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A Personal Vision for Germantown

Initially written for presentation to a planning group sponsored by Philadelphia University.

On a recent Friday, I spent most of the day shopping for food at Germantown markets and having lunch with my daughter at a Germantown café. Like many people in the neighborhood, I was mentally drained from a couple of neighborhood controversies. Shopping in Germantown can be discouraging, but if you know where to look, food shopping is not. I always find that it revives my faith in the future. It did precisely that on Friday. I posted about it on the Living in Germantown Facebook page, and the response was uniformly appreciative.

Germantown’s Strengths

I mention this experience because it reminded me, not for the first time, that Germantown has many strengths and resources that we tend to forget when we concentrate on the tattered shops along Chelten Avenue or walk past the disastrous conglomeration of parking lots at Wayne and Chelten. Here are some of the ones I see:

Germantown is among the most walkable neighborhoods in the city. My house has a walk score (on walkscore.com) that is only two or three points lower than many addresses in Center City. You can’t walk to Macy’s or the Reading Terminal from my house, but you can get most of what you need for day-to-day life without using a car.
For all its faults, the central business district has a good structure and design for rehabilitation. Most of its shops front on the sidewalk, and it is well-served by public transit. Except at the Wayne Avenue end, it has not fallen victim to creeping suburbanitis. A suburb dependent on a failed shopping mall is actually less well positioned for the future than Germantown.
Germantown has a varied housing stock, including single homes, small multi-family buildings, and large apartment blocks. Much of our housing is affordable and provides good value. Some of the smaller houses offer opportunities for a public-spirited developer to add to our affordable housing, if the incentives are right.
Germantown has many active neighborhood groups. These groups have different agendas, sometimes at cross-purposes, which can make it hard to get agreement on a plan of action. On the other hand, they bring a great deal of energy to the neighborhood, which could be a power for good once agreement is reached.

Looking to the Future

Germantown’s development does not occur in a vacuum. In the larger world, fuel costs and environmental constraints are making revival of cities and local shopping districts not merely desirable but essential to survival. The rising generation is already beginning to move back to cities, abandon the private automobile and use public transit and bicycles to meet its mobility needs.

Germantown can and should capitalize on these trends in ways that honor and support the diversity of our population. My vision for the neighborhood’s future emphasizes equitable development, local job creation, and an ethic of acceptance for people from many backgrounds. Here are some suggestions as to what this means in practice:

Any plan for the area needs to build on our existing stock of housing and continue to include affordable homes. Maintaining an equitable mix of housing need not conflict with the important goal of preserving our rich social and architectural history, especially since our mix of housing is itself a product of our history.
Equitable development needs a mix of stores to serve all segments of the community. In the area that I know best, food, this means we have potential customers for low-cost grocery stores, improved supermarkets, and specialty stores for items like vegetables and baked goods.
If our shops are to survive and thrive, people from the neighborhood have to shop in them. It does little good for a wonderful new shop to locate here if residents who might shop here drive to another neighborhood for goods they could purchase here. Any development plan should include what I call a “store support committee” whose remit would be to work with local merchants, publicize what they have available, and encourage residents, particularly the more affluent residents, to shop locally whenever possible. I am sure this kind of support for our shops is not a new idea, but a new plan could help to make it area-wide and more systematic than anything we now have.
A better mix of shops should help to create new jobs in Germantown, which in turn should help in the rebuilding process.

Building Community

Germantown has very wide ethnic and class diversity. We have a long history of welcoming new people. A well-thought-out plan for a neighborhood with housing and shops that serve this diversity can help to facilitate and support this culture of neighborliness. It cannot create such a culture, but it can show that a neighborhood need not abandon diversity—of class, race, and background—in the name of development. That is an important lesson that we all need to learn again and again.

A plan for the neighborhood can help to build community. It can also help us to avoid one of the major hazards of attempts to revitalize Germantown: nostalgia. It is hardly surprising that many residents know that Germantown was once the second largest shopping area in the city. Nor is it surprising that many hope for a return to previous glory.

Personally, I find old photos of Germantown’s shopping district a little disturbing. The people in the photos are not the diverse group that I see when I go to the store or walk through the park. The department stores pictured in them were here when we first came to the neighborhood—and we could not afford to shop in them on two non-profit salaries.

Nostalgia for a romanticized past will not revive Germantown. A plan that helps people to settle here at reasonable cost, shop here for most of what they want, and find good-paying jobs here, is what we need. My hope is that, just as we pioneered on other social issues, we can find a way for all residents to stay here and prosper—thus providing an alternative to development that drives out long-term residents over time. Perhaps such an alternative is not feasible; but if it is, Germantown should be the community to find it.

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