Germantown Neighbors: Long-time Germantown Realtor Reflects on Community Changes Over Time
By Colin Evans, Emma Padner, Dina Portnoy, Zendra Shareef and Wanda Greene
Anyone who has moved to Germantown in the past four decades is probably familiar with Loretta Witt.
During the day, the longtime resident of Pulaski Avenue sells homes across Northwest Philadelphia. In her free time, she chairs the Germantown Relief Society, a local nonprofit which prides itself as the nation’s first charitable organization. She also works as board president of Historic Germantown, a local preservation group.
Today, Witt has a team of seven other realtors who work for her in the Northwest areas of Philadelphia. Witt encourages her clients to take care of their homes and helps connect them with programs in the community once they move in, she said.
“You have to know the streets and the inventory. You have to educate yourself. I know and love this neighborhood,” Witt added.
Witt got into the real estate business after working on Ed Schwartz’s campaign for Philadelphia City Council in the early 80s, she said. At the suggestion of a friend, she attended a class for realtors where she met Doris Polsky and Shirley Melvin, twin sisters who opened Twin Realty in Germantown in 1965.
“They were the first women to run real estate in Philly,” Witt said. “They saw white flight starting in the 1950’s, and they worked to welcome the Black people moving in from the South, and encouraged people to stay.”
“They were two true hearts, brilliant, filled with integrity,” she added. “The first day I walked into that office, they welcomed me, and Doris said, ‘Loretta, remember, our children come first.’ So I never missed a school play or ball game.”
Having been in the real estate business since 1983, Witt has seen residents come and go as the market ebbs and flows over the years. The story of economic change in Germantown, as it is in other neighborhoods, is a complex one, she said.
“This word, ‘gentrification’ has become a nasty word. I think that there is a tendency to have a knee jerk reaction to it sometimes without understanding what it means,” Witt said.
According to Plan Philly, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found a small amount of evidence suggesting that lower-income city residents were ‘massively disrupted’ from gentrification.
The study found that Washington D.C. had the highest rate of gentrification, reaching 40 percent, whereas low-income Philadelphia neighborhoods experienced an 11 percent rate of gentrification.
Witt’s view of gentrification, as a realtor and a resident of Germantown, reflects one of many perspectives, showing just how complicated the issue can be. For some, gentrification not only has an impact on people because of their economic status, but can also affect communities of color in particular ways.
For example, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition study, Philadelphia had high reports of pushing low-income people of color from their neighborhoods and the city seven cities in America that makes up almost half of the nation’s gentrification.
The number of residents living in the 19144 zip code, which contains most of downtown Germantown, making more than $100,000 increased by 20.4 percent from 2011–2017. The Black population decreased by 13.5 percent, according to the American Community Survey.
Residents identifying as Black or African-American still comprise close to three-fourths of the zip code, and median household income decreased slightly from $29,849 in 2011 to $29,505 in 2017, according to the survey.
“It’s not always a racial shift, but an economic shift,” Witt said. “Gentrification is complicated, not all good or all bad. It’s very different in different communities.”
In Germantown, Witt has seen signs posted by people who offer to buy houses to sell them for profit. She said she takes them down.
“They don’t have permission to do that, and it’s public signage,” Witt said. “Those signs are taking advantage of poor people.”
Though she knows some realtors who try and steer people into buying a particular home, Witt thinks that people enter into the market with a mindset of what they want.
“Generally, people come with a notion of what they want and where they want it. I’m in a position to help people find what they want, so I don’t argue with them,” she said.
Tuomi Forrest, the executive director of Historic Germantown, which comprises 18 historic locations in Northwest Philadelphia, said Witt brings an “enormous” amount of passion and energy to the organization.
“It’s contagious and makes people want to be involved,” Forrest said.
Witt, who has lived in Germantown since 1970, raised her family in the neighborhood and would not live anywhere else, she said.
“We’re in the real world here,” Witt said. “There are lots of places where people can go because they want to feel safe, or live in luxury; that really is not a real world for most people.”
“This community is one where there is a diversity that’s vital and makes life worth living,” she added.
