December 16-22, 2004

loose canon

Class Warfare

TOO MANY BLACKS ON THE BLOCK? A Y&R scatter map showing the distribution of "excess" African-Americans.

Is Philly really losing the race for the young and creative? Not compared to New York City.

by Bruce Schimmel

Last time I checked, the city of Philadelphia doesn't have beachfront property on the Atlantic. But we do, according to the new report "Young and the Restless: How Philadelphia Competes for Talent." The new study contains a number of curious notions which supposedly will attract and hold on to the educated 25- to 34-year-olds needed for a knowledge-based industry. What emerges, however, is a concept of economic growth which is at best naive and at worst destructive.

To be competitive, we are told that Philadelphia must reach out farther than it has ever reached before—beyond the city's borders, beyond the five bordering counties to include the cities of Wilmington, Trenton and Atlantic City.

Through the magic of marketing, our city of a million and a half becomes—poof!—the epicenter of some 6.5 million people, as "Philadelphia" expands to occupy virtually all the land on the East Coast between New York and Baltimore.

Yet as "Philadelphia" expands, its center will surely hold, this report assures us (it also has the annoying habit of referring to Philly's Center City variously as "Central City" and "downtown"). Get real. Young workers from Newark, Del., to Fort Dix, N.J., don't see Philadelphia as their cultural mecca, and lip service won't make it so.

The Y&R study contains still other items which defy explanation and which frankly border on racist. It compares the average racial concentration of the entire mega-Philly region to the averages of areas in the city, so we learn which city blocks have an "excess," as they put it, of certain racial groups, most notably "African-American." What possible legitimate use could this information could be put to?

To page through the Philadelphia Y&R report, you'd think it was produced by aliens. Well, almost. In fact, the Philadelphia study was authored by a marketing firm located in Memphis, Tenn., that produces similar packages for other cities. Philly's recommendations are nearly identical to those suggested for Tampa, Fla., Portland, Ore., Providence, R.I., Huntsville, Ala., and Memphis.

Ultimately, the picture that emerges from this report is a PR wet dream that, taken seriously, could become a real nightmare.

The fantasy is that Philly is crisscrossed with open roads, ready to be populated with educated schleppers who'll work for cheap. The study ignores our clogged highways and creaking mass transit. And in promoting workers that are young, mobile and cheap, we hear nothing about the plight of displaced older employees, members of a middle class that's already barely hanging on.

Yet despite the report's fantasies and idiocies, the Inquirer (with mega-regional aspirations of its own) endorsed the study's conclusion that we are not getting our fair share of the nation's budding talent.

Maybe yes, and maybe no. But if the folks in the White Tower on Broad Street had scrutinized the report more carefully, they might have learned something that bodes rather well for our race for the creative class.

In Philly's contest with New York, our biggest rival, we're actually winning. Between 1995 and 2000, some 22,000 young and educated Philadelphians left for New York, but some 28,000 New Yorkers moved from the Big Apple to the Pretzel. One in every four new Y&R Philadelphians comes from New York.

The "Young and the Restless" was commissioned by Innovation Philadelphia and was financed by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, the Pennsylvania Economy League, the William Penn Foundation and the city of Philadelphia. They all ought to read the report they paid for more carefully.