This really isn’t much of a surprise, because when the #BlackLivesMatter marchers rioted through 2020’s Summer of Hate, they mostly burned stuff in heavily black neighborhoods.

On June 1, 2020, Philadelphia Inquirer architecture writer Inga Saffron noted, in the article originally entitled Buildings Matter, Too:

Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?

That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.

Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered. . . . .

“People over property” is great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia — and in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and a dozen other American cities — is devastating for the future of cities. We know from the civil rights uprisings of the 1960s that the damage will ultimately end up hurting the very people the protests are meant to uplift. Just look at the black neighborhoods surrounding Ridge Avenue in Sharswood or along the western end of Cecil B. Moore Avenue. An incredible 56 years have passed since the Columbia Avenue riots swept through North Philadelphia, and yet those former shopping streets are graveyards of abandoned buildings. Residents still can’t get a supermarket to take a chance on their neighborhood.

Well, no, of course not! Would you bet your money on those neighborhoods? Grocery stores normally have pretty small profit margins, on the order of just 2%, and, as William Teach recently noted, yet another major chain store is closing down stores in Democrat-run cities where they are losing money to theft.

Second night of break-ins and thefts in Northeast Philly leaves some small business owners in ruin

Police arrested six people in connection with this second round of thefts, which followed a string of break-ins Tuesday targeting businesses across Center City, North, and West Philadelphia.

by Ellie Rushing, Ximena Conde, Beatrice Forman, and Anna Orso | Thursday, September 28, 2023 | 9:03 AM EDT | Updated: 3:27 PM ET | Updated: 5:07 PM EDT

For the second night in a row, groups of people broke into and burglarized a string of businesses in Northeast Philadelphia, leaving store owners again cleaning up destruction.

Why can’t the (purportedly) educated reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer use the proper word, burgled, rather than the bastardized ‘burglarized’?

The thieves smashed the doors of about a half dozen shops early Thursday morning — including three Fine Wine & Good Spirits, a small beauty supply store, and a Walgreens, among others — and fled with their arms and bags filled with goods. Police arrested six people, bringing the total number of people charged with the mass theft since Tuesday to 58.

The second round of looting prompted city leaders to again condemn the action and call for peace, and City Council members said Thursday they were working to connect business owners with grant opportunities and help with cleanup.

And it came as Eddie Irizarry’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Officer Mark Dial, who shot and killed Irizarry during a traffic stop in Kensington last month, and his partner Michael Morris, who was present but did not fire his gun. The first round of looting Tuesday was prompted by a judge’s decision to dismiss all criminal charges against Dial, even as Irizarry’s family called for peace amid pleas for justice.

It has nothing to do with the death of Eddie Irizarry, or somehow seeking ‘justice,’ or calls for peace by Mr Irizarry’s family; the riots are, as Acting Police Commissioner John Stanford called the, acts of “criminal opportunists.”

Claudia Silmeas

Claudia Silmeas, owner of Nat’s Beauty Supply in Mayfair, was shaking and on the verge of tears as she described the extensive damage to her small business Thursday.“This is my only source of income,” she said. “I’m heartbroken, at a loss of words, nobody is ready for this. No one plans for this to happen.”

Nat’s Beauty Supply specialized in beauty products for black women, and a video on the Inquirer’s original shows the looters who smashed the glass front door and broke in, stealing all sorts of stuff, and, yup, sure enough, they appeared to be all other black women. Did they not know, or at least guess, that the owner of a store for beauty products for black women was owned by a black woman?

At Nat’s Beauty Supply, surveillance video showed about 10 people in hoodies, gloves, and surgical masks gathered in the parking lot around 12:45 a.m. Using what appeared to be a bat, they smashed the front door and ducked inside. Within two minutes, dozens of hair extensions, wigs, and products were cleared out.

Silmeas rushed over around 1 a.m. to find the walls and shelves of her most expensive products — items that cost as much as $135 per bundle — nearly bare. She spent much of Thursday cleaning and counting the lost inventory, and estimates she lost “thousands of dollars.” The business, she said, just opened five months ago and is her “one and only, first store.”

“I was working six, seven days a week, mornings … nights, overnight,” she said, “so I could save up to open this store, and now this happened.”

When you have “about 10 people in hoodies, gloves, and surgical masks” gathered there, you know that they had planned all of this. This wasn’t a protest that got out of hand, but deliberate, intentional robbery.

The left in Philly have a new word that they love to use: ‘disinvestment,’ meaning that whomever — the city, the state, private entrepreneurs — have abandoned heavily minority — “black and brown” in the Inky’s usual formulation — neighborhoods. But Miss Silmeas invested in a minority neighborhood, working long hours to put together the money she needed to get her business off the ground. Now look what the neighborhood have done to her!

Did Miss Silmeas have insurance against this sort of thing? We don’t know, but if she did, her losses will be less. However, if she does have insurance, we can count on one thing: her insurance rates will increase significantly in the future. I would guess that these thugs have increased the insurance rates for every business in the area, whether owned by black or white entrepreneurs.