Looking at Grays Ferry from the Perspective of Health

How can Grays Ferry Avenue, a wide arterial street weaving through the Southwest Philly neighborhoods that surround Pennovation Works, be remade into a healthy corridor?

For starters: Make room for bikes, fix the sidewalks, add streetlights, plant trees, build out vacant lots with affordable housing, and relocate the nearby toxic industrial facilities.

That’s according to a study conducted by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) in Philadelphia, in partnership with a host of local government agencies, health organizations, and community groups, and led by Julie Donofrio of PennPraxis, chair of the local leadership group tasked with organizing the sixth-month process. The local application of a national ULI initiative, focused on improving public health on arterial roadways in cities and suburbs, kicked off last summer with a stakeholder workshop that looked at existing conditions on the corridor. In December, ULI convened a panel of national experts to work with the local leadership group on potential interventions. The group released its key recommendations last month.

“It was really good timing for this project to come along now because of the Pennovation Center opening recently,” said Julie Donofrio, managing director of PennPraxis and chair of the local leadership group for the ULI healthy corridor study. “Penn continues to be engaged in strategic planning to tenant and activate the Pennovation Works campus. How the campus is integrated with the neighborhood around it is going to affect how successful it is, and how it is seen in the neighborhood, and at Penn.”

ULI began its Healthy Corridors initiative in 2014. In addition to Grays Ferry Avenue in Philadelphia, the group has looked at arterial roads in Los Angeles, Denver, Nashville, and Boise, Idaho, as well as Fayetteville, Arkansas, and St. Paul, Minnesota. All the streets studied are wide and auto-oriented, lacking pedestrian and bike infrastructure. They represent some of the “worst built environment conditions for health and safety in the country,” according to ULI’s December presentation.

“They’re all tough places,” said Laura Slutsky, executive director of ULI Philadelphia. The goal of the Healthy Corridors project is to allow various ULI chapters the chance to trade ideas with each other and create a “community of practice” around healthy interventions on arterial streets, Slutsky said.

Public health conditions in the neighborhoods along the Grays Ferry corridor—identified as Grays Ferry and Southwest Schuylkill for the study—are substantially worse than in Philadelphia as a whole, according to a briefing prepared for the working group over the summer. Both neighborhoods lag behind the city when it comes to median income, education levels, exercise habits, and childhood asthma levels. Some parts of the area lack walkable access to parks and healthy foods. These conditions were sorted into a long list of challenges and opportunities facing the Grays Ferry corridor by the stakeholder working group last summer.

The National Study Visit panelists, hailing from Washington, D.C., Detroit, Denver, New York, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, (including PennDesign alumna Alexis Stephens) helped develop recommendations to address these challenges, focused on both short-term implementation and long-term strategies. On the implementation side, recommendations include interventions to improve street infrastructure for bikers and pedestrians, greening, opening a business development center and performing targeted workforce development with public housing residents, returning citizens, and youth. On the strategy side, recommendations include creating a long-range action and implementation committee in the area, conducting health impact assessment and retail studies, and empowering novice developers and entrepreneurs to build new housing and businesses.

Each of the recommendations is paired with a team of “champion” organizations that could carry the action forward. But, at the end of the day, the recommendations are just that. Organizers are hoping the interventions will be carried out on the strength of the momentum that the group built over the last six months.

“The idea is that we started a conversation, and it's up to all the partners involved to continue the momentum,” PennPraxis’s Donofrio said. She hopes the Grays Ferry study will help inform future initiatives driven by the many local agencies, community members, and property owners that were involved in the study, which will hopefully result in Grays Ferry being a welcoming connector to serve its many users.

Numerous PennDesign alumnae were involved in the local leadership group including: Jeanette Brugger, Jack Byerly, Julie Donofrio, Mark Kocent, Nicole Ozdemir, and Amanda Wagner.