Blight Out

by Steven Conn

For Mayor John Street, his Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI) stands as a remarkable, $300 million achievement. Remarkable not so much because of the huge size of the project but, rather, because it has been passed and signed without any real substantive debate over its goals, purposes or methods. City Council’s contribution to the discussion, such as it was, consisted largely of turf squabbling.

Thus, the city stands poised to embark on the most dramatic reshaping of itself in half a century in a way that largely bypassed the democratic process. No one really has much of an idea of the big picture here; the vision of what will rise from the ashes of these neighborhoods once the bulldozers are done is lacking largely because none of the important players have bothered to ask the question publicly.

More distressing still is that the future of the NTI now rests mainly with a series of groups, agencies and players who are also not very accountable to democratic control. For anyone who cares about the future of the city, it is worth considering how a piece of legislation guarded so jealously by the mayor and passed by Council after desultory debate will now be acted upon by a collection of people not known for their public accountability.

One stated purpose of NTI is to help stimulate the private real estate market that has stagnated in many city neighborhoods. However, we don't really know if the private market could resuscitate these neighborhoods on its own because it has been choked nearly to death by a byzantine collection of overlapping agencies and offices. Basic bureaucratic procedures that take days or weeks in other cities take months or years here. God forbid your project requires an L&I plumbing inspection.

Everyone knows this. Everyone also says that this will all be fixed and that the process of building and land acquisition will be streamlined. Few believe that it ever will be, given the patronage and vested interests with their fingers in these pies. Perhaps the real estate market would perk right up if the agencies with their collective hands now around its throat were loosened up. It wouldn't cost $300 million to do that, only the expenditure of political capital.

If bureaucracy is choking the real estate market, then the building trades unions are smothering it. The monopoly control that the unions exercise over construction has driven away all middle-class development from the city, and as long as the unions continue to run the show, market-rate middle-class housing in the city will never return to the city.

We all know this, too, but if this mayor won't even referee the "Friday Night Union Fights" at the Convention Center, it seems unlikely that he'll step in to fix this situation. The mayor has quite clearly struck his Faustian bargain with these devils, but the soul he sold belongs to the dozens of city neighborhoods that nobody can afford to build in.

These are some of the players who, by sins of commission, may well scuttle NTI. There are several others, through their acts of omission, that will do the same.

SEPTA has not been much in evidence as NTI has emerged, and that's too bad.

In cities like Washington and Chicago and Los Angeles, public transit has been at the center of reviving depressed neighborhoods, and it is easy to imagine new urban growth developing around existing SEPTA subway and train stops. SEPTA should certainly play a proactive role in helping to redevelop neighborhoods, but its current silence on the issue suggests that NTI will prove yet another train that SEPTA will miss. Yet in this, as with all things SEPTA, who expects it to respond to any public demand?

The Parkside and Strawberry Mansion neighborhoods ought to be as hot as Manayunk and Old City because they ought to be sitting next to the greatest municipal park in the country. Instead they are adjacent to Fairmount Park, great portions of which the Fairmount Park Commission has permitted to slide into a genteel, tragic shabbiness. It is hard to see these neighborhoods coming back at all unless Fairmount Park itself is brought back to life. For these and other neighborhoods, parks are the key for revitalization, and yet the control of Fairmount Park remains the purview of an un-elected and, in some cases, unresponsive club.

We have been down this road before. Fifty years ago, cities were remade under the banner of "urban renewal." Then as now, it involved lots of government-funded demolition, overlapping agencies and sweetheart contracts.

The results were predictably awful. It remains to be seen whether Philadelphia is doomed to repeat these mistakes, but thus far, things don't look encouraging.

Steven Conn, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University, is moderating a panel at an all-day blight forum at the University of Pennsylvania on April 19. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper interim editor, 123 Chestnut St., third floor, Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.




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