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Elmer Smith: 2 women wage tireless war to halt townhouses

BETTY BEAUFORT AND Tiffany Green took the battle of Point Breeze to the mayor yesterday. Actually, the mayor was on his way to a luncheon when he ran into the two women, who were waiting for an elevator on the second floor of City Hall.

BETTY BEAUFORT AND Tiffany Green took the battle of Point Breeze to the mayor yesterday.

Actually, the mayor was on his way to a luncheon when he ran into the two women, who were waiting for an elevator on the second floor of City Hall.

His may have been the only ear in City Hall that hasn't been bent by these two leaders of the concerned citizens of Point Breeze in their campaign to halt the development of three-story townhomes in their South Philadelphia neighborhood.

They weren't going to miss this opportunity even if it meant just blurting out a sentence about their stalled attempt to get a moratorium issued on three-story residential development in Point Breeze.

"Have you considered our moratorium?" Green asked.

"We're from Point Breeze. Will you meet with us?"

"I haven't seen the bill," the mayor said quietly.

"I can't really comment on that."

It wasn't much. He didn't do a meeting.

But it was the highlight of another fruitless trip to City Hall. I watched them waste a morning in the prothonotary's office trying to figure out how to raise the money to appeal the zoning board's permits for the development of five three-story houses on Alter Street, between 19th and 20th.

That ended with a 10-minute explanation of the six-page In Forma Pauperis form they would have to fill out and get notarized before they could ask for a waiver of a filing fee of $183 per parcel.

"We'll be back Monday morning," Beaufort told Jacqueline Courtenay in the prothonotary's office.

You can count on it.

They have visited the zoning board of adjustment, the planning commission and have buttonholed half of City Council.

Council President Anna Verna, who represents Point Breeze, had even agreed to grant them a one-year moratorium.

But then developers, businessmen, new residents and even some longtime residents spoke out against it and she tabled the moratorium bill.

Beaufort and Green's complaint has been that upscale developers were taking over a largely blighted area that runs west of Broad street to 28th and from Washington Avenue south to Passyunk.

Yesterday, the area was abuzz. Work crews hammered away at new buildings on the same blocks where longtime residents painted and repaired their houses.

Real-estate sale signs swung in the wind in front of five vacant lots in the 1900 block of Alter Street, where they were appealing the building permits.

"I didn't know they were appealing these houses," said Noah Ostroff, the real-estate agent who is hoping to sell the houses that are going up there.

"What we're doing is good for the neighborhood," Ostroff said. "The value of older houses goes up, too."

Beaufort and Green weren't buying that.

"These new people are coming in building $300,000 houses that are blocking out sight lines. Why can't we have balanced development with some houses that people in the neighborhood can afford, too?"

Beaufort was even more blunt.

"We're not going to sit here and let people just walk all over us," she said.

They argued that upscale housing will price low- to moderate-income black families out as taxes rise to reflect the cost of newer homes.

Census figures show that the growth of upscale housing has led to a dramatic change in the demographics of the area north of Washington Avenue to South Street.

Since 2000, the black population in that area has been cut in half while the white population has doubled.

But some black homeowners seem to welcome the influx of upscale neighbors.

"I don't have a problem with it," a man talking to me out the second-floor window of his house on 19th Street near Dickinson told me.

"I've been living in Point Breeze for 66 years and in this house for 29."

A new three-story at 19th and Reed with a winding wrought-iron stairway leading to a roof deck appeared to block his view of the city skyline. "I can't see past that schoolyard in the next block anyway," he said.

Send email to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: www.philly.com/ElmerSmith