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Once one of the city’s trendiest entertainment and shopping destinations, full of stores, bars, music clubs and crowds of young people, South Street started slumping more than 20 years ago and has struggled to recover.
To be sure, the street’s far from dead: the main tourist stretch from Broad to Front still offers a host of attractions, from sparkling mosaic walls at the Magic Gardens and meaty cheesesteaks at Jim’s South Street, to a Whole Foods, an Acme, restaurants, clothing stores, a comics shop and much else.
But foot traffic is light compared to the street’s heyday, and the commercial vacancy rate has climbed to 30% — the highest in a generation and far above comparable neighborhoods like East Passyunk and Fishtown.
In addition, some nearby residents say the business mix lacks variety and the street is plagued with nuisance establishments, particularly its dozen smoke shops, its pawn and check-cashing businesses, and hookah lounges that sell alcohol without liquor licenses.
“I don’t think that anyone looks at South Street in its current form and thinks, ‘This is perfect,’” said Cait Allen, president of the Queen Village Neighbors Association. “With everybody thinking that there’s some room for improvement, then the question becomes: How do you fix it?”
One change under consideration is standardization of zoning along much of the corridor, so that developers could more easily put up new, taller buildings, with apartments or condos upstairs and a commercial space on the first floor.
The idea is that landlords would be more likely to redevelop old properties if they could just go ahead and do it “by right,” without first having to go through the lengthy, costly and unpredictable process of seeking a zoning variance from the city. The new zoning category would also allow more types of shops to operate on South Street without special permission.
Those moves could attract a variety of new businesses, including large anchor establishments that draw more visitors to their blocks and boost traffic for everyone, supporters say. Skeptics, meanwhile, say they’re concerned the changes could just bring in additional nuisance shops, rather than more useful and diverse businesses.
It’s unclear when the rezoning or “remapping” might happen. It’s been more than a year since planners for the city last met with the area’s registered community organizations to discuss a draft proposal, and the groups appear to have made little progress toward endorsing it since then.
City Councilmember Mark Squilla, who would introduce any changes for council approval, said he hopes to see them offer a response to the city’s draft plan in the next three to six months. They could decide to move forward with it or go back to the drawing board, he said.
“You’re not going to make everybody happy. We understand that,” Squilla. “But we want at least the communities involved in the process to have their input into the remapping.”
Making the possibilities easier to understand
The city remaps a neighborhood almost every year, updating its zoning to better match current uses and residents’ vision for the future. In the last few years, Society Hill, Rittenhouse Square south of Spruce Street, and East Poplar have been remapped.
In August 2024, planning staffers from the city met with the Queen Village Neighbors Association, the South Street Headhouse District, and groups representing Bella Vista, Society Hill and Washington Square West to discuss their options.
They then drafted a proposal to replace a variety of zoning classifications between 11th and Front streets with CMX-3 mixed-use zoning, according to a presentation from August 2025. Buildings could be up to 65 feet tall, with new construction required to have commercial space on the first floor. Historically designated and purely residential buildings would be excluded from the updated rules.
The proposal would also allow tattoo shops, fortune tellers and take-out restaurants, all of which are currently prohibited (although many of the street’s restaurants already do heavy take-out and delivery business).
“It would be easier for people just to understand what is possible on South Street,” said Ken Silver, owner of Jim’s and board chair at the South Street Headhouse District. “It’s very hard, if you’re going to try to locate a business on South Street, to know where your kind of business can be located, without doing a significant amount of homework.”
The planners did not suggest changing the rules around smoking lounges, which residents say are technically banned but manage to operate by also functioning as restaurants.
The planners met three times with representatives of the South Street Headhouse District and the four RCOs. Other than a few minor questions, like why fortune tellers should be allowed, everyone seemed to be in favor of the plan, said Silver, who thinks the rezoning is a good idea.
“We’ve all been in pretty tight agreement that a uniform CMX-3 makes sense for the street,” he said. “We’re all looking to have buildings that are in good repair, that are full of tenants, and that developers look to the street as a place where they can develop, and not a place where they just run into brick wall after brick wall of bureaucracy.”
Squilla noted that to maximize building sizes under CMX-3, developers would need to obtain a floor area bonus by including features like mixed-income housing or a green roof. They may prefer a category like CMX-2.5, which allows 55-foot structures without bonuses, he said. Community members may also want to alter the plan.
“You have to weigh both of those to see which is the better scenario, and is it enough of an incentive to encourage people to develop that area or not,” he said. “We’re going to have work with some property owners to see before we do anything — ‘Hey, is this worthwhile doing, and or is it going to impact the community negatively, or not, as we do this?’”
‘Mixed feelings about everything’
While Squilla said he hopes to advance the plan in the next few months, others don’t see it moving that quickly.
Allen said the Queen Village Neighbors Association board is still a long way from presenting a plan to residents for feedback, much less endorsing it. She also said “there hasn’t yet been any consensus” among the neighborhood organizations and businesses about what they want to see happen.
Some people treasure the street’s funkiness and eclectic architecture and think that by-right development “would take away the character that makes South Street, South Street,” she said. Some residents want more emphasis on bringing in useful businesses like a grocery store or a pharmacy, which Queen Village lacks. Some want more planning for the long-term effects of a busier corridor.
“What’s the impact going to be like on the schools? Is there anything we need to do to get ahead of that? Can we get more trash cans? Do we need more bus routes?” she asked. “Even if the goal is exponential growth, it still needs to be done methodically to make sure that it’s the best quality of life for everybody moving into the neighborhood.”
She said commercial vacancies may be high in part because landlords are demanding high rents, and she wondered whether spurring redevelopment would only drive them higher.
“There’s mixed feelings about everything with this, which is also part of why it’s where we are in the process right now,” she said.
The Queen Village board is under the impression that remapping plans have been “shelved,” according to the minutes from a meeting in May, although they remain interested in reviewing zoning for Queen Village itself.
Eugene Desyatnik, president of the Bella Vista Neighbors Association, said some locals oppose easier by-right development, preferring that most new developments on South Street continue requiring variances. Squilla and other district councilmembers take RCOs’ opinions into account when deciding whether to support a variance, giving neighbors power to negotiate with developers over building heights and other issues.
Desyatnik said he personally favors rezoning but is also skeptical about its benefits. It will take much more than updated permitting rules to bring in more diverse and successful businesses that attract tourists and serve the neighborhood, he said.
“We had a building burn down, a historic, beautiful building. It was demolished. Brand-new construction took its place, and of course, what’s the commercial tenant? Another smoke shop. You can have all the zoning in the world, and we still have like 17 smoke shops on the street, and technically speaking, they’re not supposed to be there,” he said.
“So I don’t know what [remapping] buys me, really. That doesn’t solve any of the problems. I don’t think it’s a silver bullet.”
A wealth of challenges and solutions
In fact, there’s no single solution, because South Street has several simultaneous challenges, according to Brandon Engelhardt, a Society Hill resident who recently completed an extensive study of the corridor for his Drexel master’s thesis.
In addition to losing visitors to hipper, newer business districts, there are too few nearby residents — especially younger ones — to support business growth, he said. Buildings are already profitable from upstairs residential rentals, and landlords have little incentive to make big, risky investments in upgrading their storefronts.
Another challenge is that there’s no entity with the authority and will to overcome differences among the RCOs, businesses and property owners, and drive revitalization efforts, he said.
“You have rising discretionary income in wealthy neighborhoods surrounding the corridor — a corridor, though, that is trying to import people in with usually a value-based fast food or nightclub type of atmosphere,” Engelhardt said. “What ends up happening is no party is really agreeing with each other. Everything’s a ‘no.’ And so, if everything’s a ‘no,’ it sort of just sits stuck.”
His strategy to fix the street includes the proposed upzoning, which he said would bring in more businesses and create more rental housing, boosting the resident population. He would establish a South Street Revitalization Corporation to acquire, upgrade and market vacant properties, and close the street to cars from Third to Seventh streets on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings to create a temporary pedestrian plaza.
Engelhardt argues that the street should also be designated a Pennsylvania Creative District to bring in grant funding, and get a new type of “cultural corridor overlay” from the city. That would create rules making it easier for arts and entertainment businesses to open up, like comedy and jazz clubs, he said.
While the proposals may be heavy lifts, the examples of other destination streets in Philadelphia and other cities show those types of changes can work together to bring dormant commercial zones to life, he said.
“I hate to use the phrase ‘kitchen sink,’ but I’ve seen many developers I trust in Philadelphia say, if I could wave a magic wand on South Street, I would just do everything,” he said. “Just do everything you can, because it needs a lot of difference to make a difference.”
