I'm glad this kid is back because this was really thoughtful and well executed, better than pretty much all mainstream journalism I've seen on this topic.

Got driven through here while visiting acquaintances, and while the surrounding area is definitely run down, getting on Kensington itself it’s like you drove onto an over exaggerated movie set

I used to drive an ambulance here. At 38:39 you can see the hospital we worked with in the lower left corner of the frame.

I'm glad he included the ice cream truck because I swear to god they all play that same demented tune on the same old distorted speakers all the time and it somehow accentuates the insanity of the condensed human suffering.

One of the most surreal fucking things I ever saw was when it would rain hard. The storm sewer system is so full of trash that these neighborhoods just flood. Everyone continues about their business, wading around knee deep in a murky soup of trash, shit, syringes and god knows what else. McPherson Square (the needle park the one guy refers to) still has a nominally functioning library but it's essentially become a naloxone distribution center.

I don't know about Temple University having some gentrification masterplan. Some universities definitely did this years ago (cough, Penn) but Temple seems to have been relatively painstaking when it comes to dealing with the local community. They wanted to build a stadium a while back but that plan got nixed by community opposition, for instance. It's remained a weird little island in an ocean of blight as a result.