One time someone wandered onto the casino floor at the Trop, up at the tables, who had shit their pants. The whole floor stunk and it was clear who'd done it. This person was fucked up, stumbling around, clothes tattered.

Security came over and kindly escorted them to the bathrooms. About 20 minutes later, they came out and started drifting from table to table, looking for something to play. They fuckin let this dude stay after he'd shit his pants.

Didn't even change his clothes.

Let's see if they can finish it before the housing market completely collapses in on itself

Would you like to explain to the class what kind of effect that has on low income, non-property owning residents

This is the thing. I wasn't for the stadium if the neighborhood was against it, but the much bigger problem is the private student housing that keeps pushing further out into the neighborhood and affecting property values and housing costs.

I thought a solution could have been Temple agreeing to construct more student housing on campus (significantly more, like another Morgan sized building) and requiring all non-commuting freshmen and sophomores to live on campus in exchange for the stadium. Seems like that could've been a huge win-win.

People from out of the area will always be bad drivers, anywhere you go. Driving conditions are unique everywhere, and adapting to them can be difficult.

Drivers from the city in general are terrible at driving on highways. They don't understand what the left lane is for, seemingly have no problem driving in the middle lane 15 mph slower than everyone else, watching cars blow by on either side while everyone else behind them is trying to get around. Cars will drive the same speed next to each other for some inexplicable reason, slowing down traffic for the entire road. I live in Philly, and driving 76 and 95 is a nightmare aside from the congestion.

At the same time, suburban drivers have no idea how to handle the city. Jersey plates are often the ones holding up 4 way stops, crawling along busy streets looking for parking, making 4 or 5 attempts to parallel while traffic builds up behind them.

California and Connecticut are probably the two worst places I've ever driven.

Queens

Whenever I talk about how big PA feels to me, I'm always like "can you believe we're in the same state as f*cking Erie right now."

Ok, let's go back to that.

First of all, I agreed with you that what they did with Richard Allen wasn't ideal. But do you know what was there before, or what the area was like before they redeveloped it? The outcome wasn't great, but I understand why they tried it out - and it's certainly s lot better than it was in the 80's and 90's.

It's also not the worst thing that could be there. It's not the end of the world that there are twins with backyards. But it's not my community. I don't live in Richard Allen, and whatever they do or don't do with it should be up to the families that have been there for, in some cases, generations. Your suggestion of evicting an entire community's worth of people so they can build condos and flood the area with people from everywhere else is a terrible one, that benefits only a handful of people - none of whom currently live here or have a vested interest in the neighborhood.

I also don't disagree that public housing projects are a bad solution to a major problem - but evicting Richard Allen and throwing thousands of people's lives into chaos isn't the solution, and it won't help create a better one. It just moves the problem somewhere else.

You're a lawyer, go ahead and reform public housing, figure out how to integrate better section 8 policies, push for PHA to buy and maintain individual housing units & scattered sites instead of constructing projects, and then we can have a conversation about what replaces Richard Allen, and the Spring Garden Apartments, Harrison, etc.

But any redevelopment that happens in this neighborhood, I won't be supporting anything that's higher density than what exists now. The character of the neighborhood has always been lower density row housing. If I wanted to be surrounded by tacky, high density condo buildings, I wouldn't live here. That's not what this neighborhood is, and no one here wants to see it torn apart.

If there's more demand than there is housing, too fucking bad. Find a different neighborhood to live in. There are plenty.

Resorting to waving your diploma around is a pretty pathetic move, but I have an urban studies degree tough guy.

No it's not, you're clearly a dumbass with very little academic or real world exposure to anything you're trying to lecture people about.

Lol poor and shitty, spoken like someone who has a firm understanding of the American inner city and plenty of respect for our communities and the people in them.

Fuck off.

There's so much wrong with what you're saying that I hardly know where to begin.

First of all, no, West Poplar would not be "massively improved" by destroying the neighborhood for denser development. No one who lives in this neighborhood - neither transplants nor locals who have been here for generations - wants to live in a jungle full of condos. I've lived here for a decade, and I moved here and stayed here because I love this area the way it is. Take your opinions about a place you don't live somewhere else - you clearly know very little about this neighborhood or the people who live here.

I don't entirely disagree that how Richard Allen was redesigned wasn't great, but what's your solution? Evict an entire community that's been there for almost a century for more tacky and poorly constructed condo buildings? Revert back to high rise public housing? You obviously don't understand the issue very well. And by the way, any problem you perceive with the development of the area stems from an urban renewal project that did exactly what you're suggesting back in the 30's - a poor neighborhood was seized by the city, its residents evicted, and their homes replaced by higher density development.

No, what happened to our cities in the 20th century and what's happening now are not dissimilar at all. Replace the actors and change some of the language, and it's fundamentally the same thing. Our neighborhoods are being gutted and altered for the benefit and profit of people with a lot of capital who don't live in them.

Love the "responding to demand" myth though, that's always a good one. No one responds to demand, they respond to profitability. There's very little demand to turn Kensington into a future condominium graveyard, but there's money to be made by developing the area and inducing that demand (an important concept I'm sure you learned in business school - whoever you're parroting certainly did at least). There's much more demand to not tear these neighborhoods apart block by block, but there's much less money to be made leaving places alone and maintaining them as they are.

When land in the suburbs was cheap and developing it became practical, all kinds of accommodations were made for developers to help attract people out to them. When that market saturated, they did the same thing to get people back into the city after the urban housing market had collapsed and it was profitable and expedient to do that.

And besides, weren't governments just responding to the demand for highways that increased car usage created? When the government does it, it's anti-urban action, but when a private developer stands to make money tearing up the fabric of our communities, it's just responding to demand right?

Do you think I designed them? I don't get your point.

If you're dumb enough to believe supply and demand is the primary driver of property value, then yea maybe.

Right, so let's raze half the city and replace it with higher density new construction, so the entire landscape of the city is a rolling wave of shitty new plastic facaded apartments and condos.

You developer mouthpieces don't give a shit about Philadelphia or the things that make it unique and give these neighborhoods the value you people exploit. You think anyone is going to want to move into any of these neighborhoods if the rowhomes are gone?

I hope this sub is still around when this housing bubble bursts and all these hideous drywall and plastic condos are worthless and literally crumbling to the ground.

The most disturbing and perverse thing about this comment though is that people are seemingly returning to this utility + profit > everything urban design mentality. It's what developers want the public to believe, so that they're given a greenlight to do essentially to whatever they want to the landscape of our cities. They managed to push the public narrative in this direction in the middle part of the 20th century, and they gutted every single city in North America for highways that encouraged more auto travel, brutalist offices and apartments, public housing projects that worsened conditions for the city's impoverished and are mostly long demolished. And what happened? Cities collapsed and fell into decades-long depressions, which were only reversed when people started moving into older neighborhoods that maintained long term value.

It's a really sick thing this person here is saying.

Fuck that, developers don't just get to decide to expand the boundaries of Center City so they can inflate the value of their shitty condos. North Philly starts after Vine and South Philly starts after South.

That's the thing though, context doesn't really matter. What matters is the law, right? What matters is the rights people have, and those rights need to be universally respected, not respected conditionally based on class, race, or profiles.

I get that the dirt bike/atv thing annoys people. I live a block off Spring Garden, it's one of their favorite stretches to tear up. But that doesn't mean the cops get to go around and find any excuse to seize property that very well could be legally owned. The police need to prove that something is illegal, NOT the other way around.

The problem here is that people are demanding certain rights be violated because something bothers them. We need to "crack down" on the dirt bikes and seize them all because I don't like when they ride around my neighborhood. That's just not acceptable. If this happened in a different neighborhood for a different reason (again, what if the cops came through a block in Rittenhouse and towed all the sports cars away), people would be absolutely irate.

People's rights need to be respected 100% of the time, even if it's inconvenient. Isn't that a part of our whole national ethos all those patriots are carrying on about all the time? It's those same people out now demanding the police circumvent local, state and national law to put a stop to a minor nuisance.

They were serving a narcotics warrant, no? Do you think each of these individual bikes were covered under that warrant also? Obviously not, since the police told neighbors to bring their papers and recover their property. That's an admission that they have no idea what bikes are legally owned with papers, and which ones aren't. They took those bikes as a PR stunt to score some points with the public that have been rightfully critical, and you all ate it out of their hands.

There is zero proof that anyone who owns/possesses any of these dirt bikes was involved in smashing anything. What if you owned a sports car, would it be ok if the police impounded it because people with similar cars as yours illegally street race? Has no one ever committed a crime in a station wagon? Well, since I'm sure someone has at some point, I guess that gives the police probable cause to impound your vehicle, until you can prove it's yours and that you didn't commit a crime with it.

The onus of producing proof is on the police, not on the citizenry. That's exactly what is supposed to separate us from a police state.

Then they should've seized the narcotics and illegal property, not whatever they felt like taking.

What if the cops were serving a warrant for your neighbor and towed your car away in the process because you weren't there to produce a title? Are you telling me you wouldn't be pissed? The police absolutely do not have the right to seize someone's property because it was nearby. The onus is on the police to prove they have the right to confiscate this property, not vice versa. This is legitimately the way police states operate.

People are so up in arms about these stupid dirt bikes that you're willing to allow police to bully entire communities and make up the rules as they go along, so long as they're going after something you don't like. That's bullshit, and I know every hypocrite in these comments would be up in arms if it happened to them.

No one immediately present that was directly in front of the cops had documents. They seized 40 of them. What gives the cops the right to seize any property they want on the off chance it's illegal? If this story was about guns, white people and Nevada, people would be losing their fucking minds.

What's your point? That the cops can come seize it whenever they want, and it's totally fine because you can go claim it?

Your favorite part is that people had their property seized? I'm sure you'd feel the same way if the cops showed up at your house, towed your car and said you can come claim it if you can prove you own it.

You can actually sit and hang in a cafe, since all the good ones in philly inexplicably close by 3.

Nah it's open. Can't smoke in there anymore though