The First Street Journal reported, on December 5^th, just how well the Democrats, whose current cause de jour is “affordable housing,” have done when they’ve actually been in charge of housing. We noted a story and an Editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer^[1]Sadly, both stories are now behind a “subscribers Only” paywall, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you’ll just have to take my word for it. showing how a liberally-oriented “affordable housing” landlord ignored conditions in a dilapidate apartment, and the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections, noting in the Editorial that:

(Essie) Campbell filed several complaints, but no city inspectors entered her home or issued violations for the appalling conditions inside.

Well, though no one has died due to it, it’s happening again!

The Embassy Apartments, 2100 Walnut Street. Photo via Google Maps.

Some tenants in a Walnut Street apartment building say they haven’t had heat this winter

Some tenants of the 15-story Embassy Apartments say the temperatures in their units were lower than legally allowable.

by Nate File | Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 5:56 AM EST

For some people, being carried in the arms of firefighters is a kind of fantasy.

But for 83-year-old Deborah Diamond, it was misery. On Friday evening, she and the other residents of Embassy Apartments at 2100 Walnut St. were told by their building’s management to evacuate because the city deemed it unsafe after a daylong power outage had disabled the fire alarm system. Firefighters strapped Diamond, who is on hospice care, to a chair and carried her down nine flights of stairs.

“This building is in tremendous disrepair,” she said of the 15-story property built in 1900.

This building isn’t some dump in North Philly, but is located between Rittenhouse and Logan Squares. In my Google Streetscape search, I noticed two very nice nearby townhouses, one with an historic preservation plaque on it, with “Harris/Walz” signs in the windows. 🙂

Even before the outage, some residents said their apartments had not received heat this winter, or weak heating at best. Two residents said they measured temperatures inside their apartments that were far below legal temperatures.

There’s more at the link. The newspaper’s story does not say that there had been previous complaints to L&I which were ignored, but here we have a 15-story apartment building, in a city which has been run by the Democrats since the latter days of Harry Truman’s presidency, just a couple of weeks shy of 73 years ago, and there are stories like this.

More will crop up as the depths of winter hit the City of Brotherly Love, and we hear of fires caused by electric space heaters, and toxic fumes from desperate people using kerosene heaters; this happens every winter.

According to a 2021 study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, roughly 30% of the city’s rental units lack a rental license entirely, and only 7% of the city’s rental units are inspected during a given year. This presents a troubling lack of clarity on how many households are renting units that fail to meet basic habitation standards.

There’s no surprise in this. Philly is both one of our oldest cities, so the existing housing stock is relatively old, and our nation’s poorest big city. But that also tells us that the Democrats and their policies for “affordable housing” are just words, not matched by deeds.