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<% End If %> South of Center City, Philadelphia is in a state of transition.

Every day, newspapers print glowing stories on the transformation of Center City (“Center City Renaissance,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 27, 2005). Traditional neighborhood boundaries have blurred to where a person living on Montrose Street in “South Philly” can now consider her- or himself a “Center City resident.” Huge townhouses are popping up all over South-Central Philadelphia, most with price tags in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yet within all this large-scale, upscale investment, persistent areas of poverty remain. Higher-end communities live cheek-to-jowl with neighborhoods pockmarked with crumbling housing stock. Low- and moderate-income residents, predominantly African-American, who make up a majority of the census tracts comprising Universal’s target area, have been largely unable to participate in the “renaissance” of many of their own communities. This is wrong – and since 1993, Universal Companies has acted to make sure the benefits of a changing community have been available to all its residents.

We invite you to learn more about our organization – and about the “Universal Plan.”