I have very mixed feelings about my days living in a row home in Philly. While I was always attracted to the design and layout of these structures, I hated them immensely for two main reasons: A. No matter how well you kept your house clean, if the neighbors had roaches–you had roaches. B. You could hear just about everything happening in your neighbor’s house.
Well apparently the woman in the following story could hear and smell everything going on in the abandoned home next door. In fact, her neighbors were squatters who were not supposed to be there in the first place.
BURNED OUT
By STEPHANIE FARR
Philadelphia Daily News
ALVIRA PERRY knew when the squatters moved in next door by the smell of their cooking.
She’d lie awake at night, alone in her house on a deserted block in Frankford, frightened that she’d left the stove on.
“It’d wake me up and it scared me because I knew no one else was in my house,” Perry, 66, said.
With her home not a foot away from the squatters’ den next door, it didn’t take long for Perry’s nose to lead her to the odor’s origin.
“My major concern was I was scared I was going to get burnt out,” she said.
For months, Perry complained to an aide in her councilman’s office about the vacant building and the squatters.
For months, nothing was done.
Now, Perry leaves her stove on anytime she’s in the house. She doesn’t have a choice. It’s the only source of heat she has left after her house was severely damaged one year ago today in the fire she had predicted the squatters next door would start. The squatters didn’t care about her house, and now she’s wondering if anyone does.
Even though she warned, even though she pleaded - and even though, according to Perry, the city itself owns the vacant building where the fire started - the city’s Office of Risk Management has offered her only part of the cost of the needed repairs.
“I’m not asking anyone to rebuild my house,” she said, “just to fix what is broke.”
Two gaping holes in the roof, two broken-down doors, and the destruction of the house’s heating system were among the damage from the fire, Perry said.
She bought the two-story house on Margaret Street near Darrah in 1998 for $3,500. It wasn’t much - “it was one of them drug houses you buy at an auction,” she said - but she managed to clean it up.
The house has a bar and kitchen downstairs and an apartment upstairs. At first, she rented out the downstairs portion for small events.
“It was good for a while,” she said. “This was my getaway relaxation.”
But it didn’t take long for the neighborhood to turn uglier, particularly when, she claims, a nearby barbershop began selling drugs as well as haircuts. Today, all the houses on the block are vacant, except for Perry’s.
While the building next door to hers was vacant from the time she moved in, Perry said she didn’t begin noticing the presence of squatters until late 2005. That’s when she began contacting an aide to her then-councilman, Rick Mariano.
“I could hear walking up and down next door. Sometimes it sounded like there was a whole gang of them in there,” she said.
After Mariano was convicted of corruption in March 2006, the aide went to work for the new councilman, Daniel J. Savage, and Perry continued her complaints: “They just kept hearing me complaining all last year. They kept saying they would get somebody out there to clean it out and board it up again,” she said. “As far as I know, nobody came out.”
In desperation, Perry grabbed the ear of any city worker who showed up on her block. One night a police officer came by, and she told him about the squatters. Another time, she approached a city crew boarding up a different house and asked them to re-board the one next to hers.
“They said yes and they put it on a list to do it,” she said. “It did get boarded up, but later on the squatters broke back in it again.”
It was 1:53 a.m. on Nov. 27, 2006, when the fire that Perry had long feared finally broke out.
Luckily, she was staying the night at a friend’s house. It wasn’t until the next morning that she saw what the fire had done to her home.
“After I seen my damage and the next-door damage, I knew what it was,” she said. “I knew it had happened.” (more…)
If a person lives in an area that has historically been neglected by local politicians, why is it so important for them to vote?
My wife has extended family members living in situations close to this.
One area is because of sinking homes. Evidently the homes were built on an area that was a marsh that was filled in with sand or something. Now the homes are sinking and there are blocks upon blocks of empty buildings with a few families still in a home here or there.
Is that in Philly? That sounds like the Logan section near where I used to live.