farms nearby, and the most delicious ice cream you ever tasted.”

Jay devised methods using electrophoresis, an apparatus that separates the proteins in a gel using electric current, to detect the adulteration of skim milk, nonfat dry milk and buttermilk powder. In addition, some of the more than 50 scientific papers he wrote or co-wrote focused on the isolation and properties of proteins in milk products.

He also found ways to boost the benefits of dairy products.

“I studied the homogenization of milk, where fat globules are broken up so that they don’t separate into cream,” Jay signs.

“You want the fat globules to stay large enough so that they pass through the body and don’t get stuck in blood vessels.

Jay made a name for himself as a “cheese detective” for environmental watchdog agencies. “Whey is a byproduct of making cheese,” Jay signs, “and some companies were dumping whey into streams and rivers illegally, which caused unwanted algae to grow. In order to avoid penalties for pollution, companies would add whey to dairy products. I would analyze these products to detect whey proteins.”

Jay had no trouble explaining his ideas to colleagues. “I communicated with them by using my voice and lip-reading,” Jay signs.

“If necessary, we wrote things down.” It worked. The U.S. Civil Service Commission named him Outstanding Handicapped Federal Employee of the Year in 1969, one of many awards he garnered during his career.

While Jay helped the USDA ensure that

Marilyn and Jay Basch pose in front of the old Pennsylvania School for the Deaf building on Germantown Avenue where Jay attended elementary school. The building is now a bible college.

milk products adhere to their guidelines, he and Marilyn have helped the deaf community, too. “My parents believe in giving back,” Shari says.

The Basches have been longtime members of the 103-year-old Silent Athletic Club of Philadelphia, where Jay and Marilyn met.

Jay has held many positions, including president, at the facility, which provided a place for playing sports and socializing. “We have volunteered with the Hebrew Association of the Deaf and Deaf and Hard of Hearing Senior Citizens of Delaware Valley,” Jay signs.

P HOTO BY C H R IS BA K ER EV E N S

The Basches have given much time to PSD. “For years, I was the volunteer manager for the monthly alumni newsletter,” Marilyn says and signs. “I handled printing, collating, folding, inserting into envelopes, adding addresses and return labels and … mailing them.”

The newsletter promotes a close-knit alumni association.

“We have about 397 members, and it’s growing,” says the president Denise Brown.

“That includes a lot of networking with people helping each other.”

Jay also launched the school’s Deaf Culture & Heritage Center in the 1990s.

“Deaf people love to see their past,” signs Jay, still the volunteer custodian of the center. “The museum has books, documents, rare photographs and memorabilia like china dishes from when PSD was a residential school. The museum helps to educate people about what it means to be deaf.” ◆ To learn more about the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, visit psd.org or call (215) 9514700 (voice) or (267) 331-4748 (videophone).

M AY 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 5

BUSY BEE

Black-owned corner store offers oasis of healthy, fresh food in a food desert

T

story by claire marie porter • photography by chris baker evens

he nickname “B” has followed Yasmeen Brown around most of her life.

She also happens to be a bug enthusiast, with a deep appreciation for bees especially.

“I’m obsessed with insects that do things,” she says. “Insects that pollinate, insects that dig, ladybugs, bees … ” She always dreamt of starting a brand that uses the image of a bumblebee.

Bee’s Tiny Market, a corner store on Brill Street in the Lawncrest area of Northeast Philadelphia, is the manifestation of that dream. Opened at the end of January, the market offers local, minority-owned brands and healthy options for the surrounding food desert, Brown says.

Brown was previously an operations manager at Instacart, where she hired over 2,500 people as in-store shoppers and launched Instacart’s service at several Whole Foods locations.

She says the mission of her market arose from a personal need. When she was a single, working mother living in Germantown, she struggled to get from the daycare to the grocery store and back home, she says.

16 GRID P H IL LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

“I remember thinking, ‘Dang, I wish the corner store sold really good stuff,’” she says.

She was enamored with the concept of 1960s and ’70s corner stores that sold groceries or contained butcher shops. Walk-

Yasmeen Brown is the owner of Bee’s Tiny Market in Lawncrest.

Brown stocks Plant Basting Shop maple sugar (below left), which is made in Fishtown.

able, reliable stores for kitchen staples or that missing ingredient was not something that existed in her neighborhood.

She also sensed a real lack of education surrounding healthy food while working with Whole Foods. She realized many people didn’t understand “real food” and assumed words like “fresh” and “organic” translated to “expensive” and “inaccessible,” she says.

“I developed a passion for explaining that to people,” she says, “letting them know that [healthy food] was accessible. People were like, ‘Wow, you should do this. You should educate people.’”

As a mother of five children, Brown just never had the time or funds to start her own business. But the pandemic presented an

opportunity. By saving money and receiving a stimulus check she was finally able to lease a retail property.

Between her management experience and her knack for community education, she says that entrepreneurship came easily.

The vision was a walkable neighborhood market that highlights local products, especially those that are minority-owned and independent. A place that carries staples, seasonal produce, meat, healthy snacks, local favorites such as Bassetts Ice Cream and some essential toiletries.

“Our main mission is fresh, our second is Philly favorites,” she says.

She sees Bee’s as a “bridge store,” an opportunity for education, she says, which is why she offers both organic and conventional products. She doesn’t want to scare people away with the organic label, though she does eventually want to funnel out the conventional products.

She notes that she doesn’t carry any meat with steroids, and it’s all Halal or Kosher, which customers are used to seeing because of the area’s prominent Muslim population.

The market also offers meal kits, an idea Brown adapted from Whole Foods. The kits are hand-selected and she offers recipes anyone can make from scratch. She says they’re great for a date night or family dinner.

She also offers CSA-inspired boxes— tailored for people who want something specific, like a smoothie-making box—and offers organic or conventional, and even discounted vegetable boxes so customers can afford fresh produce for the week.

The market has been received warmly and has ample neighborhood and family support, says Brown.

“My mother helps me,” she says. “She’s

We want it to be in the neighborhood. That’s our niche.”

— yasmeen brown, Bee’s Tiny Market owner

my rock, as it pertains to this dream. My husband helps as much as he can.”

She currently has a small team of employees, with two from the neighborhood.

Employee Hallé Ahmaddiya says she was immediately interested in Brown’s mission when she learned about the new kind of corner store.

“Accessibility and community are extremely important to me,” says Ahmaddiya. “Accessibility in general, but especially when it comes to food.”

She has experience in farming but has never worked as a grocer. She says Brown’s market stands apart from other stores offering similar products because it is Black-owned and stocked with Black-owned brands.

It also just “feels warm when you walk inside,” she says.

Paul Minnar, a frequent customer, lives on the same corner as the market and was immediately drawn to the products. He appreciates Brown’s commitment to healthier and more sustainable foods, and thinks it’s an important change that needs to happen in his community. He personally enjoys the meal kits, and his favorite product is her cheesecake.

“It’s great to see the push for change in the community,” he says. “So many corner stores in Philly are pretty dangerous to even walk into, but Bee’s is a peaceful environment with good products that I enjoy.”

There have been some financial challenges, as Brown did not apply for any business loans to open the store, though she is currently in the process of doing so. She says the ups and downs have been rewarding.

“When I finally opened this place, it was like, ‘Wow, I did it.’ And when we make over $200 a day I am ecstatic,” she says.

It’s the type of store where one customer comes in and buys $100 worth of groceries, and another, like one neighborhood regular, buys just five mangoes. Sometimes customers recommend products or give suggestions, which Brown loves.

“It means they want to come back,” she says, and that they rely on the business. “It means that what I dreamed, it’s actually coming true,” she says. “I love being an entrepreneur.”

Brown says she envisions growth.

“My goal is to have one [tiny market] in every borough of Philly,” she says, especially focusing on providing affordable access to healthy food in areas that are considered food deserts. And the stores will follow the same model: small, accessible corner stores.

“We want it to be in the neighborhood,” she says. “That’s our niche.” She wants it to be a place that kids can come by themselves and feel safe, adding that they do not sell tobacco products.

“Every part of Philly should have that kind of safe place.” ◆

M AY 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 17

Despite not having proper permits, the Union League cleared at least 43 heritage trees at their Torresdale golf club.

On March 1, L&I posted a stop work order.

WHO SPEAKS FOR THE TREES?

Tree laws in Philadelphia have loopholes big enough to drive a logging truck through story by bernard brown • photography by troy bynum

O

n january 3, 2022, the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) told the Union League of Philadelphia that it had to wait to cut down 43 large, native trees at its golf club in Torresdale. The private members-only club had sought to clear the trees in order to expand the golf course and add a golf training center. Cutting down the trees, protected under Philadelphia law as heritage trees—larger trees of particularly valuable species—required 18 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

special permission from the Zoning Board of Adjustment, according to the referral notice from L&I. That didn’t stop the Union League.

On January 23, L&I investigated and cited the golf club for multiple violations, including one for disturbing more than 5,000 square feet of land without a permit. These land disturbance permits force developers to take measures to prevent soil from washing off the disturbed landscape and into local waterways, such as Byberry Creek. On

March 1 the golf club failed another inspection from L&I, and the department posted a stop work order effective March 17th.

Any project disturbing more than one acre of soil is also required to submit plans for approval to the Philadelphia Water Department to explain how stormwater runoff will be managed after construction is complete. This in turn requires another permit from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), called a National Pollution Discharge Elimination

Many of these trees are probably close to 100 years old or older, and whoever said they were sickly is very wrong...”

— torre sdale re sident

System permit. The DEP’s tracking system shows that the Union League only applied for this state permit on March 7.

Grid reached out to L&I to ask why the department hadn’t also cited the Union League for cutting down the heritage trees without the proper permits. An L&I representative responded: “It’s really a matter of priorities and reasonable expectations.

L&I’s core mission is protecting public safety in the context of construction activity.”

In addition to clearing the trees, the Union League had constructed a new building without any advance permitting, and the inspectors had focused on the land disturbance and building violations.

L&I inspectors have a lot on their plates, including ensuring that demolition and construction activities don’t endanger the lives of Philadelphians, that electrical systems won’t spark fires and that buildings will be accessible for people with disabilities, among other concerns.

The fact that they are additionally responsible for interpreting and enforcing rules protecting Philadelphia’s trees points to a major

weakness in the city’s forest canopy.

Philadelphia’s tree code requires landowners to identify trees, including heritage trees, that will need special permission to be removed and that will be replaced in their development plans. The code also leaves it to arborists hired by landowners to identify trees that don’t require special permission or won’t be replaced, for example trees that are dead or diseased.

The Union League put the L&I inspector, who is not an arborist, in an impossible situation of having to review a landscape of stumps and dismembered trees and determine which should have required a permit to cut. As the L&I representative put it: “The inspector would not be expected to, in addition, surmise that the heritage tree provisions of the Zoning Code may have also been violated and issue a citation. This is especially true given the difficulty of proving that the violation occurred, because the inspector would not be able to testify to having personally observed heritage trees on the property.”

L&I’s citations required the Union

League to obtain permits for the earth disturbance and for the new use. Ordinarily developers seek approval ahead of time from the community for projects like this by reaching out to local organizations designated as “Registered Community Organizations.” These organizations then provide feedback and vote on whether to support the project.

In this case, the golf course development took the community by surprise.

On February 9, Ken Law, the Treasurer of the West Torresdale/Morrell Park Civic Association, alerted staff of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation that the Union League had cut down an estimated 15 acres of trees at the club, visible behind the Thomas Mitchell Playground and John Hancock Elementary School. Before the cutting began, about 55 acres of woods stood between the club’s golf course and trap shooting range and the neighborhood, largely composed of row houses, to the north.

Law’s email stated that the club was “clearing land in or very close to flood plains, on slopes [greater than] 15 degrees, removing habitat of many animals, and subjecting the residential neighborhood [to] the sounds of unabated … shooting and errant golf balls.” Byberry Creek runs through the woods being cleared, and the noise from shotguns had drawn noise complaints from neighbors in the past.

Law, who declined to comment for this story, also made 311 calls to report the tree cutting, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer article about the golf course development.

It is hard to imagine that the Union League violated local zoning and land use regulations out of ignorance. The current president of the Union League’s board of trustees, Charles J. Davidson, teaches full time at the Daniel M. DiLella Center for Real Estate at the Villanova School of Business, serves as a member of the Lower Merion Township Zoning Hearing Board and previously served on the Planning Commission of Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County.

Union League CEO Jeff McFadden presented the club’s development plans at a March 3 special meeting of the West Torresdale/Morrell Park Civic Association.

There he requested belated approval for a new use as well as for cutting 43 heritage trees, which, by that time, had already been cut down.

The Union League told the civic M AY 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 9

association members that, “much of what was removed was either dead or diseased,” according to the minutes from the meeting.

They also presented plans to replace many of the trees they had taken down. McFadden has not responded to Grid’s requests for an interview.

The civic association voted 62 to 21 to retroactively support the Union League’s application to the zoning board for the permits to cut down the heritage trees and to allow the new “recreational” use.

A neighbor familiar with the woods before the cutting, who requested to speak anonymously, visited on March 30 and observed a new fence behind the playground, topped with barbed wire. Behind it, apparently freshly-cut tree trunks sat stacked up with logging machinery nearby.

“It is extremely sad how many trees they took out,” they said. “Many of these trees are probably close to 100 years old or older,

and whoever said they were sickly is very wrong. ...[T]he inner parts of the trunk are perfect. Not a blessed thing wrong with them. They took out hundreds of trees.”

The Union League told the civic association that it planned to replace the heritage trees with new plantings, as is required

by Philadelphia’s zoning code. By then, of course, the trees were already gone, and there was no independent assessment to back up the Union League’s claims of how many trees needed to be replaced.

The tree code’s reliance on landowners and L&I inspectors who aren’t tree experts creates loopholes big enough to drive a logging truck through. Even if the Union League hadn’t completely flouted the city’s construction laws, it likely would have been permitted to cut down the trees after seeking approval for plans to replace the trees from the civic association, and then

On March 3 the Union League requested

approval for cutting 43 heritage trees, which, by that time, had already been cut down.

obtaining a special exemption from the zoning board.

Like most municipal tree codes, Philadelphia focuses on documenting and then replacing trees rather than protecting them from being cut down in the first place.

“So much of these ordinances are about measurement and mitigation,” Pete Smith, program manager for urban forestry at the Arbor Day Foundation says. “You can still cut the tree down. The public often doesn’t get that. So every time a tree comes down the public asks what is going on.”

Though tree lovers might recoil at the sight of a bare stump, there are plenty of reasons to cut a tree down.

This winter Parks & Recreation took down a beloved but ailing sugar maple on the Belmont Plateau. If it had stood in a forest, its rotting interior might have provided habitat for owls, flying squirrels and other wildlife.

If a limb broke off, it would have hit another tree or the forest floor. In a busy park, however, its falling limbs and splitting trunk posed a risk to people beneath. The same would be true next to a house or a sidewalk.

On February 9, Ken Law alerted Parks & Recreation that about 15 acres of trees had been cleared behind Thomas Mitchell Playground.

20 GRID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

Large trees store a lot of carbon, help cool the air and buffer the watershed from heavy rains, but they can also heave up the sidewalk, rendering the pavement impassable for people who depend on wheelchairs to get around.

Exotic tree species can displace native species without providing the same benefits to the local food web, and forest restoration projects often involve cutting the former in order to plant the latter. Forests can also overwhelm other habitat types. Meadow restoration, for example, often involves cutting back trees.

And of course, trees often get in the way of construction projects.

“I would suggest that tree cover in neighborhoods is as much a result of stability in housing as any other factor,” Smith says.

For decades, stability in Philadelphia led to increased tree cover. By the 1970s, virtually all of the city’s farmlands had been built up with row house or suburban-style developments, and the trees planted along these streets and in thousands of new yards grew taller and matured.

Housing patterns in older neighborhoods also led to tree growth, as mostly white residents fled for newer neighborhoods and many residents of color, hobbled by racist housing and lending systems, stayed.

Vacant lots either sprouted trees on their own or were landscaped with trees by beautification efforts.

And in a perverse twist, tree cover in parks increased as budgets shrank. With less money to mow and maintain landscaping, woods grew up in Fairmount Park’s unused spaces.

Researchers from the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Pennsylvania analyzed Philadelphia’s tree cover in a 2021 study using aerial images and found that overall, between 1970 and 2010, the city’s tree cover went from 18.7% to 23%.

However as Philadelphia’s population loss has turned around and construction has boomed, trees have paid the price. The city’s 2018 Tree Canopy Assessment used LiDAR (aerial laser imaging that can detect vegetation) to determine that between 2008 and 2018, the city gained 1,980 acres of trees but lost 3,075, for a net loss of 1,095 acres, or 6% of its tree cover.

The report recommends that, “Preserving existing tree canopy is the most effective means for securing future tree canopy, as

loss is an event but gain is a process.” Most of the city’s lost tree cover had been on residential land. “While some trees on residential land use likely have reached maximum life expectancy, factors such as construction and landowner removal are more likely to play a role,” according to the assessment.

The assessment found that the vast majority of Philadelphia’s tree canopy is on residential land or on wooded land, which isn’t surprising given that residential land covers most of the city, and that wooded land, by definition, is covered in trees. What is surprising, given the need to protect the city’s tree cover, is that the zoning code’s tree protections generally don’t apply to either.

Philadelphia’s zoning code exempts “lots with a principal single-family, two-family, parks and open space, or urban agriculture use” from heritage tree protections as well as other landscaping requirements to replace trees removed in construction.

Around the same time the Union League was cutting down its trees, the Cobbs Creek Foundation was clearing about 100 acres of forest, likely including several hundred heritage trees, at the Cobbs Creek and Karakung golf courses. Since they stood on land zoned as “recreation,” which falls under the “parks and open space” use, the trees on the golf course were completely unprotected, and the foundation is not required to replace them.

“Trees are going to be removed for all kinds of purposes. It’s not unreasonable to ask developers to make adjustments. The other side is that if we can’t save them all and they’re not all worth saving, can we mitigate and use more public space to add that tree canopy where it can thrive,” says Smith, from the Arbor Day Foundation. “I encourage every city to look around and try something different.

On the whole, when you calculate the benefit of those trees for air quality, water quality and the health benefits that trees provide humans, it is worth the effort.”

Other cities have tree ordinances covering public lands as well as smaller residential lots, and city arborists involved in oversight.

Austin, Texas, stands out as having particularly stringent tree protections. There a city arborist is involved with approving the removal of any tree with a trunk 19 inches wide or more (“diameter at breast height” is a commonly used measure of tree size). Removing even dead or diseased heritage trees requires approval of the city arborist’s office.

Cities such as San Antonio administer tree funds that developers can pay into when they cut down a tree, and that are then used by the city to plant more trees.

In 2008, the administration of then-Mayor Michael Nutter set a target to increase the city’s tree cover to 30%. Given that the city lost 6% of its urban forest canopy in the next decade, the city is failing, and much of that failure stems from an inability to protect the city’s existing trees, whether they are in a backyard, along a street or on a golf course.

TreePhilly, the urban forestry program run by Parks & Recreation and the Fairmount Park Conservancy, plans to release a new tree plan for the city later this spring.

The draft tree plan, released in 2021 for public comment, proposes changes to strengthen Philadelphia’s tree protections, including creating a city forester office to be involved with the planning process, increasing the numbers of trees required to be planted by developers, issuing fines to developers for not replacing trees, and establishing a tree fund with the proceeds of those fines. It also proposes measures to mitigate tree challenges for homeowners, for example having the city pay to repair sidewalk damage caused by trees. The draft plan does not mention expanding tree protections onto smaller residential lots or public property.

Although Parks & Recreation declined to make TreePhilly staff available to comment for this article, others involved in the development of the new tree plan noted the need to improve Philadelphia’s system for regulating tree removal.

“There are ongoing discussions to make the tree replacement ordinance clearer and more effective so Philadelphia’s canopy cover will be increased and protected,” Jason Lubar, associate director of urban forestry for the Morris Arboretum, says. “It would be beneficial if the folks reviewing the plans at L&I did have some environmental background in arboriculture, landscape design, that kind of thing. Or if they had questions about the submission, they [could] reach out to a knowledgeable party.”

Overall, though, Lubar thinks the city is moving forward.

“Personally I’m glad to see an ordinance in place and a movement to keep improving it,” Lubar says. “Preserving and enhancing the tree canopy, especially in urban areas, is vital to the health of people and the environment.” ◆ M AY 20 22 G R I DP HILLY.COM 21

BUILDINGS AND CONSTRUCTION ISSUE

RETRO FUTURE

A city initiative and a State Senate bill show promise for retrofitting homes, but not without big challenges story by starr herr-cardillo

P

hiladelphia’s built environment is responsible for about 70% of its carbon footprint, making it a key sector to tackle in order to meet climate goals. Building new, efficient buildings is part of the solution, but experts say there’s a practical need to work with buildings that already exist, a large percentage of which are individual homes.

“Housing is an enormously intersectional issue,” says Rabbi Julie Greenberg of POWER Interfaith, which she describes as a “multi-faith, multi-racial organizing force in the state of Pennsylvania for racial and economic justice for a livable planet.”

According to Greenberg, retrofitting housing is one of the biggest challenges for reaching energy efficiency targets and one that’s key to addressing climate change through a climate justice framework—important, as Philadelphia ranks fourth in the lower 48 states for highest energy burden on low-income households, an issue that disproportionately impacts communities of color.

Greenberg is encouraged by programs like the Philadelphia Energy Authority (PEA) Built to Last and State Senator Nikil Saval’s Whole-Home Repairs Act, which was introduced at the end of March. Both propose methods to streamline home repair, weatherization and electrification by leveraging existing programs and funding while creating quality jobs and workforce training opportunities.

Greenberg is clear that doing this work is 22 GRID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

going to be a huge undertaking. “In order for Philadelphia to meet its democratically chosen decarbonization goals by 2050, we need to make a massive, adaptive, complex change,” says Greenberg. “It’s not an easy lift.”

Over the past several years, the Office of Sustainability has been focused on improving the energy performance of larger, commercial buildings, instituting an energy benchmarking program designed to help building owners both reduce their energy use and save money and, more recently, the Building Energy Performance Policy, one of the first mandates for energy reduction requiring compliance for large nonresidential buildings.

“One of the things we’re pivoting to now and want to focus on is the residential piece,” says Christine Knapp, the director of the Office of Sustainability. “It’s just so much harder because there are 600,000 single family homes versus 3,000 to 5,000 big buildings.”

Climate change means Philadelphia’s future will be a lot hotter and wetter, with more frequent heat waves and more severe storms that will cause damage and flooding. That’s a real health and safety issue for people living in housing that leaks, floods or that can’t be efficiently heated and cooled.

“There are a lot of programs and policies that are trying to address the problem, but they often don’t work in coordination with one another,” says Knapp.

Waitlists for existing programs are comically long, and when issues are interrelated, it’s crucial that they be addressed holistically.

The Whole-Home Repairs Act (Senate Bill 1135) is a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Saval, whose district includes parts of Philadelphia. Aging housing stock, displacement and energy burdens for homeowners and renters are major issues in Pennsylvania overall, and Saval’s office estimates that about 280,000 homes across the state are in serious need of repair.

“That can be connected to an overall cycle of displacement and gentrification,” says Saval. “If people who are unable to make repairs to their homes, or energy efficiency improvements to lower their utility bills, [they] may end up losing their homes to disrepair or just the sheer cost of upkeep.” Adding to the urgency is the fact that displacement is P HOTO G RAP HY BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

In a policy hearing held earlier this month, Aimena Lipscomb, a tenant living in Mount Airy, testified in support of the bill “on behalf of Black Philadelphians, especially women, who are continuously disregarded within the city and state.” Lipscomb recounted a series Alon Abramson (right) of the of maintenance issues that Philadelphia made her bedroom uninEnergy Authority habitable, her utility bills and homeowner Faruq Morris. skyrocket and forced her Morris’ West to sleep on her couch for Oak Lane home is undergoing more than six months. “I rennovations as pray for a resolution that part of the Built to Last program. includes open access to resources, a streamlined application process and vetting process for landlords and dedicated advocacy for those who feel trapped in a system that … does not support tenants and elders of our community,” Lipscomb concluded.

So far, the bill has received bipartisan support. Saval says they would aim to repair around 10,000 homes per year.

This isn’t a $2 million problem. It’s more like a $500 million dollar problem in Philly alone.”

— al on abrams on, director of residential programs at the Philadelphia Energy Authority

often followed by demolition, he says, which expends additional energy, wastes reusable materials and eliminates affordable housing.

“All of that fuels our climate crisis.”

The act would create a “one-stop shop” for home repair and weatherization and create a fund to provide grants of up to $50,000 for homeowners and small-scale landlords for repairs, hire staff to facilitate applicant access to different programs, and provide stipends and funding to support workforce

development and improve retention.

The bill would also benefit renters.

It’s estimated that about 75% of affordable housing comes from privately-owned, unsubsidized rentals. That means that when landlords are unable or unwilling to make repairs to their buildings, they cause energy burdens and health hazards for tenants.

Through the act, smaller landlords would qualify for grants as long as they sign on to maintain affordability requirements.

The concept behind this potential law is remarkably similar to the Built to Last program. Over the past several months, PEA director of residential programs Alon Abramson has been overseeing a 50-home pilot project that’s providing critical insight likely to inform the Whole-Home Repairs approach, should the act pass.

Central to Built to Last is reducing homeowners’ energy burdens through weatherization and system upgrades with minimal disruption, allowing residents to remain in their homes during the process.

Weatherization and air tightening are key to improving building energy performance. When starting from scratch or doing deep retrofits (when a space can be stripped down to the studs), remarkable performance can be achieved. The Passive House standard represents the high end of the spectrum, where buildings are made to be so airtight that virtually no natural air circulation occurs. Achieving such a seal in existing buildings requires near total replacement of doors and windows plus intrusive sealing measures to the building envelope, all drastically increasing costs.

Retrofitting to that extreme is simply not feasible for Built to Last, but Abramson says that the program can still provide a signifiM AY 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 23

cant improvement for homeowners. “We’re finding that our approach to the challenge is sound, but standard weatherization is not getting us as far as we had hoped,” says Abramson. “Basically, envelope sealing on a Philadelphia row home that’s occupied is incredibly challenging.”

“We’re trying to figure out how far we can go given the constraints and being minimally disruptive,” he says. “We’re exploring what work can be done now, and what might be done later, even at point of sale …

We’re having to embrace the reality that we will not be able to get to incredibly high levels of performance for all of our properties.”

Deeper retrofitting could work well for an entity like the housing authority, he said, which owns properties and could make improvements when units are unoccupied.

At this point, Abramson says they’ve begun work on about 20 homes. The first pri-

Abramson explains. “It’s more like a $500 million dollar problem in Philly alone.”

According to data gathered by the Healthy Rowhouse Project, 70% of all housing units in the city are row houses and 75% of those are over 50 years old. That means that understanding how to best repair, weatherize and electrify older row houses at maximal efficiency is critical to meeting climate goals.

Ideally, total electrification and solarization are part of the package, so that homeowners aren’t stuck using more costly, dirty energy in the future, but Abramson says that currently there isn’t an electrification funding source.

“We would love to see some federal support if we were really going to move on electrification, especially for low-income households that would require subsidies,” he says, “but that goes beyond the home and requires grid updates.”

With regard to climate change, one of our biggest challenges is retrofitting the existing built environment.”

— erica avrami, assistant professor of historic preservation at Columbia University

ority is stabilizing the home and addressing any major deferred maintenance that might impact energy performance; next is weatherizing and basic air tightening; and the final step is converting the home to electric, if and when feasible, and adding solar panels to further offset the cost.

Though the pilot was initially estimated to cost about $60,000 per home, unforeseen complications—including inflation, supply chain issues and rising labor costs—mean that average costs have come out a bit higher. But just because it’s challenging doesn’t mean the approach isn’t viable. “I think we can continue iterating our approach to come up with solutions that are cost effective that will get us closer and closer to maximizing energy performance,” Abramson says.

Implementing the pilot is a start, but scaling it to address Philadelphia’s roughly 60,000 low-income homeowner-occupied houses is the next hurdle.

“This isn’t a $2 million problem,” 24 GRID P H IL LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

Unfortunately, at least in the academic sector, there hasn’t been much research on how to pragmatically retrofit existing buildings.

As Erica Avrami, assistant professor of historic preservation at Columbia University points out, in the academic realm, dominant architecture programs are teaching new design. On the other hand, the much smaller and less influential preservation programs tend to focus on places of heritage value and their associated narratives.

“With regard to climate change, one of our biggest challenges is retrofitting the existing built environment,” says Avrami.

“There is a huge gap in professional education between historic preservation, which focuses on a subset of significant buildings, and architecture, which focuses on designing new structures.”

Historically, she believes, the preservation field has mostly aligned itself with sustainability as a convenient means of advancing its heritage goals. The famous adage by Carl

Elefante that “the greenest building is the one that’s already built” lacks context and narrowly focuses on the energy embodied in building materials alone—an important component, but one that doesn’t acknowledge operational energy or building lifecycle upgrades.

Avrami’s research about preservation and sustainability is timely as it has drawn attention to the issue of energy code exemptions for historic buildings at a time when new greenhouse gas regulations may no longer honor them. In most cities, older buildings that meet certain eligibility criteria have been exempt from more stringent energy standards since the 1970s.

Those exemptions, Avrami’s research shows, can be traced back to one questionable study on operating energy.

“They cherry-picked the data,” she says, “because preservationists at that time weren’t seeking policy reform, they were interested in rationalizing the importance of older buildings and maintaining the policy status quo.”

Avrami recalls that at the same time preservation was making the case for special exemptions, incentives for solar energy were proliferating as a result of the oil embargo.

“Preservationists could have forged important research and new practices at that moment,” she says, “but then oil got cheap and energy consumption was less of a national imperative. The energy code waivers afforded historic buildings meant preservationists didn’t have to prioritize energy efficiency for decades.”

But, she believes there is hope.

“With the climate crisis and newlyemerging greenhouse gas laws,” she says, “that is changing.”

As cities adopt bolder mandates, the onus will land on building owners to meet them, which is why programs like Built to Last and Whole-Home Repairs are so important. They provide the needed incentives and financial support for property owners who couldn’t otherwise afford retrofitting, while also refining a practical approach to a complex endeavor.

“There are exceptional leaders within the city agencies who are doing everything they can to move these changes forward in a way that works for all the stakeholders,” says Greenberg. “Philadelphia programs are going to need to be well-funded and brought to scale.” ◆

Spring is here!

Café and Cider House are

Now Open 7 days a week!

8am to 7pm

Enjoy Fresh Air,

Beautiful Scenery, and Great Wholesome Food with your friends and family!

1 Boathouse Row • 215-978-0900

cosmicfoods.com

MAY 6, 2022, 8AM - 7PM IN-PERSON @ PENN STATE AT THE NAVY YARD AND LIVE ONLINE

18+ SESSIONS, 4 WALKING TOURS, EXPO FLOOR + HAPPY HOUR! Learn and earn CEUs (AIA/GBCI/LFA/PHIUS) on topics including: Integrated Design, Project Financing, Embodied Carbon, Indoor Air Quality, Equity, Passive House, Living Building Challenge, Green Stormwater Infrastructure, Energy Efficiency, Circular Economy/Zero Waste, Net Zero, Sustainable Agriculture, and more!

REGISTER AT GREENBUILDINGUNITED.ORG/SYMPOSIUM

M AY 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 25

BUILDINGS AND CONSTRUCTION ISSUE

WORTH SALVAGING Philly Reclaim founder says the organization is in trouble and the city has the power to save it

story by sophia d. merow • photography by chris baker evens

T

o greg trainor, executive director of Philly Reclaim, deconstruction is a no-brainer.

An environmentally-friendlier alternative to demolition, deconstruction diverts building materials from the landfill and enables, through reuse, preservation of the embodied energy therein. And because systematically dismantling a building is more labor-intensive than leveling it with an excavator or a wrecking ball, deconstruction promises job creation, too.

Trainor has had a deconstruction-based vision for a better Philadelphia for over a decade now. Inspired by his tenure in AmeriCorps, he incorporated Philadelphia Community Corps (PCC) in 2011 with the goal of revitalizing blighted neighborhoods by deconstructing abandoned buildings. In 2014, he added job training as well as Philly Reclaim, the retail arm of PCC and the city’s only nonprofit building material reuse center.

Press coverage of PCC and Philly Reclaim at its pre-pandemic peak portrayed it as an enterprise with a solid handle on all three components of the triple bottom line: people, planet and profit.

Its yearlong job training program provided Philadelphians facing barriers to employment the opportunity to become certified deconstruction technicians. Tax deductions incentivized developers and individual property owners alike to not only donate reusable materials but also hire Trainor’s crews to do the deconstruction—of row houses, churches, factories, Main Line mansions, Jersey Shore bungalows and all 250,000 square feet of the old 26 GRID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

West Philadelphia High School. Between payment-for-service and the sale of architectural salvage, the operation stayed afloat—barely.

“As a startup you have to fake a degree of success,” Trainor says. But he is done pretending. “There’s no more time to act like everything is great.”

The proximate cause of Trainor’s predicament in March was a paperwork error by the Internal Revenue Service. PCC’s 501(c)(3) status was revoked in August 2021 because the office misplaced the organization’s 990 forms. The IRS eventually—after six months and intervention by U.S. Rep/ Dwight Evans’ office—acknowledged the mistake and reinstated the 501(c)(3), but not before PCC, unable to fundraise or offer tax incentives, had suffered a 70% decrease in revenue.

And this was just the latest setback.

“We’ve just been going from one crisis to the next for years,” Trainor says.

PCC has never had the funding needed to staff properly or lock in a resale space. Philly Reclaim has moved three times in the past seven years, relocating its fragile and unwieldy inventory from one barely functional warehouse to another. (Trainor tells of frequent flooding and power outages and of restrooms “literally collapsing into the floor.”)

Trainor’s ability to hire help has waxed and waned with the outfit’s boom-bust profitability cycle. He is operating solo as of March, putting our conversation on hold periodically to help customers.

“I’m here by myself trying to keep this thing going,” he apologizes.

Trainor readily concedes his own

shortcomings and missteps. Perhaps it would have been wiser to establish a for-profit contracting business before launching PCC, to achieve financial stability himself before taking the helm of a nonprofit. And maybe he should have undertaken one of the enterprise’s halves—the building material reuse center or the deconstruction job training program—in isolation rather than trying to realize his whole vision all at once. He could have been more disciplined about making sure the organization didn’t overextend itself, that it lived within its perennially meager means.

But even as Trainor questions his own decisions, he also questions Philadelphia’s failure to step in and substantively support his poorly-funded dream.

Trainor would like the city to contract PCC to deconstruct some of the hundreds of buildings it demolishes annually. He’d like Philly Reclaim to be considered for at

Left: Philadelphia Community Corps founder Greg Trainor stands in the Philly Reclaim warehouse.

Right: A reclaimed mantel for sale is decorated with art made with old RustOleum cans.

There’s no more time to act like everything is great.”

— gre g trainor, founder of Philadelphia Community Corps least semi-permanent tenancy in one of the vacant city-owned buildings in, for instance, the Navy Yard. Cities such as Portland, Oregon, have used ordinances to get deconstruction and reuse industries off the ground, he notes, and Baltimore’s “whole ecosystem” of deconstruction and reuse nonprofits has proven the feasibility of the model he’s striving to implement in Philly.

Trainor has talked deconstruction with state senators and representatives, City Councilmembers as well as staffers of city agencies such as the Philadelphia Housing Authority, the Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) and the Managing Director’s Office.

“They all tell us the same thing, which is they love what we do,” Trainor reports.

Director of the Office of Sustainability Christine Knapp affirms this when Grid asks for insight into the city’s thinking on deconstruction and reuse operations like Trainor’s: “The city supports the mission of Philadelphia Community Corps/Reclaim Philly … and continues to engage with the organization.”

L&I commissioner Ralph DiPietro was slated to tour Philly Reclaim’s facility, Knapp says, and “the Commerce Department has worked with the organization to identify alternate spaces for growth as well as funding opportunities, and will continue to do so.”

Trainor has received comparable encouragement for years now, and yet material assistance never seems to materialize.

But why?

“There is a lot of complexity that we have not had the bandwidth to explore due to the pandemic and related budget constraints,” offers Knapp.

Economic development consultant Terry Gillen offers another perspective.

“People in the government are usually really overworked, and they’re doing what’s on their plate right now,” says Gillen, whose work with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Pay for Success program taught her about coaxing policymakers to think on timescales longer than one- or two-year budget cycles. “Unless the mayor embraces deconstruction, it’s not in any one department head’s interest to do this.” ◆ M AY 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 27

Left: Fern Gookin and Jon Wybar of Revolution Recovery. Right: A dumptruck empties its haul at Revolution Recovery’s sorting facility in Holmesburg.

‘THE FINEST DUMPSTERS IN TOWN’

Revolution Recovery leaders discuss where the market for recycling used building materials has been— and where they hope it’s headed

What did the construction and demolition recycling industry look like in 2004 when Revolution Recovery started? wybar: At that time, LEED and green building were just hitting the construction market. But the waste industry was not interested in multiple dumpsters to separate recycling. So after pitching people on drywall recycling, contractors kept saying, “Well, okay, but I need help with all these other materials.”

We quickly realized to tell them we could do everything. And that’s kind of how we got started and expanded to wood, cardboard, plastics, metal, concrete, brick, et cetera.

But recycling wasn’t really a big thing on the East Coast for the construction industry, so we were swimming against the current. Since that time much more construction and demolition recycling has emerged. It has caught on, but it stalled out around 2016.

story by nic esposito • photography by drew dennis

R

evolution recovery was founded in 2004, borne out of cofounder Avi Golen’s shock while cleaning out construction sites and witnessing the mass amounts of drywall that contractors were throwing away. He contacted his college friend Jon Wybar and pitched him the idea to find recycling markets for these materials.

Since then, Revolution Recovery has 28 GRID P H IL LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

added locations in Delaware and Allentown to become one of the largest construction and demolition recyclers in the region.

Grid’s Nic Esposito sat down with Wybar and director of sustainability Fern Gookin to reflect on the successes and challenges of this growth, and to look ahead to where the construction and demolition industry is heading.

This interview has been edited for clarity, length and style.

Why did it stall? wybar: I think it was because the price of oil dropped. It’s a big factor when energy prices drop. That’s bad for recycling because virgin materials are then cheaper and more affordable to produce. We used to recycle carpet, and then the price got so low that we couldn’t even cover our costs.

That certainly tracks with the rest of the recycling industry. What are some other

Recycling is very much tied to landfill costs.

So if we can compete with the landfill on cost, that’s going to keep our customers happy.”

— fern gookin, Director of Sustainability at Revolution Recovery tain markets, like large or mid-size general contractors, but I think there are some sectors that we still probably don’t tap into nearly enough. Like contractors that are handling their own material or have to use dumpster rental companies. We’re not on their radar because they have existing relationships.

hard-to-recycle construction and demolition materials? wybar: Commercial roofing is a big one.

A lot of times they are composite materials with multiple components. The best we can do is downcycle them. But in reality, some of them are just doomed. gookin: Yeah, there’s other composite materials like office chairs. It’s very labor intensive to take apart an office chair that might have plastics and metal and different kinds of fabrics and foams that’s all in one component. So it comes down to the economics of if it’s worth it to recover those materials. Can we do it at the same cost as landfill? The answer is often no, unfortunately, just because there’s not enough value in those materials and it costs so much in labor to do that disassembly.

In the last decade, Philly has increased its population for the first time since the mid20th century. With that has come a building boom for single-family and multi-unit sectors. How has that affected business? gookin: I think there’s been tremendous growth. When I started here in about 2010, we were maybe taking in 100 tons of material a day. Now we’re taking in almost 600 tons of material a day just at our Philadelphia facility.

Even with that growth, do you feel that enough contractors know about your business? gookin: We do know a healthy part of cer-

If it’s not recycling, what other value propositions are there for why people come to you? wybar: In the construction business, it’s all about price and service. I like to joke and tell contractors that we have the finest dumpsters in town. And we are constantly striving to raise the bar on our service and have as competitive pricing as we possibly can.

When it comes to policy, is there anything that the City of Philadelphia could do to help you fulfill your mission? gookin: Recycling is very much tied to landfill costs. So if we can compete with the landfill on cost, that’s going to keep our customers happy. And that’s going to keep the material coming into our facility. Then we’ll be able to recover more and get that material in our door. If landfill prices are up, then we’d be even more willing to put in more labor or more equipment to be able to recover as much as possible to benefit from diverting that waste and cost. wybar: Europe’s landfill fees are two or three times higher than they are here. Even on the West Coast the landfills are far more expensive, and that incentivizes companies to pull more material.

What are you doing within your own clientele to limit landfilled materials? gookin: We might recognize that some customers have a higher-quality material, so it’s easier to recover than others. It’s just the nature of their business or their work and so, we might favorably tweak their price points a little bit if we know that there’s higher amounts of cardboard or good, clean,

quality wood by giving them a discount over somebody that delivers material that is not as high quality for recycling.

Illegal dumping is a huge problem in Philadelphia. What role, if any, can Revolution Recovery play in helping the city address this issue? wybar: We do our best to provide a service to our community at a fair price point and be customer friendly. But that only goes so far.

Some cities have free dumping of construction and demolition materials for residents at city dumps. That seems like the best option. I mean, you have to put yourself in the head of the person who’s illegally dumping to figure out how you can deter them.

If somebody is running a job in Southwest Philly, and we’re kind of far from them, it’s not as convenient. There’s also instances where maybe they’re not pulling a permit on their jobs. So it’s really hard to capture that audience if they’re resistant to following normal business practices.

We’re sitting here on a gray day, but are there sunny skies ahead for this industry? wybar: I would like to stay optimistic, but I still can’t believe where the climate change discussion is in this country. And I can’t believe that we’re all not on the same page about how hard we need to work together on this problem. But I feel like the wolf is at the door and people will have to see what’s happening.

So I have to be confident that people are going to snap out of it and we can start really moving forward and making real change. gookin: I’m hopeful that there is going to be a wake-up call or maybe a change in some of the commodity markets for difficult things to recycle. We still have challenges related to the pandemic and labor. But I’m hopeful that if we can get more serious about energy prices there will be new opportunities for commodities that haven’t really been around in the last few years. Fingers crossed. ◆ M AY 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 29

BUILDINGS AND CONSTRUCTION ISSUE

RE:VISION IN ACTION PECO Green Roof, 2301 Market St. In view of the Schuylkill River, nearly an acre of rooftop is alive with perennial plants and grasses.

Instead of producing polluted stormwater, an estimated 60 to 70% of the 1.5 million gallons of annual rooftop rainfall now supports lush vegetation.

THE NEW

REVISIONISTS

Green architectural firm adapts and evolves with each project story by marilyn anthony

W

hen scott kelly and Jennifer Rezeli launched their Manayunk-based design firm, Re:Vision Architecture, in 2003 they were pioneers in green building design. The world has changed since then.

Previously Kelly felt he had to be “stealthy” about including sustainable elements in his architectural designs. These days he revels in the freedom to go deeper, exploring with clients how buildings can actively promote healthy environments, happier communities, social equity and accessible beauty. Re:Vision partner Drew Lavine echoes Kelly’s enthusiasm.

“In the last ten years, the baseline of understanding sustainability has increased considerably. Now we’re able to discuss deep green, holistic and authentic sustainability approaches,” Lavine says.

LEED certification used to be the building industry’s gold standard, but what Re:Vision strives for now is the ambitious Living Building Challenge: net-positive energy management; a closed loop for water consumption; low materials toxicity from extraction to end-of-life use; and a 30 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

connection to the building’s context, culture and the character of the location. The end result aspires to be an enlivening space, both useful and beautiful.

Is it easier and cheaper to accomplish these goals by building from scratch or through adaptive reuse?

That, Kelly says, is a controversial “third rail” of architectural design. Re:Vision believes that every new building starts with an unsustainable huge carbon sink of virgin materials. They view adaptive reuse, especially given Philadelphia’s rich inventory of existing structures, as an impactful way the building trades can address climate change.

Traditionally, the design and construction approach has been to find a process that works and endlessly repeat it. Re:Vision thinks true sustainability comes from constant innovation, not replication. Every project requires responsiveness to what is unique about the context.

Lavine says, “You have to push yourself and be willing to do something different.”

“We never just pull a solution out of drawer number three,” Kelly adds, referring to the fact that they don’t have a standard set

United by Blue Flagship Store, 205 Race St. A cornerstone of United by Blue’s mission is keeping plastics out of the ocean. For its flagship store, the business wanted salvaged materials, and a low carbon footprint. Re:Vision’s solutions made United by Blue’s philosophy visible. It’s a “biophilic” design style, meant to stimulate our biological response to nature. The natural light, the natural materials and surfaces all tap into our love of nature. See how walking around this store feels better than conventional retail where cheap, durable plastics are widely used.

of solutions that they apply to every project.

Integration across Re:Vision’s three business lines—architectural design, sustainability consulting and certification— reveals its collaborative company culture, a style evident in the partners. They don’t finish each other’s sentences. They listen thoughtfully, then build on what the other has said. Lavine describes Re:Vision’s team as “books on the shelf of an open library.

Knowledge sharing is what we do.”

To which Kelly adds, “It’s what we do internally and externally, among ourselves, with our clients and with our community.”

The partners share the conviction that architecture is an amazing profession that becomes even more amazing when you realize your responsibility. They’ve witnessed architects reach a point in their careers when they realize they’ve been part of the problem and it changes them.

“That’s the common thread with us,” Kelly says, “all of these people we work with want to be part of the solution.” ◆

P H OTO C O U R T E S Y O F R E : V I S I O N A R C H I T E C T U R E

The PECO Green Roof, a Re:Vision project in Center City, hosts roughly an acre of plants.

Mariposa Food Co-op, 4824 Baltimore Ave. A conventional grocery store, a “big dumb box,” requires a large tract of vacant land. Adaptive building reuse enabled Mariposa to provide access to healthy food in a neighborhood already full of structures. Re:Vision’s conversion reinforces the co-op’s mission of pairing community and environmental stewardship. You’ll notice refrigeration behind energy-saving glass doors, extensive use of natural light, rain cisterns, a vertical garden and welcoming space for community events.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT Training and loan program empowers participants to renovate properties with people and climate in mind

I

story by nic esposito • photograph by chris baker evens

n 2015 Mount Airy-based real estate developer Ken Weinstein decided it was time to share his success and expertise with aspiring developers. He created Jumpstart Germantown, where partici� pants can learn from experienced developers in training programs and mentorships, as well as access a loan program that can help them purchase and renovate properties.

While Weinstein initially focused his efforts in Germantown, a low-income neighborhood that has experienced an accelerated rate of speculation and development, the idea was so popular that other organizations around Philadelphia soon began calling Weinstein’s group for advice.

Rather than put more on the organization’s plate, Jumpstart decided to opensource its toolkit and practices and created an overarching group, Jumpstart Philly, to help guide programs in five other neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia.

Jumpstart Kensington started as a partnership with the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, Shift Capital and Impact Services in 2016; Jumpstart West Philly started soon after as a coalition of The Enterprise Center, Habitat for Humanity and the People’s Emergency Center; Jumpstart Southwest is run by Southwest CDC; and Jumpstart Tioga and Jumpstart North Philly were started by individuals who had gone through the Jumpstart Germantown training program.

Although Jumpstart Philly does not exert control over these organizations, they do provide loans up to 85% of the property value for aspiring developers who have gone through those programs. To date, the

organization has issued 300 loans worth a total of $37 million with the number of yearly loans increasing around 50% each year.

Jumpstart Germantown alone has graduated more than 1,100 people and has enrolled participants mostly through word of mouth from alumni.

Jumpstart Philly director Angie Williamson has seen people become so impacted by the program that they quit their day jobs to become full-time developers. And after their last training program she even received a box of cookies and cupcakes accompanied by an equally sweet letter from a graduate—remarkable in an industry where thoughtfulness isn’t always the hallmark.

“Our graduates are excited about not only

making money for themselves, but the social impact that they’re able to have,” Williamson explains. “I don’t see a lot of that in large scale developers. So it’s exciting that we have been able to see so many small-scale developers making a positive difference.”

Williamson has seen renovations of existing buildings by people with close ties to the community directly intersecting with sustainability goals. To strengthen that connection, Jumpstart’s curriculum has introduced participants to sustainable architects such as Sherman Aronson, who taught green building techniques for renovation projects.

Jumpstart has also sought to increase sustainable development awareness with their participants by engaging the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to speak about the power that street trees can play in a development project to add aesthetic and environmental amenities to a house. Greg Trainor of Philadelphia Community Corps and Philly Reclaim (p. 26) also was invited to discuss how developers can salvage materials for reuse and actually get a tax break for the project.

“When you add up all those small-scale developers it’s a pretty big impact,” Williamson points out. “But we do hope that some of these small-scale developers will become larger-scale developers and have these priorities and values that they have been able to hone through the Jumpstart community.” ◆

Jumpstart Philly director Angie Williamson with program participant David Hairston at a Germantown row house he is renovating.

M AY 20 22 G R I DP HILLY.COM 31

My hope is that the work I do, as a domestic educator, validates women from where they stand— in their own homes. It’s normal to feel silenced and suppress domestic frustration for the sake of the family or relationships. No one wants to rock the boat if they are afraid they might fall in the water. And, if you don’t don’t feel supported, the ship might go under. Big picture: learn how to swim.

I can help you find your balanced flow.

Book your session: TheVoltaWay.com

One of my favorite parts of the job is teaching an open-minded man how to clean. I help them understand the value of domestic work by honoring the work that came before. Not only by appreciating their newly learned skills, but giving thanks and reverence to the work done by the hands of the women throughout their whole lives. Be part of women’s liberation by learning how to ease the systemic pressures that fall on the majority of women. I can help.

Step back and look at the domestic problem. Many times, we want shortcuts to remedy the symptoms of clutter because the real issues are too hard to face, namely, how the mess and clutter happened in the first place. When we acknowledge that we can be messy and apathetic toward major issues, we can then take the first steps on a path of clarity, healthy decision-making, and control over our homes. Rather than shuffling items and issues from one place to another, we begin the real, lasting work.

Most times when I am working with a client, they just need someone there to talk through how to approach their clutter, come up with a strategy and give them a little push in the right direction.

So many people feel overwhelmed at home and can’t seem to find a good flow. I can help. - Lois Volta

TOP OF MIND local businesses ready to serve COMPOSTING

WEB DESIGN

Mother Compost

Raznov Designs

Woman-owned composting company providing service to the Main Line & educational programs for those looking to compost at home. Interested? Find out more at mothercompost.com

Experienced, local website development. Responsive, fresh, stylish - Shopify and WordPress websites designed and built to fit your small business needs. Portfolio at

BOOK STORE

GROCERY

RaznovDesigns.com

When: Wednesday, May 18th Doors - 5 PM, Show - 5:15pm-6:30pm

Fern Gookin Revolution Recovery Sustainability Director

Where: BOK Bar

800 Mifflin Street, 8th Floor, 19148

Tickets: $15 Billy Dufala Revolution Recovery RAIR

Books & Stuff Multicultural, Afrocentric books, gifts, and surprise packages for all! Founded in 2014, and recently online only at booksandstuff.info and teespring.com/booksandstuffstuff.

Kimberton Whole Foods A family-owned and operated natural grocery store with six locations in Southeastern PA, selling local, organic and sustainably-grown food for over thirty years. kimbertonwholefoods.com

32 GRID P H IL LY.CO M M AY 2 0 22

To purchase tickets, visit bokbar.ticketleap.com or scan the QR code Sponsored by

With music by

Todd & Gabi

Enjoy the

PHOTOS FROM TOP: LUKE FRANKE/AUDUBON; MICHELLE GUSTAFSON

wonder of birds

Educational Exhibit at the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove.

... and learn about the Delaware River Watershed at the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove and The Discovery Center.

DISCOVER YOURSELF IN NATURE

Find Spring & Summer 2022 programming and new birding classes at pa.audubon.org/events.

Turn your passion for the environment into a fulfilling career Make the most of industry connections and Ivy League academics Virtual Café Join the MES program team from 12-1 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month for an online chat about your interests and goals.

Log in with us.

www.facebook.com/UPennEES

In Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies program, you train for success in a field where you can make a real, practical difference.

Built with flexibility in mind, the program’s innovative, interdisciplinary approach allows you to create your own focus, or choose from six established concentrations: environmental biology, environmental policy, environmental resilience and adaptation, environmental sustainability, resource management, and urban environment.

Gain hands-on experience through internships and fieldwork opportunities while studying on a green campus in the heart of Philadelphia. And enjoy the option of full- or part-time enrollment to suit your schedule.

@Penn_MES_MSAG

Take the next step in your environmental career at

www.upenn.edu/grid