It is not that difficult for me to explain what I think happened to Coatesville.

Just 5 years ago we were a town full of promise. We were on the cusp of a $700 M redevelopment.

Coatesville has one operating passenger and freight track coast to coast railroad line and one short line freight that could be expanded to the passenger service from Wilmington, DE to Reading, PA that it once had.

We have an airport that will soon have direct international flight capacity.

We have a population of about 12,000 with the infrastructure in place for 20,000 people.

We have quick road connections to Interstate North and South roads.

We are centrally located within one of the ten wealthiest Counties in the USA.

Through its Redevelopment Authority Coatesville owns many acres of former industrial land near very high road traffic intersections.

We are in the path of development from Philadelphia, PA from the East and Lancaster, PA from the west.

The Miami School of Architecture’s Knight Foundation for Community Building selected Coatesville for its 2004 Charrette. Only one community is selected per year:

http://www.coatesville.org/forms/charrettereport.pdf

Upper middle class drug users are within an easy drive to Coatesville. We are a mixed race community long trampled on by its wealthy White Anglo-Saxon neighbors. We have quick transportation to New York, NY, Philly and Baltimore. “Packages” can come by air to Scranton Airport down the NE Turnpike to Coatesville. All ways for “packages” have a quick 15 minutes in and out in Coatesville. Combine all that with the generations long tension between fear of murder and income from drug money and you have Coatesville as the multi-million dollar drug distribution center of Chester County. Nothing else comes close in Chester County.

The planned revitalization would have eventually lain to rest the county drug depot here.

I think that some people couldn’t let that happen.