Mills, Meatballs & Mega-Acre Data Deals
What happens to Franklin Mills? Plus a 5,000 acre data center district gets the green light.
Monday, November 2, 2026. Philly's in that stretch where Halloween decorations are still up but the Sixers already have Center City buzzing, and out in the suburbs a township just said yes to nearly 5,000 acres of data centers while a Northeast Philly mall sits in limbo with no plan and no buyer. Let's get into it.
🏘️💰✨ Residential – Listings, Moves & Market Trends
🏗️🏠 Construction Permits Issued for Four-Unit Building at 1250 South 45th Street in Spruce Hill👉🏾 🏚️📐 A vacant West Philly lot is about to become a four-story, four-unit infill build
A narrow gap between two existing rowhomes on South 45th Street is finally getting filled. Permits are in for a $1 million project — $900K in general construction, $100K for excavation — on a 1,552-square-foot lot that's just 16 feet wide and 97 feet deep.
The plans from Pace Architecture + Design call for a contemporary four-story building rising 38 feet to a roof deck, with balconies on the second through fourth floors and black metal guardrails. There's a privacy gate up front, a rear exterior fire stair, and two light wells squeezed in along the sides. Small footprint, maximum use.
RM-1 zoning, 1,164-square-foot footprint (75% lot coverage)
118-square-foot roof deck, parapets up to 41.5 feet
Near Woodland Avenue, Clark Park and the Route 11 trolley
This is Spruce Hill infill in a nutshell — tight lots, trolley access, and University City proximity doing the heavy lifting. No flash here, just steady density where it already makes sense.
🏚️🎨 House of the Week: A Three-Bedroom Victorian in Germantown for $375,000👉🏾 🔨🧱 A couple who saves old buildings for fun just finished their latest preservation project
Emily and Todd Grant have a pattern. They left Fishtown for Germantown because they wanted a yard — and then they kept finding old buildings to rescue. A 1750s farmhouse. An old firehouse Emily now runs as an arts space. And now, after a year of work, a roughly 1900 Victorian that had barely been touched in decades.
"We tried to save as much as we could," Todd, an architect, said. "We wanted to make everything look like it was an original." That meant salvaged materials, original vestibule French doors with their marble thresholds still intact, new low-energy windows, mini-split HVAC, and a waterfall-edge kitchen island tucked into a house that still has its 1915 red-brick block paving out front.
The 1,792-square-foot home has three bedrooms, two sets of stairs, a new en suite with radiant floor heat, and a heated basement running the full footprint. It's listed by Tim Owen of Compass for $375,000, walkable to Wayne Junction, Attic Brewery and Germantown Ave shops.
This is what Germantown housing stock rewards — patience and craft, not teardown-and-rebuild. The Grants clearly get that.
🚗🏡 This $8.75M Chester County Home Includes a 40-Car Garage👉🏾 🏎️🐟 A detached garage big enough for a car collection anchors this Tredyffrin Township estate
The garage alone is over 8,000 square feet — bigger than most houses — with three lifts and radiant flooring built for a serious car collection.
That's the headline detail on this $8.75 million Tredyffrin Township listing, but the 17,832-square-foot main house isn't exactly modest either. Six bedrooms, nine total bathrooms, two primary suites — one with a steam room, the other with an 800-square-foot closet — and a great room with 34-foot vaulted ceilings anchored by a two-story stone fireplace.
The kitchen has a built-in pizza oven and a 20-foot island; the bar area includes a 700-gallon saltwater fish tank that feeds itself. Out back: a 45,000-gallon pool, three fire features, and a pool house. Listed by Carole Bissett-Montagna of Compass since September.
This is the kind of listing that's less about shelter and more about lifestyle infrastructure. Whoever buys it isn't just buying a house — they're buying a hobby headquarters.
🎨🎉🌟 Lifestyle & Entertainment – Food, Fun, Festivals & Philly Vibes
🎃🏙️ 67 Awesome Things to Do in Philly This Week👉🏾 🍂🎟️ Spooky season's final stretch collides with Sixers season-openers and closing-weekend gardens
Halloween's technically over but Philly didn't get the memo — here's what's still worth your time this week:
👻 Halloween Nights at Eastern State Penitentiary — through Sat, Nov 7 (select dates), 2027 Fairmount Ave. Nearly a dozen haunted attractions inside one of the country's most legendary sites.
⚽ Philadelphia Union vs. Toronto, Fan Appreciation Night — Saturday at Subaru Park, Chester. The Union clinched a playoff spot riding a 12-win stretch; discounted concessions and merch all night.
📚 Cookbooks & Convos — through Sat, Nov 7, multiple locations including Weitzman Museum, Rex at the Royal, Little Walter's, and Recipe Philly. Author talks and tastings closing out Sisterly Love Collective's 2026 series.
💀 El Día de los Muertos Ofrenda — through Sun, Nov 8 at Magic Gardens Museum, South Street. Altar offerings plus a hands-on calavera painting workshop.
🎃 Pumpkinland & Food Truck Frenzy — closing weekend through Sun, Nov 8 at Linvilla Orchards, Media. Hayrides, mazes, pony rides, and nearly 30 food trucks Sat/Sun.
🌿 Chanticleer, a Pleasure Garden closes for the season — Sunday, Nov 8, 786 Church Road, Wayne. Last chance to walk the Ruin Garden before it shuts for winter.
🏀 76ers vs. Chicago Bulls — Monday, Nov 2, 7:30pm at Xfinity Mobile Arena. LeBron's pregame handshake routine with Embiid and Maxey has already gone viral.
Spooky season's winding down, but between playoff soccer and a new-look Sixers roster, Philly's not slowing down for anybody.
⛸️🔥 IBX RiverRink Winterfest Returns to the Waterfront👉🏾 🌉🧊 Ice skating, fire pits and heated cabins hit the Delaware waterfront starting Nov. 27
Mark the calendar: Independence Blue Cross RiverRink Winterfest opens November 27 and runs through February 28, 2027, with the Ben Franklin Bridge as a backdrop. Admission's free — skating and extras cost separately.
Skating: $5 admission, $12 skate rental, sessions up to 90 minutes
Opening weekend (Nov 27-29) includes a Holiday Tree Lighting Sunday from 6-8pm
Fire pit rentals: $35/90 min (seats 4); heated cabins $80-$130
Rinkside Lounge rental: $350-$400 for 2.5 hours, up to 40 people
Food lineup includes Chickie's & Pete's crabfries and Philly Tacos
Heads up: on-site parking will be limited due to I-95 cap construction
Winter traditions don't get more Philly than skating under the bridge with a cheesesteak in hand. Just plan your parking before you plan your outfit.
🍝🇮🇹 The 15 Best Italian Restaurants in PhillyPhillyMag's annual Italian roundup is less a ranking and more a map of how deep this city's Italian food culture runs — from old-world Sicilian to Modena transplants.
Joey Baldino's trio — Zeppoli, Bomb Bomb, and Palizzi Social Club — anchors the "new wave" conversation, with Baldino famously refusing to touch Sunday gravy on principle: "no one makes it better than someone's mom or someone's grandmother." Marc Vetri's Fiorella gets the nod for South Philly heritage with a contemporary twist, while Emilia in Kensington tells a different kind of story — chef Meri Medoway's tortellini in brodo recipe was literally handwritten in Modena, Italy, and mailed to her.
Other standouts: Osteria's wood-fired Northern Italian menu, Gran Caffè L'Aquila's rotating region-of-the-week concept in Rittenhouse, and Heavy Metal Sausage's nose-to-tail approach using Pennsylvania ingredients.
The throughline across all 15 spots: Philly's Italian food scene isn't frozen in red-gravy nostalgia — it's actively being rewritten by chefs who grew up in it and chefs who fell in love with it somewhere else entirely.
🏢💼🌟 Commercial – Towers, Deals & Transformations
🏬❓ Former Franklin Mills Is No Longer for Sale — What's Next?Dean Adler's splashy April bid to buy Franklin Mills for over $60 million — with dreams of housing, athletic fields, a hotel and a water park — never got close to a real transaction. Now the court-appointed receiver says the mall is off the market entirely, mostly because the Adler headlines kept dominating search results and scaring off potential tenants.
"We wanted to make sure that the tenants, as well as their customers, know … we're investing in the mall," said receiver Brenton Hutchinson, CEO of OPEX CRE Management. That's a tough sell — occupancy has dropped from 65% at the end of last year to 40% today, after the property's appraisal collapsed from $370 million in 2007 to $76 million in 2024.
Housing is the obvious play on paper. Developer Mo Rushdy floated a 3,000-4,000-unit mixed plan across the sprawling parking lots. But Councilmember Brian O'Neill — who's represented the district since 1979 — reportedly won't support residential or industrial development there, and without his backing, any rezoning has to survive the Zoning Board of Adjustment, a slow and uncertain path.
As former Liberty Property Trust CEO Bill Hankowsky put it, steel, copper, diesel and interest rates are all working against big swings right now. Nobody's building offices. Nobody wants a data center there either, politically. That leaves Franklin Mills stuck — too big to ignore, too complicated to fix. A 100-acre hole in the middle of the Northeast, as Rushdy called it, that could sit for years.
💰🏘️ Standard Communities Begins Investing in PhiladelphiaStandard Communities closed on the 186-unit Helston Apartments in Wynnefield Heights for $29.3 million — its first deal in the region — and says it's earmarked another $150 million for more Philly-area purchases. The 1970-built mid-rise will get $4 million in renovations to address deferred maintenance; more than half its current residents earn under 80% of area median income.
"We're here for the long term," said Standard Senior Managing Director Christopher Cruz. The firm manages $7 billion in assets and roughly 30,000 housing units nationally — so this is a real entrant, not a one-off.
Elsewhere in the deal sheet: Pearl Properties dropped $3 million on three Jeweler's Row lots adjacent to a site already entitled for a 34-story residential tower. And Regions Real Estate Capital Markets arranged $81 million in loans across three Philly multifamily projects — including $36 million for 120 units at 1330 N. American St. in Olde Kensington.
Between Standard's war chest and the financing flowing into Olde Kensington and Germantown, the preservation and construction of workforce housing is quietly one of the busier corners of Philly's commercial market right now.
🏥📐 Philly Hospitals Seek Cost Savings From Architects, Builders👉🏾 🏗️💸 Hospital CEOs are telling their contractors: help us or we can't keep building
"You've got to help us in our ecosystem. Get on our team. We're getting paid less." That's Penn Medicine CEO Kevin Mahoney, speaking bluntly at Bisnow's Pennsylvania Healthcare Real Estate Summit this week about the squeeze hospital systems are under.
CHOP is spending nearly $2.6 billion on a 20-story patient tower due in 2028, and CEO Joseph Mitchell didn't sugarcoat it: "That's just unaffordable in the long term." Construction costs across Eastern Pennsylvania were up 11.2% year-over-year in September, and federal Medicaid cuts expected through 2034 are adding pressure on margins industry-wide.
Mahoney pointed to Penn Medicine's 2021 Pavilion — 30% modular — as a model, arguing future projects should push toward 70% prefabrication. CHOP's Brian Gardner floated standardized construction plans across projects as a lower-cost lever. Meanwhile, hospital executives say the data center boom is already driving up lead times and prices for things like generators and air handlers, competing for the same materials and labor.
The message from this panel was consistent: hospitals can't keep absorbing rising costs alone, and they're putting that burden back on the firms that build for them.
🚚🏭📦 Industrial – Warehouses, Logistics & Big Boxes
🏭📦 Salem Township Approves 4,500-Acre Data Center DistrictWhile plenty of Pennsylvania towns are pushing back on data centers, Salem Township in Luzerne County went the other direction — supervisors voted to nearly triple the township's data center overlay district to almost 5,000 acres. The landowner group behind the push, 4-3 Glennbrook Group, has assembled 194 families and is now looking to sell the land for $1.4 billion to a developer for a project called the Salem 3 Campus.
This follows Glennbrook's spring sale of the neighboring Salem 2 parcel to Blackstone's QTS Data Centers for $586 million. The vote came after a meeting dominated by supporters in matching "Data Center Yes!" shirts, backed by a proposed $43 million community benefits package that includes $12 million toward a microhospital — notable since the township has lacked nearby medical care since Berwick Hospital Center closed in 2022.
Salem Township's pitch rests on existing infrastructure: a nuclear plant, a natural gas facility, and heavy electrical capacity already in place. That's also exactly the kind of site Gov. Josh Shapiro's August executive order was aimed at — requiring data center operators to cover their own power costs and get local approval before state sign-off. Glennbrook says the Salem 3 plan complies.
It's a reminder that the data center fight in Pennsylvania isn't uniform — some communities see dollars and infrastructure upside where others see only strain on the grid and local character.
That's 63 in the books. A mall with no plan, a Chester County garage bigger than most houses, and a township in Luzerne County betting big on data centers while Philly hospitals beg their contractors for a break — this city and its exurbs are pulling in about six different directions at once, and somehow it all still adds up to more housing, more development, and more reasons to keep watching. See you next Monday.
Photo: Tim Kiser, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
Also published on Substack.