Community groups in Philadelphia are trying to remake blighted vacant properties into community gardens and neighborhood amenities.
The group is trying to get the city to allow vacant and abandoned land to be transferred to community members for reuse.
"'How are our children supposed to grow and become productive members of society?' asked resident Nashanta Robinson, 30, standing in a lot on the 2100 block of Leithgow Street, between two crumbling, deserted houses, 'if this is what they see growing up?'
Robinson, a mother of three, has lived for about two years in Fairhill, one of the neighborhoods east of Broad Street in the section that is struggling with blight. 'With the blight and the trash, it brings crime and just produces a negative aspect to the community which we don't want. We don't want that.'
According to the campaign's recent report, 'Put Abandoned Land in Our Hands,' 25 percent of the properties in the section, which runs from Girard to Lehigh Avenues and Front to 10th Streets, are vacant or blighted."
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