Frankford, Northwood, and the Blocks Under the El
Frankford is 19124, in the lower Northeast — Frankford Creek along the south, Bridge Street at the top, and the long spine of Frankford Avenue running northeast to the Frankford Transportation Center at 5233 Frankford Ave, where the El terminates and sixteen bus routes converge. Margaret, Orthodox, Griscom, Arrott, Unity, Wakeling. Womrath Park. The Historical Society of Frankford at 1507 Orthodox. Frankford Friends Meeting, established here in 1684.
Two things people get wrong. The El stop at Margaret and Orthodox has been the Arrott Transit Center since the rebuild. And Northwood — northeast of Frankford Avenue, laid out from 1905 as a middle-class suburb — is a different market inside the same ZIP: twins and singles on Wakeling, Harrison, Penn, Foulkrod and Allengrove run 1,700 to 2,100 square feet against a Frankford rowhome median closer to 1,280. If you’re in Northwood, say so when you call.
Porch-Front Rows: The Specific Way They Fail
The dominant Frankford house is the two-story porch-front masonry row with a basement garage — close to 8,900 in this ZIP, most from the 1920s through the 1940s. City records put the median Frankford house at about 1,200 square feet on a roughly 19-by-84-foot lot, median build year 1935. Nearer the Avenue and the creek there’s older mill-era stock without porches.
The porch fails first, in a predictable order. The porch roof is low-slope and nobody ever looks at it, so water gets behind the ledger and rots the band joist. Then the column bases go — they sit on a deck that holds water and wick it up. Then the deck framing goes, and the roof above hangs from trim. Then the ceiling caves, which is usually when someone calls us.
Then there’s siding. Plenty of Frankford porch-fronts got asbestos-cement shingle mid-century and then aluminum or vinyl over that, so nobody has seen the sheathing in seventy years. The city’s guidance is that asbestos-cement siding doesn’t release fibers unless it’s sawed, drilled or cut — exactly what a renovation does, which is why removal needs a licensed contractor. We price this in.
Add the era’s usual list: 80% of the housing in 19124 predates 1960, so knob-and-tube and undersized service are live possibilities in anything un-renovated, along with galvanized supply, a clay lateral and basement moisture. Two things owners rarely check: the Frankford Creek floodplain runs through built-up residential blocks, and the Water Department’s Basement Backup Protection Program installs a backwater valve free if your water bill is current.
The Violation Stack
Here’s Frankford’s real number: 19124 ranks second in Philadelphia for L&I violations — roughly 8,000 since the start of 2025, about 35 per hundred parcels against a citywide 26.
Read the character of them before you panic. The top codes are weeds, rubbish, vacant-lot upkeep and unlicensed rentals. On imminently dangerous structures Frankford ranks about fifteenth, well behind the collapse-risk neighborhoods. This is deferred maintenance and absentee ownership, not buildings falling down — and across the ZIP, vacancy and tax delinquency both run below the citywide average, though the blocks around the Avenue run heavier than Northwood.
What matters for a sale:
- Violations run with the property. Selling doesn’t erase them — it transfers them, which is
- fine, because we take them.
- Unpaid fines and city-performed work can become liens, and liens must clear to convey title —
- at settlement, out of proceeds.
- You don’t have to cure anything to sell to us. Not the roof, not the porch, not the handrail
- someone got written up for in 2019.
- If the case is “unsafe” or “imminently dangerous,” say so on the first call. Different track,
- six-day appeal window, and if the city demolishes, the cost becomes a lien on your parcel.
- If the house next door came down, you may have inherited a duty you don’t know about. The
- building code puts the obligation to weatherproof an exposed party wall on whoever demolished —
- tarps for no more than 60 days, permanent covering within 60 days of exposure. But if that party
- was refused access to your property and a danger exists, the duty can shift to you.
If you have no idea what’s open on your property, that’s normal. We can pull the address history — it’s public, on the city’s Atlas map — and walk through it with you.
Selling With a Tenant Still In It
You do not need to remove anyone. The lease conveys with the property, deposits transfer at settlement, and the tenant keeps their tenancy — we handle the notification. Emptying a building before you sell usually costs more in vacancy, legal fees and time than it adds to the price. If there’s an eviction in progress, say where it stands; it changes the timeline, not the deal.
Section 8, Turnover, and the Math That Stopped Working
The Frankford tired-landlord story is consistent: you bought in the early 2000s or at auction, you’ve had voucher tenants for years, inspections got tighter, the last turnover cost thousands and four months, and the roof now costs more than the year’s profit. Vouchers are a real part of this market — some tracts run above 20% of occupied units — and that cuts both ways: reliable rent, tighter inspections, a smaller buyer pool when you sell.
One more pattern worth naming. About 62% of housing here is owner-occupied, but only about 46% of parcels have filed for the Homestead Exemption — a sixteen-point gap. Some of that is people who never got to the form. A meaningful share is heirs living in a house they can’t put in their own name. That’s a title problem, not a sale problem, and there’s free legal help for it here.
What We Need From You to Make an Offer
The address, whether it’s occupied, the rent if it is, and anything you know about open violations or unpaid taxes. Enough for a first conversation. We’ll pull the rest.
(267) 507-5453 · 1800 E Schiller St, Philadelphia PA 19134
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