MAPS: Every building the city has torn down for being structurally unsafe
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
The city is struggling to demolish a backlog of structures that are on the brink of collapse, but has already torn down thousands of buildings.
This week's news lead focused on the city's struggle to keep up with the torrent of crumbling buildings caused by the severe winter weather. Because of the massive levels of abandonment in many Philadelphia neighborhoods, the city is forced to try to preemptively tear down dangerous buildings to stave off even more hazardous collapses.
However, because of limited funding for such demolitions, some buildings still slip through the cracks. The city has 585 structures it has flagged as being so dangerous they must be demolished immediately, but that list grows faster than the pace of publicly funded demolitions.
As part of that data-driven analysis, the City Paper obtained statistics on the locations of every building that L&I tore down. Below are maps illustrating the department's focus for its demolition strategy, unsurprisingly clustered in older, more blighted areas of the city. The "layer" tool can be used to separate demolitions by year.
And in case you missed it in the main article, here is a map of every building that is currently flagged as being "imminently dangerous," but has not yet been demolished.
