Correction: The original version of this story misspelled the last name of Eliezer Vila.
Pat De Carlo is known as the “lady who lives in the big house.” It’s a three-story brick row home on the Northwest Corner of Norris Square Park – the green quad at the heart of the neighborhood of the same name. She’s lived there since the late 1990s.
A retired attorney from Puerto Rico, De Carlo has been on the frontlines for decades fighting to keep this once-predominantly-Puerto Rican neighborhood affordable.
Now, the fight has come to her own yard. The lot next to her house - where she picks from her raspberry bush and fig trees daily – recently got a visit from the city’s Office of Property Assessment. The office assesses land for potential development.
De Carlo is worried about that – and about similar changes around where she lives.
“What we’re trying to do is preserve the neighborhood,” she said.
Costs are becoming out of reach for second- and third generation residents, and some fear the neighborhood’s predominant Latino culture is slipping.
Those were top concerns in the 2025 Norris Square Neighborhood Profile, published this week by PennState Extension. Researchers sought to capture information on the area’s population, quality of life, and economic status and spark dialogue among community leaders and residents.
The community survey was led by the Penn State Center for Economic and Community Development (CECD), which is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Through focus groups, outreach and surveys, researchers zeroed in on topics community members felt most important. Key trends and issues included housing costs and demographic shifts as well as income and educational disparities.
Norris Square’s evolution
The Norris Square neighborhood is nestled between Diamond Street to Dauphin Street and Germantown to Front Street.
In the 1950s it attracted Latino families seeking affordable homes in an area that was culturally connected. But when manufacturing jobs shriveled up over the next three decades, more than 250,000 people lost their jobs, according to a Johns Hopkins University human sciences journal called Project Muse. Job losses led people toward the drug economy that became prominent in the 1980s. At one point, Norris Square Park was a hub for dealers and users.
“For many in the impoverished Norris Square area, income from the drug economy was a household survival strategy,” the Johns Hopkins article reads.
The neighborhood was struggling, evidenced by abandoned homes and vacant lots. Then in the 1980s, a group of women known as Grupo Motivos planted community gardens in an effort to establish a refuge for families impacted by incarceration and the heroin epidemic.
These gardens were the entry point for John Byrnes at Penn State Extension, whose work on health equity led him to Norris Square.
“Gardens are a key component of Norris Square,” Byrnes said.
Byrnes is the lead investigator for the 2025 Norris Square Neighborhood Profile. He co-led the project with Cristy Schmidt, senior research associate with CECD. They looked at Census Bureau data and culled information from people who worked and lived there, Schmidt said.
“When you live somewhere, you have a sense of what your neighborhood is, but if someone's visiting, they may not have the same perception,” she said.
Together they pulled together a 53-page report that pieces together key data and community insights.
Byrnes calls it a “tool” for community members and leaders “to understand the trends within the neighborhood and help support any action they want to take.”
With guidance from people like De Carlo, the research team investigated trends people wanted to know about the most. One was the neighborhood’s demographic makeup.
The team’s analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey shows that between 2013 and 2022, the number of Norris Square’s Latino residents decreased by 13%, compared to a 16% increase of White residents. The data indicates that people under age 65 are leaving the neighborhood, while seniors are staying put.
The Spanish-speaking population is also aging – there was a 44% increase in the number of Spanish speakers above the age of 65 during that period.
Norris Square became a hub for Latinos, particularly those in the Puerto Rican and Mexican diasporas, when gentrification and skyrocketing housing costs in Northern Liberties and Spring Garden pushed families further North.
Byrnes said residents he interviewed for the profile expressed concerns about Latino culture in the neighborhood beginning to wane.
“They’re seeing more white people,” Byrnes said. “They're not feeling like they're part of the fabric anymore.”
Comments about the changes in – and risk of losing – the neighborhood’s culture were peppered throughout the profile. One of those comments was from Eliezer Vila, director of compliance at Xiente (formerly Norris Square Community Alliance).
“People have been pushed away and the identity that has been established for the last 40 years in this neighborhood is disappearing little by little,” Vilam told researchers.
Part of the change is precipitated by rising costs in homes.
Andria Bibiloni, executive director of the Norris Square Neighborhood Project, said people look for houses outside of the city or in New Jersey’s suburbs in search of more space and an affordable price.
“Norris Square unfortunately is becoming a less affordable neighborhood unless you happen to know somebody who has an older building,” Bibiloni said.
Although the percentage of cost-burdened households has decreased since 2012, more than 56% of Norris Square households are still spending 30% or more of their income on rent.
Working-age people in the community move where they can afford to live, she explained.
Norris Square is attracting more land use developers and has become a topic of chatter on pro-development forums. The profile’s data also points to change: it found home median home values increased 163% between 2008 and 2022.
Residents worry Norris Square is following the footsteps of surrounding neighborhoods that have seen rapid development and more expensive housing in recent years, such as Northern Liberties and Fishtown. There has also been a 272% increase in new multi-family unit complexes similar to those seen in those areas.
Sara Palmer, who is the Kensington Library’s supervisor and adult teen librarian, was a Norris Square newcomer in 2014. But these days, Palmer says the neighborhood feels different and costs are beginning to change. Her property taxes have gone up.
“There has been an increase in families who feel more Fishtownish,” she said, holding up her hands in air quotes. “More white people, probably salaries a little higher than the median. They're coming to story time. There are also a lot of nannies bringing kids to Story Time.”
A looming gentrification ‘storm’
North Front Street at the edge of the Norris Square neighborhood was once a catch-all market – a collection of mom and pop businesses for families looking for odds and ends, household goods and clothes. Over the years those businesses left and newer businesses catering to younger, wealthier demographics have appeared.
When Palmer moved to the neighborhood, there was only one donut -and- coffee shop within walking distance to her home on Second Street and Diamond.
Now there’s one on every corner, Palmer said, listing a few such as Rowhome, Forin, The Grounds and American Grammar.
She recalled that several years ago, developers broke ground on a series of new buildings near older buildings along Front Street.
“At one point those two [old] buildings collapsed because of the work that the construction was doing,” she said, referring to a 2021 incident on North Front Street.
The remaining buildings, just a block from West Dauphin, housed that original donut shop and drugstore next to it. Soon after the collapse, both of those businesses shuttered. She believes the damage pushed older businesses out.
Construction damage from new development has threatened the structural integrity of older homes in the majority -Puerto Rican neighborhood for years, according to a 2019 story from Al Día. Some longtime residents told reporters they witnessed the foundations separating from their homes and cracks appearing in their walls, and believed nearby construction of three-story condos was the cause.
There have been multiple incidents of new development causing home damage and injuries in Philadelphia.
Byrnes calls looming gentrification a “storm.”
“The disparities were really huge and we started to realize the storm was coming North,” he said.
‘They don’t welcome the prices’
Longtime residents are wary of what impact this will have on them, especially those with annual incomes below $40,000. The household median income in Norris Square is among the lowest citywide, according to the new neighborhood profile. Among Norris Square Latinos, it is even lower.
De Carlo sees these changes daily.
“There are people in our community – osea (that is) de la comunidad Latina – who would really like it if this became a little more gentrified. Little specialty coffee shops. They sort of welcome that, but they don’t welcome the prices,” she added.
In the last decade, people with higher incomes are moving in, said Byrnes.
“Latino household income compared to whites during the 10-year period is just kind of heartbreaking, honestly,” he said. “[Newer] people in this neighborhood are making easily $100-grand a year and the people who got this [community] going are still in poverty. And they're living next to each other.”
As a land use lawyer and a resident, Bibiloni has experience with both shifts.
When she moved to Philadelphia from Queens, New York, Bibiloni rented an apartment in an old Norris Square house. As a burgeoning visual artist with Puerto Rican heritage, the neighborhood was affordable and she felt like she fit in.
“I saw the Puerto Rican flags and the gallos [roosters] and I was like, ‘This is where I'm supposed to be,’” she recalled.
During law school she learned about public policy, zoning and land use – drawn to employ her training in the historically redlined area. Through her work with the Resident Community Organization she met Patricia De Carlo.
“I began understanding the pressures that the community was experiencing in connection with all of the new development and how none of it was affordable,” she said.
Once Bibiloni finished law school, she tried to help connect her neighbors to other attorneys who could advise them on trying to negotiate Community Benefits Agreements, or legal contracts between community groups and developers that prioritize neighbors’ quality of life.
“Which was always a really big challenge because developers didn't necessarily have a huge incentive,” she said, noting that developers can get plans past the zoning board whether they have the support of resident organizations or not.
De Carlo, who is still an active member of the Xiente Resident Community Organization (RCO), said the fight continues to keep side lots that are repurposed by residents from being sold to developers. The uncertain future of César Andreu Iglesias Community Garden, established in 2012 by Philly Socialists, is one example.
Much of the fight for neighborhood preservation has taken place in community gardens that began as grassroots projects and have become enticing to land developers.
During a walk through the neighborhood, Byrnes points toward a newish gray apartment building beside “El Batey” garden.
“Come here. Everybody I walk around with I stop and I tell them the story. Look at that. Look up,” he said, pointing at a narrow alleyway that’s home to an expansive blue mural now mostly hidden by new construction.
“Literally freaking overnight. One day, they wake up and they find that a construction crew had been here, dug it up and hurt some of this garden and completely obliterated that amazing mural.”
The mural used to be the backdrop for the nearby garden, which serves as an homage to Puerto Rico’s Indigenous Taino people. The construction of the new building damaged a third of the garden, and the mixed media butterfly mosaic is nearly covered by the four-apartment condo.
Bibiloni, who is a transplant in the neighborhood, considers her presence there complex. Although she is tied to her neighbors on a cultural level, she is one of the relative newcomers in the area with higher income levels and recently bought a new-construction home.
“I realized I was going to spend the same amount of money to buy a new house than to fix up an old one,” she said. “And then I thought, ‘Well, if I don't buy this, who's going to buy it?’ “
From a land use lawyer perspective, she has seen how open lots that are cared for by elders in the community are reappraised and auctioned to developers. This accelerated during the pandemic, as Sheriff sales, or public auctions, went fully online and anyone wanting a cheap plot could buy it, get the deed and build whatever they wanted, she said.
Over time, this contributed to higher tax rates, which is impacting residents who live on $20,000 to $45,000 per year.
“It's one of those challenges where it's affecting a certain demographic – senior citizens, often Spanish monolingual, (and) fixed income residents,” Bibiloni said.
While Norris Square has a strong network of neighborhood organizations such as Xiente and Norris Square Neighborhood Project, some federal funding and other funding for housing, arts and cultural programming has dried up.
Leaders in the community want to see more investment in Norris Square, and they want to keep cultural ties strong as a way to preserve what exists, Bibilioni said.
“I keep thinking a lot about sustainability. One of the strengths of this community is its resourcefulness and resilience,” she said. “There's a really robust network of people who have a connection to this place.”
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