The speculators are already coming for North Philadelphia’s Kensington Avenue corridor.
Running through one of the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest big city in the country, the stretch today is mostly known for being the regional center of the opioid crisis. But right now on Zillow, you can find one-bedroom apartments listed along the corridor from $550 all the way up to $1,995 a month.
Alex Robles spent his high school years in the neighborhood and moved back to the area a few years ago to work in real estate after a successful early career in the hotel industry. “We’re two train stations north from areas that are gentrified already, so it’s only a matter of time,” Robles says. “Most of the gentrification in Philly has gone along the train lines.”
Not that long ago, there was a vibrant retail corridor here lined with mom-and-pop shops — including Robles’ mother’s hair salon. Today there are pawn shops, discount mobile phone stores, a few sneaker stores, and a lot of vacancies. For a speculator with a “buy low, sell high” mentality — who might come in and buy properties en masse, wait for the city to deal with its opioid crisis and then flip the corridor into Philly’s next hottest locale — it’s an area ripe for the picking.
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