Straight Talk
“Kensington” means three different things depending on who’s talking, and it matters for your property. The historic district — incorporated 1820, absorbed into the city in 1854 — ran far wider than the name does today. The neighborhood as the city maps it is another thing. And the Kensington in the news is the El corridor along Kensington Avenue, roughly Lehigh up to Allegheny — a few dozen blocks that actually straddle four neighborhoods: Kensington proper, Harrowgate, Fairhill and West Kensington. It crosses 19125, 19133 and 19134, and 19133 is the poorest ZIP code in Philadelphia.
So when someone says “a house in Kensington,” the honest first question is which blocks. Somerset, Allegheny, Cambria, Indiana, Emerald, Ruth, Tusculum, Willard, Hancock and Orkney are not one market.
We’re not going to write a paragraph about the neighborhood’s charm. You know what’s happening on the Avenue and around McPherson Square better than any website does. What we’ll tell you: the property still has value, that value is real, and it goes down for as long as the building sits open.
Mill-Era Rows
This is textile-mill housing — hosiery, carpet, dyeworks, the Stetson hat complex at Fourth and Montgomery. By 1912 a mill owner here could claim more textile mills in view than anywhere in the world. The houses went up around the jobs.
The stock in 19134 is the purest workers’ row in the city: 91% two-story, 55% of lots fourteen feet wide or narrower, median about 1,066 square feet, built out through the 1900s and 1920s.
What decades of vacancy does to that specific building type:
- Water comes in at the parapet first, not the field of the roof. The parapet flashing fails,
- water tracks down inside the wall, and the joist pockets rot before anything shows on the ceiling.
- Then the third floor goes, then the second. Once a floor lets go the debris load takes the one
- under it. This is why a building can look intact from the street and be a shell inside.
- Plumbing gets stripped. Copper is gone within weeks of a house going open. So is the boiler,
- the radiators, often the panel.
- Basements fill. Stone or brick foundations, dirt or thin-slab floors, a clay lateral that has
- probably collapsed at the curb line.
When L&I Has Already Posted the Building
Philadelphia Licenses and Inspections has two designations that matter to you. Unsafe means the structure is dangerous — decayed, structurally compromised, partial collapse possible. Imminently Dangerous means failure or collapse is imminent, and it moves fast: notices posted on the door, and if the owner doesn’t act, L&I goes to court for a demolition permit. The appeal window on either is six days. Six. Not thirty.
This is not rare here. 19134 carries roughly 191 active unsafe structures — the fifth highest count of any ZIP in Philadelphia, out of about 3,179 citywide; 19133 has around 97. If your building is one of them, you’re not being singled out — and you won’t be quietly forgotten either.
Two things people get wrong here:
- A violation does not make the property unsellable. It does change who can buy it and what
- it’s worth. We buy with open violations. We read the case history first.
- A city demolition is not free to you. The cost of the demolition becomes a lien against the
- property. If the city takes the building down, you can end up owning a vacant lot and owing more
- than the lot is worth.
If there’s a notice on the door with a date on it, that date matters more than anything else in this article. Call us and read it to us over the phone.
The Neighbor Problem
Kensington has more exposed party walls than anywhere else we work. When the house beside yours comes down — by the city, or by collapse — your side wall becomes an exterior wall overnight. It was never built to be one: no weather face, sometimes no proper coping on top, joist pockets open to the sky. Rain gets in, freezes, and works the wall apart from inside. If nobody has parged, capped or braced it, the building is deteriorating on a clock. That’s not a sales line; it’s how masonry works.
Insurance, Scrapping, and Waiting
Most standard homeowner policies stop covering a dwelling once it’s sat vacant past a set period, often thirty to sixty days depending on the carrier. People find this out after a fire. A vacant-property policy costs real money. Meanwhile the copper is worth more to someone else than to you.
None of that is urgent in the fake-deadline sense — there’s no offer here that expires. It’s arithmetic: an open building is worth less every quarter, and the two costs that grow fastest, city liens and stripped systems, are the two you can’t get back.
If You Still Live Here
Different conversation entirely — and there’s something you should know before anyone talks you into selling.
Kensington’s assessments rose more than any other neighborhood in Philadelphia in the most recent cycle — up about 15%, against a citywide median around 3%, taking the median assessed value from roughly $115,700 to $133,400 and adding on the order of $250 a year to the bill. Sale prices in 19134 have been moving up while Fishtown’s have flattened. That is a real shift, and it means two things at once: your tax bill is the thing getting worse, and your house is the thing getting more valuable.
If you’re an owner-occupant you have options a vacant-property owner doesn’t: income-based city payment agreements that specifically protect an owner-occupied home from sheriff sale, plus the Homestead Exemption, which has no income or age limit and can be claimed even while you’re behind. Most homeowners in the highest-increase neighborhoods are already enrolled in something. If you’re not, that’s the first call to make, and it isn’t to us.
(267) 507-5453 · 1800 E Schiller St, Philadelphia PA 19134 — that’s a 19134 address, in the neighborhood, not a call center in another state.
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