Frustration, Even After a Blight is Removed

Linda Pollard isn't planning on staying in her neighborhood, even after "a bad project" was removed after years of promises by the city to do so.

The project, Liddonfield Homes, is an expansive public housing complex encompassing 573 units in Holmesburg in the Northeast. All the occupants were given other housing, through Section 8 programs, elsewhere in Philadelphia and around the country.

"When I moved here, there was a lot of drug traffic," Pollard said. "If I had known, I never would have moved here."

Pollard lives on a street directly adjacent to Liddonfield Homes. The project is now home only to stray cats and squirrels, which rummage through the empty row homes.

Pollard said she wants to move back to Bristol, Pa., where she is from. The neighborhood here is "dead," and she said she misses the "livelier, friendlier" atmosphere in Bristol.

Still, Pollard said she was glad to see the project go, as were most other adjacent or close-by residents, citing the drugs and violence that seemed to be a mainstay in Liddonfield Homes. Many also said they were glad to see the project actually be torn down, after they had been told for years – in some case decades – that the project would be closed soon.

Stephen Zook and Morgan Zalot, Group 20, Northeast