Sometimes the real news is found in sections of the newspaper — and yes, I’m a newspaper reader, even if it’s just the digital editions! — in which you don’t expect it. From the Real Estate section of The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Apartment building proposed under the El adds even more transit-accessible housing in Fishtown

The 114-apartment building with a restaurant is planned for Front Street.

by Jale Blumgart | Thursday, April 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

A 114-unit apartment project is planned immediately adjacent to the Market-Frankford Line at 1440 N. Front St. on the border between Fishtown and South Kensington.

This is the latest, and largest, project from Archive Development, a new real estate company that’s been building in the Fishtown area since 2020. The project will contain 2,000 square feet of retail space, which the company wants to go to a restaurant.

“Front is one of the only streets in Fishtown where you can truly build with high density,” said Henry Siebert, cofounder of Archive. “We’ve seen it transition from a former industrial street with warehouses to a true, viable commercial corridor. That’s what attracted us.”

Amenities include a seventh floor “sky lounge,” with a kitchenette and a roof deck. It will also include a gym, coworking spaces, a dedicated conference room, and a ground floor garden. There will be five studios, 93 one-bedroom units, and 16 two-bedroom units.

There’s more at the original, but that apartment building better have some outrageous soundproofing. Who would want the sound of the El outside their windows?

Fishtown has been gentrifying for years, enough to have attracted the attention of Forbes:

How Fishtown, Philadelphia Became America’s Hottest New Neighborhood

Peter Lane Taylor^[1]I cover luxury real estate, travel, hospitality, and entrepreneurs | May 2, 2018,09:52pm EDT

Every Friday afternoon at 5:30 pm the doors of “the El­”—one of America’s oldest elevated subways—swoosh open at Girard and Berks Street stations, unleashing a stampede of Millennials, yuppies, hipsters, entrepreneurs, and empty nesters onto Front Street.

As fast as the doors close, they scatter east down a maze of narrow streets swirling with trash, bumping shoulders with the occasional heroin addict and scrappers pushing shopping carts piled high with salvaged sheet metal. Nobody blinks.

A half dozen blocks away from their newly-built, half-million dollar townhomes, the lines twist out the doors at Pizzeria Beddia and Frankford Hall, two of Philadelphia’s hottest foodie spots. Across the street, Johnny Brenda’s is already packed—hosting as they have for over a decade one of America’s hottest indie rock bands. Mothers pushing strollers window shop past Lululemon along Frankford Avenue’s buzzing retail corridor fronted with wine bars, coffee shops, couture boutiques, yoga studios, a vintage motorcycle joint, and an Argentinian tango dance school.

Visually the dichotomies are jarring. Culturally the contradictions are even more confusing. Yet when the El disgorges its “New Fish” every afternoon it epitomizes the driving forces behind Fishtown’s warp-speed transformation, and the demographics fueling America’s new urban revolution.

There’s more at the original, including this photo, which I found interesting. Captioned as “An average night at Frankford Hall,” it shows the stereotypical young urban professionals at the Frankford Hall Hofbräu München German biergarten, a full courtyard of exclusively white — from what I could see — twenty-and-thirty-somethings. Philly is, overall, a very racially and ethnically diverse — and I’ve come to hate the word ‘diverse’ — cities, but, as the Inquirer previously reported, “Among the 30 biggest cities, Philadelphia is second only to Chicago in its level of residential segregation between Black and white residents, according to data from Brown University. Between Hispanic and white residents, it’s the sixth-most segregated.” And it’s only going to get worse.

But if Fishtown is gentrifying, an up-and-coming neighborhood, it’s right up against Kensington, Philly’s worst, or at least the one with the worst reputation, one so bad that the Mexican government used video of Kensington in an anti-drug ad campaign. And the 1440 North Front Street project is just 2.1 miles from the SEPTA elevated train station at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues.

Inquirer reporter Jake Blumgart spent a fair amount of space telling readers about the mass transit opportunities in the area, with this paragraph standing out:

Archive Development’s project on Front Street comes amid a construction boom directly adjacent to the Market Frankford elevated tracks. The El has struggled with low ridership, remote work trends, and a surge in antisocial behavior following the pandemic.

LOL! A “surge in antisocial behavior”? That’s a rather mild euphemism for shootings, assaults, and rampant drug use in SEPTA stations, with stations and transit cars filled with discarded needles.

There’s a choice that Philadelphia has to take, one which will determine the path our nation’s sixth largest city will follow. Will the city opt for actual law enforcement, and clean up Kensington and the Philadelphia Badlands, to enable further gentrification, wealth, and potential integration, or will it persist in non-enforcement, in excusing crime and leniently treating criminals, further depressing the depressed neighborhoods?