"Give it five, six years, and you'll make a killing." This was my cabbie speaking as we pulled away from a pair of modern townhouses nearing completion on a hard-scrabble corner of northeast Philadelphia. I wasn't looking to buy, but I had a feeling he was right. Fifteen years ago, East Kensington was the kind of neighborhood through which you would travel only with an armed escort. But it's filling up with adventurous creative types willing to walk 25 minutes to a decent grocery store-that is, the avant-garde of urban gentrification. Within 60 feet of those townhouses, I was nearly mauled by a pitbull raging in a vacant lot and then run down by a new mom wielding a $1,000 Dutch stroller.
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