No place like first home

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Minutes feel like hours and days drag along like weeks for Arlene Stokes as she waits for the last day of the month to arrive.

On that day, Stokes will be handed the keys to her first home, a newly rehabilitated house that she bought on the 500 block of Emily Street.

"I want to move right now," she said anxiously last Wednesday while describing her journey from a homeless shelter to owning a three-bedroom property.

Stokes purchased the home from the United Communities Community Development Corp. The organization recently completed restoration of eight formerly abandoned properties on the 500 block of Emily. The result was five new three-story homes, each sold to a first-time homebuyer.

Last Wednesday, UCCDC held a grand-opening ceremony to unveil the properties.

The project cost nearly $700,000, said D.K. Johnston, executive director of UCCDC, a group founded six years ago by United Communities of Southeast Philadelphia. It was funded privately and with grants from the Office of Housing and Community Development and the Redevelopment Authority’s Homeownership Rehabilitation Program.

The properties sold for up to $45,000 for a four-bedroom, single-family home created by combining two adjacent properties plus a vacant lot on the street. Each house has a brass knocker on the front door inscribed with the words, "Developed by UCCDC."

Counting these five houses, the organization has rehabilitated 25 homes and sold each to first-time homebuyers. Emily Street was UCCDC’s first whole block.

"A project of this magnitude takes a lot of cooperation and teamwork and mutual respect," Johnston said.


Stokes, who grew up near the block where she bought her house, and currently rents an apartment near Second and McKean streets, said owning a home has long been a dream of hers, even though at times it seemed farfetched.

"I have made some bad choices in my life, and the choices I made cost me a lot of years," said Stokes, 47. "I decided I wanted to get my life together and become responsible."

She declined to discuss those decisions of the past, but said she has spent time living in homeless shelters and transitional housing. Today, she survives on a full-time job cleaning office buildings in Center City.

Then several months ago, her cousin — who bought a house of her own with assistance from the Redevelopment Authority — suggested that Stokes stop renting and purchase a place. It sounded like a fine idea.

"I was tired of getting stressed out about the rent," she said. "I decided if I am going to get stressed out, I am going to get stressed out about something that belongs to me."

Sheryl Jones, Stokes’ future neighbor and another first-time homeowner with the UCCDC, said she feels the same way. Jones, 53, grew up near Broad and Bainbridge streets and currently lives in an apartment in Southwest Philadelphia.

The first time she toured the renovated homes on the block, construction was not complete, but she was still impressed. Jones said she particularly liked the idea of moving into a newly built place.

"The idea of going into a house and fixing this and fixing that didn’t appeal to me," she added. "I probably would have stayed in an apartment."

UCCDC chose to work on Emily Street because it had been included in the 1998 Seventh Street Neighborhood Plan to revitalize the neighborhood, Johnston said. Also, the block already had a stable group of homeowners, and few renters.

It took three years for vacant homes involved in the project to be condemned and turned over to Johnston’s organization. Meanwhile, the abandoned homes continued to rot, and two of the properties became victims of those delays two summers ago.

In August 2001, the 500 block of Emily Street made news when one of the vacant two-story rowhomes collapsed. No one was injured but the tumble severely damaged the adjacent property, also involved in the UCCDC project, and it had to be demolished as well

Renovations had not begun on either home at that point.

Instead of constructing new houses from scratch in those spaces, Johnston said, UCCDC decide to leave the spaces open and sell the lots to owners of the rehabbed homes.

Johnston said he’s optimistic that the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative — Mayor Street’s plan to eliminate blight from the city, which got rolling in December — will streamline the process to acquire abandoned properties.

UCCDC has funding to renovate six more properties, Johnston said, and they are working with a local Realtor to purchase them. They will not likely be concentrated on one block like the Emily Street project, he said.

Within the next two years, Johnston said, the organization also wants to begin rehabilitating commercial properties along Seventh Street.