Gentrification
Gentrification North Philadelphia reminded Wes of the Baltimore neighborhood he had just left. The check-cashing stores instead of banks, the rows of beauty salons, liquor stores, laundromats, funeral homes, and their graffiti-laced walls were the universal streetscape of poverty. The hood was the hood, no matter what city you were in. But just blocks away from their uncle’s house, scattered evidence of gentrification—driven by the looming presence of Temple University—had started to manifest. Their uncle’s block, where half of the homes sat abandoned and burnt out, represented what the neighborhood had become. Blocks away, where newly built mixed-income homes sat next to picturesque buildings like the gothic Church of the Advocate, built in 1887, was the direction the neighborhood wanted to go. But even that dynamic wasn’t unique; the same thing was happening in Wes’s neighborhood, where Hopkins was the driving force of change, aimed at improving the quality of life for students a