Posted on 06/16/2020 6:26:04 AM PDT by karpov
Ori Feibush remembers everything about the night an arsonist destroyed 11 townhouses he’d been developing in Philadelphia’s Point Breeze neighborhood. He was awakened by a neighbor banging on his door. He sprinted about two blocks from his home to the site, but firefighters wouldn’t let him near the blaze. “I was unfortunately standing as a bystander,” he said, “with all of my neighbors watching a project that I had worked on for half a decade burn to the ground.”
Mr. Feibush, 36, says he personally lost more than $1 million in the May 2017 fire, and his investors also took a substantial loss. Later that year, he says, someone unsuccessfully tried to set fire to another of his construction projects, in Fishtown. No one has been arrested or charged for either crime, but Mr. Feibush is convinced that local anarchists who consider themselves antifascist, or “antifa,” are to blame.
Point Breeze is predominantly black, and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that between 2005 and 2009 roughly 1 in 3 residents lived in poverty. Mr. Feibush said the district had “seen 60 years of disinvestment, 60 years of drugs and crime,” but 12 years ago he decided to “take a chance on a neighborhood that a lot of developers didn’t want to take a chance on.” Mr. Feibush’s critics say he took advantage of the area’s cheap property and bad reputation, and that his market-rate developments drive up prices and displace longtime residents.
In the month before the first arson attack, posters went up in the neighborhood, including one urging locals to “smash back” against developers who are “displacing the black and brown people.” The posters singled out OCF Realty, Mr. Feibush’s company, and called for “direct action.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Gee, an enterprising Prosecutor might be able to make a case of criminal conspiracy here.
Too bad we don’t have any enterprising Prosecutors anymore.
L
Philadelphia? Didn’t pay off the right people.
Insurance fires?
Black people hate gentrification of their hood. Dumb azz developer should go to a white neighborhood for development.
Insurance fires?
Probably not as these are probably justifiably red lined areas.
And 60 years of Leftist promoted black-victimhood and family destruction. This guy is believing his own propoganda.
Unions used to do this in Phillay against developers who fully didn’t use union workers.
https://nlpc.org/2013/02/16/philadelphia-construction-unions-terrorize-builders-workers/
I went to his FB page and read his timeline.
Naïve Jewish boy who thinks hipster whites moving into black neighborhoods is jim dandy. Ori son those blacks hate hipster whites or any whites moving into their hood.
This developer sounds like a gold medalist in the Special Olympics of Real Estate Development.
That’ll teach him to try to develope in big democrat cities.
... so many Reasons to avoid Philadelphia.
Mark
We love our trash and garbage strewn slums - get the F out now blue eye!
We used to call the nearest large city “where developers go to die”.
They were out-of-towners who read the local media and the Chamber of Commerce puff pieces.
By the time they realized they were in a zoo, the lions and tigers had taken them apart limb by limb.
Never believe anything you read in the mass media—it could cost you your money or your life.
Unions? My thoughts exactly.
No surprise here. I worked for a while for a company that was buying and rehabbing old Victorian and Georgian houses in the core. I’d never actually seen authentic feral rats before, much less had to work in a place infested with rats and cockroaches.
First the neighbors came by, to tell us they didn’t like us fixing up the houses because it drove the rent up. Then some guys who claimed to be Black Panthers came by, to tell us we needed to hire them to provide security because it was a dangerous neighborhood. A few nights after that someone firebombed one of our work sites, and when we didn’t get the message, a few days after that someone firebombed one of our work sites during the day, when there were workers in the building.
Which is when I said f*** this, quit, and found a different job.
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