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Date:                   Jan. 20, 2007

Location:             Episcopal Church of the Advocate

Citizens attending: 16 participants

Moderator: Chris Satullo, Editorial Page editor

Inquirer observer: Dave Boyer, Editorial Board

 

Participants in each group were first asked to describe one hope or one fear as the city enters its election year.  Then each group did an exercise that asked participants to imagine they were giving a good friend’s family advice on whether to move to Philadelphia.

  • What would be the pros and cons of that move?
  • What forces and factors underlie those pros and cons?
  • What steps could the city and region take to strengthen those pros or weaken those cons?

For a full description of the exercise, see http://go.philly.com/friendsdilemma

Group One

Moderator's Report:

By Chris Satullo

 

What were the group's most striking hopes/fears?

 

HOPES:

  • That new leaders will find and support the solution-makers now working on the streets.
  • Not a hope, a demand: That people in the city government do their damn jobs.
  • That we get past some of the same-old stumbling blocks, like the lack of planning for neighborhoods.
  • The new candidates bring a sense of urgency.
  • That we'll end the fratricide.
  • That African Americans intellectuals devote their talents and energies to teaching children.
  • More community, family and church involvement in schools.

FEARS:

  • We'll remain a city of haves and have-nots.
  • The same old, same old.
  • We won't figure out the economic situation to provide alternatives to the illegal economy.

What "pros" emerged as most important?

1. Neighborhood pride

2. One of the nation's best tourist cities

3. Mass transit

4. Universities and hospitals

 

What "cons" emerged as most important?

1. Lack of jobs

2. Violence and illegal drug use

3. Trash and failure to keep up the urban environment

 

Let's look at the pros and cons in detail:

 

1. Pro: Neighborhood pride

Why is this pro important?

  • A sense of connectedness to the rest of the neighborhood is sometimes the only thing holding a block together, creating any positive energy.
  • Within neighborhoods, sometimes that connectedness, the sense that people look for each other, is the only thing that creates a sense of safety.

What forces or factors underlie it?

  • The deep historical roots of many neighborhoods.
  • The number of people who still live where they grew up.
  • Churches
  • CDCs

What action steps could strengthen it? What actors should do them?

     The group had a strong sense that rising development, the arrival of newcomers of higher income and different backgrounds are a deep threat to neighborhoods and some of the older, lower income people who live in them. "These crazy condo prices just make me worry that the have/have-nots gap is just going to get worse. My kids can't afford those prices." The following steps were suggested:

  • More zoning power located within local community.
  • A program to teach residents of worried neighborhoods how to repair their credit so that they can tap into the rising equity, the new wealth, that higher property values bring them.

2. Pro: Mass transit

Why is this pro important?

     What was interesting was how much disputethis pro generated. Some argued that mass transit was extensive and useful to working-class people. Others insisted that by comparison with peer cities such as Boston, New York, Washington and Chicago, SEPTA fared poorly, with uneven service, dirty facilities and high cost. 

 

And now the cons:

 

1. Con: Violence and drugs

Why is this con important?

  • A generation of African American youth is being lost.
  • Young children no longer feel safe walking down their own street.

What forces or factors underlie it?

  • Lack of jobs
  • Breakdown of family
  • Sensational reporting of crime in media, with little followthrough to show how justice system ends up disposing of cases.

What action steps could weaken it? What actors should do them? 

  • Better media followthrough on reporting
  • Police who know more about the communities they police
  • Better dispute resolution training in schools

2. Con: Lack of jobs

Why is this con important?

     The group saw this as the key to all the other problems discussed. They returned to this theme over and over, and seemed to want to discuss little else. They said the drug culture is sustained because it aggressively provides jobs that promise good pay in an environment where youths think the legal economy has little to offer them.

 

What forces or factors underlie it?

  • Legacy of slavery and 20th century disinvestment in cities.
  • "Capitalism used to work in these neighborhoods if you had a little drive and were willing to work. You could shine shoes, deliver papers, hell, even collect bottles. But now the only people the small-business people employ are their own families."
  • "You got to know someone to get a job; it's all pay-to-play."
  • Youths are very poorly prepared for jobs, both in terms of concrete skills and attitudes. They lack the relationships with successful adults that set them up for jobs. They lack role models for successful working people.
  • City seems far more interested in campaigning to get jobs to keep college graduates from outside the city than in finding jobs for people who've lived here their whole lives.
  • There are some jobs in tourism, but they don't pay enough to support a household. 
  • Lack of jobs
  • Breakdown of family
  • Sensational reporting of crime in media, with little follow-through to show how justice system ends up disposing of cases.

What action steps could weaken it? What actors should do them? 

  • Reteach the dignity of work. "Our youth don't understand that. If you're a garbageman and you do it well, there's dignity in that."
  • Teach youth to live within their means, how to budget. "They get a job, but they spend all the money as soon as they get it, on sneakers and such, then they get restless and looking for easy money."
  • City Council should fund massive summer work projects, much larger than now, to give youths some work experience, some money in their pocket and to keep them off streets.
  • Don't have to be all makework jobs; city could do a much better job of working with local businesses to find out their labor needs and placing youths in those part-time jobs.
  • Create more mass-transit options to get inner-city residents to jobs in the suburbs without long commutes, multiple transfers and high costs.
  • Programs to teach people with craft skills how to set up and run home businesses.
  • Encourage these college kids to act as entrepreneurs, investing in neighborhood markets and employees.
  • Do more to help parents and kids connect to the many resources that are already there, but they don't know a thing about.
  • Give tax incentives to employ young public school grads and people paroled from prison.
  • Get local congressional delegation to offer less support for military/industrial complex funding, and more for urban infrastructure.

3. Con: Trash

Why is this con important?

     There was a lot of energy around this issue. People really hate the way trash damages the look and feel of neighborhoods. "It hurts in a macro sense. Visitors may like the city, but sooner or later they've got to ask, 'Why is it so filthy?' Even New York isn't this dirty." 

 

What action steps could weaken it? What actors should do them? 

  • Get kids involved in trash pickup and recycling as service-learning in schools.
  • Let Recycle Bank function in the whole city, not just a couple of neighborhoods.
  • Have leaders and city employees set a better example by keeping their areas clean and not doing such a sloppy job of service, e.g. streets messier after garbage pickup than before, the way they sling stuff around.