FAQ: The FDR Park Plan and its effects on Eastwick

The purpose of the manmade wetlands constructed by PHL Airport in the southern part of the Meadows is to greenwash both the FDR Park Plan and the expansion of the city-owned airport.

The neighborhood of Eastwick shares a watershed with marshes in Tinicum that PHL Airport is paving over for its cargo expansion.

It is already among the Philadelphia neighborhoods most impacted by environmental injustice: landfills/brownfields, poor fill conditions, and chronic flooding. City planners long ago chose Eastwick for development so that they could push poor black residents into it after they were displaced by West and North Philly gentrification. They knew that it is in the floodplain. Many homes would be underwater before their mortgages were paid off.

Now the destruction of the Tinicum marshland by the airport threatens to intensify flooding in Eastwick.

Federal law requires wetland destruction to be “mitigated” by creation of equivalent new wetlands. For the airport’s cargo expansion, the mitigation is the manmade wetlands in FDR Park — not an area that would mitigate flooding in Eastwick.

Map from PIDC Request for Proposals. Flood overlay (blue) from FEMA Eastwick Flood Map.

By using our park to meet this mitigation requirement, Philadelphia Parks & Rec isn’t creating an environmental benefit. It’s enabling the expansion of the city’s airport and increasing flood risk in Eastwick. That’s greenwashing.

Eastwick residents, who were excluded from the public comment period for the airport's Environmental Assessment, should not have to pay the price for the airport’s expansion, continuing a longstanding pattern of exclusionary, racially biased decision-making.

More info:
Eastwick Friends & Neighbors Coalition