Under reported Stories: Abandoned buildings

For my Quarter 4 benchmark, I chose to report on abandoned buildings in Philadelphia and the process of building restoration in the same. The most challenging part about this project was figuring out where I was going to find my information. I knew what I wanted to touch on in my project; I wanted to address different historic buildings and I wanted explain the process of getting an abandoned house demolished, but I didn’t know where to look for this information.  Despite my confusion,  I kept working and came across many online newspaper blog posts concerning the themes that I wanted to include in my Benchmark. When I started to look at these posts, I found this information. I also went to government websites to verify that the information that I found in the articles was true. 

I had already begun a project similar to this one my Junior year of high school when I was asked to do a project about a historic building in my neighborhood. This was when I first gained full awareness of the Old Edison across the street from my grandmother’s house. As I dug into its history, I only became more and more fascinated with this neglected building. This had to have been one of the greatest projects that I completed during my high school career, therefore, I decided to piggy back its idea in this benchmark. Moreover, I have always held a fascination towards abandoned historic houses in Philadelphia, but they never seemed to be given much attention. I also wanted to address the problem that we have with abandoned buildings and neighborhoods in general.  In my articles, I wanted to raise these issues which not many people pay attention to. Restoration and preservation of not only historic houses in Philadelphia, but also Philadelphia neighborhood houses could increase its attraction factor and build the character of communities. 

I feel like many times this issue goes disregarded because most people feel like it does not immediately affect Philadelphia communities. They think that jobs and economy are priority issues that we must handle in order to get us back on a good foot. What they fail to recognize is that all of these things are interlaced. The more houses that we fix, the more jobs we will have,  and the more income we will receive because of the increased attraction factor that our sites and homes hold. Restoration of buildings will in fact push us to fix issues that hold priority in our city. I do think that this issue will get more attention in the future because more and more people are beginning to realize that not only do abandoned buildings pose a threat to surrounding houses, but they also hurting our economy.  

Through this project I learned that there are laws that protect certain historic buildings at state level and at a national level. I also learned why abandoned houses in Philadelphia aren’t just  knocked down. There is a whole process that the Philadelphia Department of License and Registration must follow in order to give permission for the house to be destroyed. I also learned of alternative methods that we could adopt to increase house restoration in Philadelphia.