While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Laura Wolf-Powers, PhD, published a book titled, “University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District” in 2022, highlighting the history of development and gentrification in West Philadelphia. Her research focuses on neighborhood revitalization and urban/regional economic development, with particular attention to how structural inequalities influence community development. Wolf-Powers is currently a professor in the Department of Urban Policy and Planning at the City University of New York, Hunter College.
The following interview from December 2024 with Wolf-Powers has been edited for clarity and length.
Gerard Johnson: How does Drexel University’s approach to gentrification and expansion differ from The University of Pennsylvania’s? How does their expansion affect the public sphere, citizenship, inclusion and exclusion?
Laura Wolf-Powers: Neither Penn nor Drexel would view itself or proclaim itself to be an agent of gentrification. Each institution believes it’s pursuing two compatible aims. For example, Penn, with its West Philadelphia initiatives in the 2000s, focused on creating an environment around its campus where students felt comfortable.
Similarly, Drexel is trying to create, in the areas around its official campus, a place where students feel part of a neighborhood, along with people who work at companies that are part of the innovation districts. Again, I don’t think Drexel would call that gentrification; they’d label it “campus-adjacent development” that extends the university’s brand into the neighborhood, creating environments where people can thrive.
There’s a lot of contention around the idea of gentrification — what it is, what it isn’t, and
whether it’s positive. Drexel is extending itself beyond its campus as both a catalyst for economic development and as an outreach to communities of lower socioeconomic status. For example, the Dornsife Center reflects Drexel’s commitment to serving communities near the university.
At the same time, I don’t think it’s inaccurate to call these initiatives a form of gentrification. It definitely marked the territory as “university-associated.”
When Penn started the West Philadelphia initiatives and created the University City District, they used the concept of “clean and safe.” The question I’d pose is: “Clean for whom and safe from whom?” Safety is framed as universal, but it can lead to stratifying the population into those who need to be kept out to maintain that safety, and those who remain in the “zone of safety.” Even if that wasn’t Penn’s explicit intention, it was the outcome of creating the University City District and expanding police or security presence up to 42nd Street.
GJ: Logan and Molotch call the city a “growth machine” due to the capital flowing through metropolitan areas. You reference them in your work — how does their theory connect to your research, and how do you think universities leverage that concept to exercise power in cities?
LW: I find them very influential. Their classic “growth coalition” involves government and major property owners, as well as the building trades unions. Even if Logan and Molotch don’t explicitly include universities in that mix, it’s implied that universities are part of it.
The reasoning is that universities are place-based: Penn and Drexel are very invested in Philadelphia being economically prosperous, and as a result, they’re interested in boosting the value of the land near them.
Logan and Molotch make a distinction between people who embrace the “use value” of land and those who embrace the “exchange value” of land. People who live in homes, or who run businesses that are tied to a specific city, are in Philadelphia because they live there or operate there. Their relationship to the land is about using it. That’s very different from seeing land as an asset to be exchanged—something you want to appreciate in value so you can sell it.
In neighborhoods like Powelton Village, Mantua or Belmont, many residents live there because it’s their neighborhood. They want to stay, and to them, the main value of their property is that it’s a place to live. But to property investors, the value lies in how much they can sell it for after a few years if it appreciates. Logan and Molotch highlight this tension between use value and exchange value. It’s central to gentrification because some actors treat real property in terms of exchange value, while others — whose families may have lived there for generations — think of it in terms of use value. Those interests don’t align.
GJ: Is gentrification rhizome-like (web-like, decentralized, yet interconnected)?
LW: I think there’s something to the idea that gentrification can spread outwards, but I’d also add that gentrification involves layers. One of them is narrative, because there’s this idea of a poor neighborhood being “dangerous” or “unsafe.” Then people say it’s changing, it’s being revitalized, there’s renewal happening. People start talking about the neighborhood differently, and that interacts with another layer, which involves actual property transactions: vacant lots getting developed by investors or higher-income people moving in. There’s a class dimension here, because what makes the neighborhood “better” is that people of higher social status move in. People are heavily influenced by their prejudices about who’s worthy, virtuous or who’s a “valuable” resident. In general, that’s all very racialized. That can erase the longtime residents who may not have money to invest but do invest their time or commitment to their neighbors. Because that commitment doesn’t have a dollar value, it tends to be overlooked in the discussion of renewal, revitalization or reinvestment.
GJ: How is the gentrification unfolding in University City different from mid-20th-century urban renewal? Is it just another form of top-down redevelopment?
LW: During urban renewal, it was very top-down. The ethos of that era was that certain areas were slums, with an “undesirable” population that needed to be removed. There was no engagement with local residents. There was also no acknowledgement that these so-called “slum” areas had substandard housing largely because of racism in the housing market and the government’s tolerance of discrimination and exploitation by real estate entities and landlords.
Today, universities approach urban revitalization differently, at least in some ways. There’s an effort to include people from the affected neighborhoods in the planning process. Civic associations are consulted, and there’s a collective attempt to envision what the future of the neighborhood should look like. That’s progress. However, there’s still a tendency to stigmatize people of color with lower incomes and to conflate “Black neighborhood” with “bad neighborhood.”
Some things have changed since those days, and the Dornsife Center is a good example. It’s meant to uplift community members, help them find jobs at the universities or in nearby companies, promote literacy, provide legal assistance and public health initiatives and aim for co-prosperity. The idea is that while the university does its thing, there will also be progress in the neighborhoods — people achieving social mobility and so on.
That’s a significant difference from urban renewal, when the residents of targeted neighborhoods were ignored, denigrated and not taken seriously. Still, there’s a prioritization of developers’ and real estate investors’ interests over the needs of long-time residents who simply want to stay where they are with decent public services and good schools. That doesn’t get counted as “development.”
GJ: How have you observed the physical consequences of displacement, and how did those experiences affect you personally? What was the affective or emotional dimension of witnessing — or writing about — events like “funerals for homes”?
LW: Many people I interviewed described the “Funeral for a Home” to me. People I spoke with in Mantua and Powelton felt it acknowledged their experience in a way few other interventions had. That’s why I decided to feature a community meal image on the book’s cover.
One displacement I observed happened at the University City Townhomes on 40th and Market. Around the time my book was published, the residents of U.C. Townhomes were informed that their homes would be demolished to make way for a new development. The city offered them vouchers, but they didn’t believe they could relocate to neighborhoods with anything close to the amenities they had in University City — better schools, a nearby grocery store and public transportation. Essentially, they were being expelled from a well-connected neighborhood that supported their social mobility.
As land value rises, the owners of the land — where the U.C. Townhomes stood — discovered it was more lucrative to sell than to continue operating it as affordable housing. People’s lives were affected, but the imperative to profit ultimately prevailed.
GJ: Now that John Fry has left Drexel University, how do you think gentrification in University City will evolve? How would you rate his legacy in terms of gentrification?
LW: The general playbook for university-led development started with the West Philadelphia initiatives at Penn — John Fry worked there, went to Franklin & Marshall, then came back to serve as president of Drexel. In many ways, he tried to import what he had done at Penn into the Drexel context and also improve on it. In some respects, he succeeded. I think Drexel’s interventions in the surrounding neighborhoods feel more authentic, more meaningful than a lot of what Penn has done. Drexel deserves a lot of credit for viewing its neighbors as partners — people who need to participate in the life of both the neighborhood and the university.
However, his shortcoming was not fully understanding that if you want to create stability and opportunity for people living around the university, you must keep land costs down. That might mean encouraging public acquisition of land or having nonprofits hold land so it stays out of the speculative market.
As for successes and failures, I think Drexel launched a lot of impressive programs, such as the Dornsife Center, its partnership with the University City District, and the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative. But unless people’s land and housing costs remain manageable in one way or another, it will be difficult for them to live in these neighborhoods and enjoy the benefits of development, because housing and property taxes just keep going up.
GJ: Gentrification matters to many students in University City. How can we change the conversation, and what would you say to the Drexel student body about it?
LW: There’s an assumption that in every case, the market should lead neighborhood reinvestment. That has consequences — one being that land is viewed as an asset rather than a collective resource. I believe Philadelphia should be more ambitious in creating opportunities for land to be held collectively — non-commodified. If that happened, the development universities pursue would benefit everyone instead of providing most of the benefits to a few.
Students do benefit from what the university is doing. Drexel’s reputation and economic footprint are growing. But if students think of themselves as members of the local community — not just as Drexel students — they might see real property as more of a collective resource and less of a commodity.
What I’d say to you and others concerned about gentrification is to keep elevating your perspective and exposing fellow students to it. That’s extremely valuable. The more you can broaden people’s horizons to recognize that the university’s actions do affect local residents, the better.