Francisville is under construction.Walk down almost any street in this North Philadelphia neighborhood, and there are houses—or multi-unit buildings—getting built. Fences and ladders jut out onto the sidewalk, annoying residents. Community meetings get loud with complaints about everything from unwanted new neighbors to rising rents to cowboy contractors. The 28-block area just north of Fairmount and the Art Museum area is, in City Council President Darrell Clarke’s words, at the “frontlines of gentrification.” It is also the site of an emerging contest between two community organizations with very different visions for the neighborhood’s future. But in Francisville, the neighborhood drama isn’t playing out along stereotypical battle lines. Instead of a clash between longtime residents opposed to development and newcomers eager see fresh amenities move in, it’s the new kids on the block who want to see the pace of change slow down.

“There’s been an influx of building and it hasn’t been for home ownership,” says Susan Stolting, a community activist and Comcast program manager who bought her LEED-certified duplex in 2016. “People [are] very concerned that we [will] be overrun by people who are renting and therefore don’t have a stake in the community as a homeowner would.”

Stolting is the force behind a new civic association, The United Francisville Civic Association. On Tuesday, her group experienced a win when a proposed remapping introduced by Clarke after months of advocacy from Stolting and her allies earned a favorable recommendation from the Philadelphia City Planning Commision.

“When I first started to look, some very nice looking new buildings were built which is why a lot of people wanted to stay,” says Stolting, who moved to Francisville in 2013 because of its proximity to downtown. For several years, she was one of the renters in the neighborhood, watching new homes rise around her.

For a while, things seemed to be moving in the right direction, she recalls. “It wasn’t too overbuilt, you aren’t talking about massive apartment or condo complexes. I didn’t want one of those buildings,” she recalls. At some point, though, the development hit a tipping point, she says. “Now its changed quite a bit.”

On the other side of the debate over Francisville’s growth and opposed to Clarke’s proposed rezoning is Penelope Giles, the founder and executive director of the Francisville Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit formed in 2002 with a mission to improve the quality of life in the area bounded by Broad Street and Corinthian Avenue, and Fairmount and Girard Avenues through residential and commercial development. Born and raised in Francisville, Giles recalls the bustling neighborhood of her childhood, one with tall buildings, often carved into apartments and and thriving avenues lined with shops and businesses. As Francisville and the city as a whole lost residents and businesses in 1970s and ‘80s, vacancy took over Ridge Avenue.

“We can understand what happened, why Ridge Avenue became desolate and abandoned… and as we lost the density, we lost the economic diversity that was paramount for supporting a bustling commercial corridor,” says Giles, whose group is both a recognized community organization (RCO) that coordinates zoning meetings and a development corporation devoted to the rejuvenation of Ridge Avenue.

She says that the development Stolting’s group opposes is the exact kind of growth needed to regain the economic integration and density the neighborhood needs to thrive again.

“They are opposing development on these large parcels that, when I was a little girl, were these big huge brownstones with multiple families,” says Giles.