PhillyDeals: Still raising money and putting it to work

Developer Bart Blatstein invited two dozen of his best friends - builders, landlords, and "a couple of bankers, so they can explain to us what's going on" - to a private screening of Oliver Stone's new financial apocalypse movie, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.

The showing was upstairs Friday at Blatstein's Pearl Theater at his Avenue North development near Temple University.

I asked the open-collar crowd, as we milled around the trays of Primo's hoagies and movie popcorn that Blatstein had set out before the lights went down, "What about Bart?"

Is he our new Willard Rouse, this generation's Albert M. Greenfield, Philadelphia's leading builder? Or just part of a crowd that grabs what it can, when it can?

"He is our Renaissance Man," said Mitchell Morgan, the suburban apartment-house mogul and national Republican fund-raiser.

"He's the one doing everything right now," said Daniel Neduscin, the developer who led efforts to turn Manayunk's Main Street into a place where you could buy $500 leather pants, if you're into that sort of thing.

Blatstein's actually better than the late and respected Rouse, one of the guests declared, because the acoustics at the Pearl's upstairs screening room are clearer than two miles down Broad Street at the Kimmel Center in Center City, which Rouse pioneered.

Away from Center City is where Blatstein's made his big investments: at Riverview Plaza in South Philly, Avenue North, Piazza at Schmidts north of downtown, and in dozens of smaller deals in neighborhoods where money had long flowed

in the other direction - out.

And away from Center City, at the moment, looks like the place for commercial developers to be: Downtown lease rates and office space are stuck at 1980s levels, and fancy new towers are on hold, while the few employers adding space, such as Comcast, find it lots cheaper to sublet at Center Square, Bell Atlantic Tower, and other high-vacancy landmarks, than to pay for anything new.

But Blatstein is still raising money and putting it to work, on the edge of Center City and beyond. Greystone Capital of New York last month laid out $29 million in Fannie Mae- backed funds to provide a long-term mortgage for Navona, the central building at the Piazza. Connecticut's Webster Bank is financing a smaller Blatstein medical-office building in South Philly.

And it's not just private money. Last week, my colleague Angela Couloumbis and I wrote about how the draft of the state's new capital budget includes up to $95 million in matching funds for three Blatstein projects: $45 million for a hotel and banquet hall next to the Piazza; $25 million toward an 86-suite boutique hotel at Second and Poplar Streets, in a plan already approved by city zoning officials; and $25 million for his planned conversion of the former State Office Building at Broad and Spring Garden to apartments and stores, which would enable him to close that deal after more than a year of financing delays.

If the state money becomes available, in the waning days of Gov. Rendell's administration, Blatstein says he'll be ready to hire and build.

For Philadelphia readers, that raised the obvious question: Who did Blatstein pay to land this money?

Back in the late 1980s and 1990s, when Blatstein was getting started in the business, he raised tens of thousands for then-Mayor Rendell, and thousands more for John F. Street, former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo (currently incarcerated), and other Pennsylvania politicians. He famously made millions in a South Philadelphia stadium land deal under Mayor Street, before moving his focus uptown.

But Blatstein has cut way back on political funding. He has given less than $1,000 to candidates in Pennsylvania state races since 2004, according to state campaign-finance records. He has been a little more active on the local level, spreading almost $6,000 among six City Council candidates in the 2007 city elections, including Councilman Bill Green and Northern Liberties Neighbors Association head Matt Ruben, according to records assembled by my colleague Dylan Purcell.

Is Blatstein being rewarded for old services by politicians with long memories? Or is Harrisburg really looking to back the projects most likely to actually get built, in Philadelphia, by the guy here who, in the slow, suffering year of 2010, gets things done?