What about Broad Street?

You can't talk about McCain's plans because they do not exist.

by David Faris

If you listen to the presidential candidates talk long enough, you'd figure all Americans live on Wall Street and Main Street. Either you're a caviar-slurping day trader or you're one of Sarah Palin's chirpy neighbors, hunting moose in the morning before buying dinner supplies at some impossibly rustic corner store.

The absence of urban America from this political discourse is no accident — year after year most cities are reliably delivered into Democratic hands in federal elections, with margins of victory that would have made Khrushchev proud. Yet no one ever talks about the GOP's problems with cities.

What would there be to say? Republicans offer nothing to city dwellers other than to gut public transit, starve schools, strip-mine their tax bases and belittle their values.

While there is a Main Street in Manayunk, Philadelphia's symbolic thoroughfare is Broad Street, which runs from the row homes of South Philadelphia, through the glittering pomposity of post-renaissance Center City, to the hardened poverty of North Philadelphia. From Front Street to 90th Street, Philadelphia is both the enduring economic and cultural center of the Mid-Atlantic, and a crumbling, impoverished shadow.

Different corners tell different stories. Eighth Street and Ellsworth was the scene earlier this year of one of the city's more notorious killings. Twenty-three-year-old Beau Zabel, who had moved from Minnesota to Philadelphia to be a teacher, was brutally murdered for his iPod. Unfolding a few miles away though, is an important experiment in urban greening at 15th and Cherry, where the Friends Center drills into the earth to power itself through geothermal energy.

At 48th and Baltimore, the trolleys fall silent at night during the week as SEPTA undertakes repairs to a particularly obsolete component of its creaky transportation network. But in nearby Clark Park, a bustling farmer's market blends Amish and African, anarchist and economist, and offers a hopeful glimpse at the new urbanism.

On 58th and Walnut, a friend toils in a school without a teacher for freshman math. He jokes, darkly, that "my cousin got shot" is the school's equivalent of "the dog ate my homework," and he regularly e-mails friends asking for surplus office supplies.

Neither campaign truly speaks to any of these corners, or has a word to say about the insidious drug war at the root of the violence. But this is no time for false equivalence. Barack Obama put up an entire page on his campaign Web site devoted to what he calls "urban policy," suggesting things like service scholarships for people who commit to teaching in the cities, transportation policies that support smart growth and programs like Chicago's CeaseFire to reduce the toll of urban violence.

While you can argue about the wisdom of his proposals, you can't talk about McCain's, for the very simple reason that they do not exist. Like most Republicans of the last 30 years, McCain has no vision for cities like Philadelphia. They see cities only as crime-ridden cancers to be avoided unless you have Eagles tickets.

Michael Nutter deserves his popularity, but he can't solve these problems alone. He needs help from a Democratic state legislature and a president like Obama, who sees our problems and wants to help us fix them, who recognizes that America's cities need billions for infrastructure, investment and education, and who understands that Broad Street is just as important — and beautiful — as Main Street.

To respond to this Slant, or to submit one of your own, e-mail your 650-word opinion piece to Brian Howard, bhoward@citypaper.net.