Keeping Bridesburg secret was once an option. People often advise new visitors to not talk about the neighborhood. Some are only half-joking.

“I really don’t want to do this interview,” Joseph F. Slabinski III, a funeral home owner and multi-generational neighborhood watchdog, said with a grin. “Bridesburg is truly a hidden gem, and we don’t want to tell many people about it. We want to keep it to ourselves.”

But it’s too late for that. Philadelphia’s real estate market is booming out from downtown in every direction, and Bridesburg has attracted more interest for its long-sung virtues of safety and stability in an often chaotic city.

That said, developers and investors have been quickly learning what happens when you don’t share the Bridesburg vision — namely, a neighborhood of single-family homes.

Led by Yvonne, the action alliance has successfully used the city’s zoning process to stonewall developers from opening multi-unit apartment complexes among other business operations.

Even when no zoning variance is needed, they’ve been able to pressure real estate interests. A bar opening up within a few blocks from a school? Not with Yvonne fighting it, as one business owner recently found.

Rising rentership remains the most common source of worry for neighborhood residents. There’s widespread sentiment that the area already has too many month-to-month tenants.

“We have more rentals now than when we were growing up,” Stephens said, at a meeting with her local charity group.

“Back then, you couldn’t get in this neighborhood if you tried,” said Rosemarie Conry, a longtime Bridesburg homeowner.

City records suggest the fears over rentals might be out of proportion.

There are 166 buildings with active rental licenses in Bridesburg — a small fraction of the neighborhood’s estimated 5,000 properties. That’s nearly 50% more rentals than there were over a decade ago. The rate of growth isn’t unique. Rentals in neighborhoods across the city have surged since 2009, according to a Keystone Crossroads analysis of licensing data.

When it comes to the neighborhood’s war on renters, many of Bridesburg’s watchdogs describe a familiar set of fears. Multi-family housing will eat up the parking supply. Crime will increase. Out of town landlords will let the properties fall into disrepair.

“The block behind me has six, and they’re shit holes,” said Conry.

As a worst-case scenario, they point to Mayfair, a nearby neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, which has seen an explosion in rental properties. Nowhere else in the city saw such a concentrated spike — with thousands more permits issued over the last decade.

“If you have a block with 20 homes, 15 of them are rental units,” Slabinski said. “The owner is in New York or out somewhere, and they’re not there. So, no pride. Rentals. That’s killing Mayfair.”

Studies suggest that a range of factors — including how far away a landlord lives and a neighborhood’s overall economic mobility — inform how rentals will impact a community.

The relationship between rentership and crime is complicated. But in Bridesburg, it’s commonly accepted wisdom that simply having more of the former drives the latter.

Police data doesn’t back up the public sentiment. In Mayfair, for instance, officers responded to fewer violent and non-violent crimes in 2019 than they did in 2014, and far fewer on average than they did in 2009, even as homeownership winnowed and rentals surged. The general decline comports with what local police commanders have shared with residents over the years.

It’s true, though, that crime in the ‘Burg has been kept even lower.

The neighborhood’s level of relative safety competes with the city’s most affluent areas. For many years in the last two decades, only the tony Chestnut Hill neighborhood could be called less fatal.

At the same time, the neighborhood has shown far more economic resilience than surrounding areas. Between 2014 and 2018, a U.S. Census survey found incomes declined in every neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia — except one: the famously halcyon Bridesburg.

These are the family-first distinctions that Yvonne and others fight tooth and nail to preserve, hopefully, they say, for generations to come.

“It’s family — it really is,” said Yvonne. “I don’t ever want to leave.”

For local gatekeepers, when you dig deeper into housing issues, things are more complicated than the homeowner vs. renter dichotomy.

Slabinski says he owns a few rental properties and vets the tenants rigorously.

And at the end of a walk through the neighborhood, Yvonne discloses something that feels almost like a secret.

“I’m a renter,” she said. “That’s the most funniest thing in the world, isn’t it though?”

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Fifteen years ago, Yvonne’s father fell ill and she made the decision to settle back down with the kids in the neighborhood. But when she and her husband went house hunting, they were stunned.

“There were no houses to buy,” she said.

Through the rumor mill, they eventually heard about a rare rental property available on Thompson Street, and locked it down with the help of neighborhood real estate broker Gary Dydak.

Residents describe Dydak as the veteran watchdog of Bridesburg real estate. “Everything went through him at some point,” said Tom Wegner, another realtor and developer in the neighborhood.

Bridesburg lifers historically didn’t give up properties easily. Residents and realtors described an informal brokerage system that helped keep the neighborhood’s estimated 5,000 properties off the real estate radar as much as possible.

Multi-generational residents long kept it in the family, Dydak says, passing them down to their next of kin. When there was no heir, local residents would sometimes buy the property before it fell into unknown hands. And when Bridesburgians sought to leave the neighborhood and rent rather than sell, they received a stern message from the neighborhood social circle.

“When they moved out, they could not rent. When they moved out, they had to sell,” said Peggy Alvarez, another longtime neighborhood resident.

Bridesburg’s invisible wall has been especially impenetrable for those hoping to rent using a subsidized housing voucher.

Federal housing data shows that about a third of Philadelphia census tracts don’t contain a single resident using the federal Housing Choice program. That includes the two tracts that make up Bridesburg. It’s a point of pride for many in the neighborhood.

“We try to keep it to a minimum,” Slabinkski said.

Landlords are supposed to consider Housing Choice tenants the same as they would any other, but in practice, many don’t. Less than a dozen properties are up for rent at any time in Bridesburg. Calls to several property managers inquiring about voucher rentals found no takers.

“I’m sorry,” one apologized.

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