By: Said Ibrahim & Dahmir Huggins
Current day Kensington would have fallen within the red “hazardous zone”, as have many primarily POC neighborhoods
It’s readily apparent that Kensington is in the midst of a crisis regarding rampant opioid abuse.
Kensington local and Carver E and S Class of 2026’s Kai Mannal-Di Marco speaks on the issue.
“Every day when I walk out of my house, there'd be people on the street. I actually lived on Kensington Avenue growing up, so I would walk straight out of my house, and I would see the real effect of what the drugs did.”
Kai then explained his understanding of the origin of the issue
“I know that when people were setting up the urban spaces in America, they put minority communities in areas with more drugs, and they kept trafficking drugs to that area, along with just mistreating it creates horrible things like heat islands, which are just really hot spots inside of cities, and it creates more pollution and litter. It's um, it's really just the start of the whole chain of events that causes Kensington to be known for like what it is known for today."
An estimated 376 tons (752,000 pounds) of trash and 126,000 syringes are removed from Kensington's streets annually. The levels of waste and syringes that fill the streets of Kensington are a public health crisis since a single needle prick from a dirty needle or sharing used syringes during drug use can transmit HIV, hepatitis, and many other viral and bacterial infections. In Philadelphia, as in other cities, these illnesses are prevalent due to IV drug use.
When people think of a “poor” or “rough” neighborhood, many tend to overlook a key demographic that calls those types of neighborhoods “home”: children. In the Kensington neighborhood, 21.85% of households that reside in the neighborhood have children (Kensington South, n.d.), which equates to about 1, 707 households with children (Kensington South, n.d.). The impact that drug abuse and unsafe living conditions have on children cannot be understated.
Children who grow up witnessing and living with this cycle of addiction are extremely more likely to develop an addiction of their own later in their lives. Additionally, children who live in these households are three times more likely to be physically or sexually abused or neglected. Health problems include behavioral health “conditions related to mental illness, substance use, and emotional well-being.
According to the United States Census, Philadelphia is the poorest of the top 10 most populous American cities in.
Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate of the large cities in the nation even compared to Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas (Cooper, 2024). In Philadelphia, the poverty rate stands at 23.3% with Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks being twice as likely to suffer from poverty than non-Hispanic whites (Health of the City, 2021).
Philadelphia has the fourth-largest police department in the country. Under their Kensington improvement plan, Philadelphia police will target drug dealers, conduct warrant sweeps, and crack down on prostitution as well as other quality of life crimes.
"We'll be deploying 75 men and women from Philadelphia Police Academy. They'll move into the Kensington pocket, and we will start to address those drug corners and drug activity that is causing much of the violence we see here," said former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel
Although the situation in Kensington looks bleak, there have been attempts to try and mediate some of the historical issues that have been plaguing the community. Temporary housing is being offered to homeless people, libraries and community centers are helping aid unemployed people in finding jobs. And hospitals are giving out Narcan in an attempt to prevent overdose deaths.
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