L&I

With a harsh winter causing more building collapses, can the city keep people safe?

The city discovers deteriorating structures faster than it can demolish them. More funding may not be enough.

CRUMBLED: A rowhome in the 2600 block of North Myrtlewood Street in Strawberry Mansion collapsed on March 10.
Neal Santos

When the wall of a building in Old City came tumbling down last week, raining bricks onto the sidewalk and an unfortunately parked Lexus, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections quickly took to a podium outside City Hall. Not to worry, he said, it was just a demolition mishap and precautions had been taken to prevent human injury — this time.

But a string of near-weekly building collapses — actual, spontaneous collapses — over the past month have served as a grim reminder that the public-safety hazard posed by Philadelphia’s countless decaying properties is not going away. Reacting to the crisis, L&I has pledged organizational reforms and the city has finally agreed to steer additional funding to a department whose budget, when adjusted for inflation, has been cut by half over two decades. 

The increased funding will, ideally, help to preemptively demolish deteriorating structures before they collapse. But with the second snowiest winter in the city’s history weakening an untold number of rotting buildings, will the extra money be enough to stem the tide?

“Due to the severe winter … we’ve seen an increase in 311 and service requests, and an increase in buildings being damaged. The water, snow and ice get between bricks, and when it thaws out and refreezes, you’re popping out masonry. And it collapses,” says Scott Mulderig, who oversees L&I’s emergency services division. His unit was organized this year as a special response team in the wake of the building collapses, like the botched Market Street demolition last June that claimed six lives. 

Mulderig says L&I inspectors try to flag the weathered buildings before they collapse, citing them as “imminently dangerous” —  an order that says a building is so unsafe it must be torn down by its owner as soon as possible. 

“The owners are the real responsible parties, not the city,” he says. “We step in as a last resort, using taxpayer funds to knock someone’s house down because there’s no other way to do it.”

Most imminently dangerous properties are held privately — although it’s worth noting that the city paid to demolish at least 155 publicly owned buildings over the last two years alone — but many deadbeat landlords are AWOL or, more frequently, deceased. Of the 589 “imminently dangerous” properties demolished last year, only 53 were actually paid for by private owners, the rest by L&I.

Currently, there are 585  buildings on L&I’s  “imminently dangerous” list — but the list is growing at a maddening pace. Building inspectors discover and cite new deteriorating structures faster than contracted demolition crews can raze them.

“We triage the properties, focusing on the ones that are near schools or on a corner. We try to take down the worst of the worst first,” says Mulderig. “But it’s dictated by the weather and it’s hard to predict where the next one will be.”

Since Jan. 1, L&I has added 93 buildings to its imminently dangerous list. But the agency’s contractors tore down just 35 buildings over the same time span, with 22 others contracted but not yet demolished. Mulderig explained that while the bad weather has necessitated more teardowns, it has also slowed the pace of public demolitions.

“You can’t have the guys out there in these conditions doing a demolition. The severe weather is a risk to worker safety,” he says.

The city has pledged a $3 million boost that would bring L&I’s annual demolition budget to $9 million — but to be clear, that’s just to weather the heavy spring rains expected before the end of this fiscal year, on June 30. 

A second, permanent $3 million funding increase for the next fiscal year will be used to pay for more demolitions, finish a computer-system upgrade, hire two additional lawyers (to take more deadbeat owners to court) and bring the total number of L&I inspectors to 149.

However, even this increase will bring L&I’s budget to just $25 million — a shade more than Baltimore spends annually on its code enforcement and licensing agencies. That city, which has less than half the population of Philadelphia, currently employs 158 inspectors. 

In an interview Tuesday, L&I Commissioner Carlton Williams was blunt about the disparity between what his agency needs and what it’s getting.

“No, $9 million is not enough to address all the issues that will come up due to extreme weather conditions,” he said, adding that the department was already using overtime to deploy inspectors on nights and weekends. “We have to operate within what the city can afford. There are bigger issues, with pension and health costs that have escalated.” 

Williams said he planned to create an in-house demolition team to “maximize” his limited funding and work more cooperatively with community groups to identify hazardous buildings — but only so much can be done with a fixed budget.

Ironically, while the city has grappled with restoring even a sliver of L&I’s decimated staff and budget, the department has continued to collect tens of millions more in revenue than it spends in operations. Through issuing permits and fines, L&I brought in nearly $55 million last year alone. All of that money is transferred into the city’s general fund for redistribution, and the agency eventually gets back less than half of its own revenue. 

While the city’s small increase in funding will help bolster the city’s demolition efforts, it’s also possible that adding inspectors will increase the rate that “imminently dangerous” buildings are detected. At its current pace, L&I is on track to add some 350 more properties to this list before the end of the year.

Although the blight problem affects every part of the city, imminently dangerous buildings disproportionately impact poor African-American neighborhoods, which tend to have more depressed property values and aging housing stock. More than half, or about 300, of the properties currently on L&I’s imminently dangerous list sit in just five impoverished ZIP codes, all in North Philadelphia. Meanwhile, a mere 14 such structures were scattered across the 10 wealthiest ZIP codes in Philadelphia.

To its credit, L&I also focuses most of its demolition efforts in North Philadelphia, and similarly struggling, older neighborhoods like Mantua and Point Breeze. But the rush to take down thousands of dangerous buildings in these areas has its own consequences.

Victoria Freeman, a home-owner in Point Breeze, lives next to a vacant lot where a crumbling building once stood, before the city tore it down more than 20 years ago. She says the exposed side of her house has since had structural problems, and that the lot is a breeding ground for mosquitoes in the summer.

“We have some cracks in our foundation,” she says. “And naturally our house doesn’t stay as warm as ones that still have a house on their side.”

But Freeman says she’s not complaining — it’s still better than living next to a vacant building.