Tag Archives: philadelphia

February 2022 in Review

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The horrible war in Ukraine is obviously the most frightening and depressing thing going on as of early March 2022, both in terms of human suffering and the risk of nuclear war. But I prefer to avoid commenting too much on fast moving current events. I’ll just say that if the world can get past the acute crisis and maybe start talking seriously about arms control again, that could be a possible silver lining. But it seems like we are months or years away from that point. So I’ll pick something else below.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Philadelphia police are making an arrest in less than 40% of murders in our city, not to mention other violent crimes. Convictions of those arrested are also down. Some of this could be Covid-era dysfunction. But there is a word for this: lawlessness.

Most hopeful story: “Green ammonia” offers some help on the energy and environmental front.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I found a 1992 Saturday Night Live skit about the Olympics more entertaining than the actual Olympics. May Phil Hartman rest in peace. I checked on Dana Carvey and he is 66 and doing okay.

Philadelphia homicides in 2021

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The Philadelphia Inquirer has a decent piece of data journalism on the shocking number of homicides in our city in 2021. Here are some numbers:

  • 557 homicides as of Wednesday, December 29, so we will probably add a few more by midnight on New Year’s Eve.
  • This eclipses the previous record of 500 in 1990. The period 1989-1997 consistently had over 400 homicides per year. We have now had two years in a row in the 500+ range (499 in 2020). During the 2009-2019 decade, the range was 246-356.
  • Guns were the cause of death in 89% of homicides. Nationwide, this number is around 75%.
  • Of the 557, 111 (20%) were considered retaliatory, 166 (30%) were drug related, and 42 (8%) were domestic violence related. It is not entirely clear to me if these percentages overlap or not – hence my giving this article a grade of only “decent”.
  • 8 of the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. recorded more homicides as of December 29, 2021 than they did in 2019. New York City has had 479 murders this year and Chicago “nearly 800”. The article doesn’t normalize these by population for us but I can do that.
    • Philadelphia: 557 homicides / 1.579 million people = 352 per million
    • New York City: 479 homicides / 8.419 million people = 57 per million
    • Chicago: ~800 / 2.71 million people = 295 per million

Philadelphia Inquirer, to go from decent to good, just put these numbers in a nice table or bullet list for us and normalize by population. Bonus points for some kind of bar chart of “tree map” that makes it crystal clear what the categories are and whether any overlap. “Communities of color” are mentioned but there are no numbers on the breakdown of victims or perpetrators by race or by age (they do mention that the number of female victims has increased, although victims remain overwhelmingly male).

So despite the eye-popping numbers in Chicago, Philadelphia is a bit worse although the two are similar. New York is doing much better.

There is a lot of hand wringing over the causes of violence. It is crystal clear though that plentiful guns make disputes and arguments much more deadly than they otherwise might be. Beyond that, we know the pandemic resulted in a large population of teenage boys out of school for a year and a half. We know the pandemic led to an increase in the unemployment rate.

Those are some facts. Now to speculate. The unemployment rate measures the formal economy, but we know that people who are unemployed in the formal economy are not necessarily economically idle. We can speculate that more people, particularly young men, became involved in the drug economy during the pandemic. Mix together young men, drugs, cash, guns, and a culture that leads to cycles of retaliation and revenge, and it is easy to picture a feedback loop that could get out of control.

It’s interesting that many categories of crime are down. This is at least partly because the police are not pursuing nonviolent crimes as much, particularly drug use and drug possession. Many people are drawing a link between decreased enforcement and increased homicides. “Homicide” and “crime” are often used interchangeably in the media, but this is wrong. Homicides are a tiny fraction of crime as a whole, and crime as a whole is down. Reduced enforcement could easily be a reason that crime as a whole is down.

How would you break the homicide loop? Media coverage focuses on guns, and reducing the number of guns might help, but that is very hard to do in our “exceptional” country. Legalizing drugs would take away the profits and economic incentive to traffic drugs and deal drugs, reduce the amount of cash changing hands, and very likely reduce the level of violence caused by drug dealers defending themselves from each other. Assuming this is what touches off many of the retaliation cycles, those should also decrease. Drug addiction might or might not increase, I am not sure, but that could be treated as the medical/behavioral problem it is. The violence on our city streets (not to mention horrific violence to get drugs across our international borders) is just not an acceptable price to pay to reduce the social problems caused by drug use, if the prohibition and law enforcement strategy was even working, which it is clearly not.

So longer term, after legalizing drugs, logical strategies would be an actual public health care system able to help people with addiction, and education and training of young men so they have economic opportunities in the formal economy. Our political system has repeatedly failed to provide these things, partly because rural politicians and voters have disproportionate political power and like to believe poverty, drugs, and violence affect only the mythical “inner city”.

gargoyles of Philadelphia

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This post is probably only on local interest, but Billy Penn has an article on all the carvings on Philadelphia’s City Hall, which is also the world’s largest free-standing masonry structure. That is, this is about as big as you could build a building out of stone, before concrete and steel are invented. Like most things in Philadelphia, it is poorly maintained, underperforming and underwhelming. This may have something to do with the gargoyles inside the building.

masks, ventilation, and filtration work in schools; social distancing and plexiglass don’t do anything

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There, I think my headline summarized by layman’s understanding of this study published by CDC. I’m hoping my (rising) third grader won’t have to wear a mask to school in the fall, but that wouldn’t be the end of the world. What I’m really hoping for is five full-time in-person school days, which kids really need for normal educational and social development at this point. Masks would be a small price to pay for that until younger children can be vaccinated, but really can we speed that up.

I’ll give the School District of Philadelphia some praise for comprehensive testing of its HVAC systems district wide, followed by correction of problems. What they found though was that many classrooms had no functioning ventilation at all! I suspect they were like that for many decades. How many flu epidemics ravaged the city in that time because this city has a culture of accepting amateurism, mediocrity, and incompetence? I want to see the pandemic money spent to bring school buildings up to date, starting with HVAC and air conditioning. Air conditioning isn’t a luxury these days. It’s getting hotter and this would mean the buildings could be used year-round which could have enormous benefits.

Richard Florida’s plan for Philadelphia

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Richard Florida and another dude I hadn’t heard of (but he’s local) have a plan for post-pandemic Philadelphia, and it goes something like this:

  • Focus heavily on medical and biotech R&D and startups, where we are a major center.
  • Upgrade workforce skills to participate in this industry.
  • Local procurement policies, especially from minority businesses.
  • Do something to fill vacant store fronts.
  • Do something about poverty.
  • Raise the minimum wage.
  • Develop “concrete actionable strategies” to do these things.

This all sounds pretty good to me. It’s short on specifics of course. We need to grow the economy and create professional jobs somehow without alienating the anti-gentrification crowd. Then tax revenue could increase and just maybe you could do something about poverty. Poverty is the tough nut to crack because there may just not be enough money to go around within a single political jurisdiction, although there probably is plenty to go around in the metro area as a whole, and certainly in the state and country as a whole.

I think professional management of city services would also help. Philadelphia should be a first class international city, but in addition to the income and education inequities it is held back by a personality that is too accepting of amateurism and mediocrity, and too unwilling to look at what is working elsewhere and adapt it. This is not such a tough nut to crack, in my view. Government, businesses, educational institutions, and the public worker unions could get together and probably come up with a plan to upgrade services significantly while saving money, building skills, and creating jobs in the process. This would be a win-win-win for everyone.

Philadelphia

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As the protests, clashes between police and citizens, looting and arson continue in Philadelphia, I find myself thinking back to On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. A lot of the book is about the relationship between the police and citizens in Philadelphia neighborhoods, and specifically (although place names are thinly disguised in the book) one of the neighborhoods where the tear gas and rubber bullets were flying yesterday.

The story the book tells is one where young men grow up without much prospect of finding a job in the formal economy, and get involved in the informal drug economy as a way to earn an income. In the informal drug economy, there is no recourse to the authorities when someone is robbed or otherwise taken advantage of. There are robberies, assaults, and cycles of escalating revenge that wind up with the vast majority of men in some neighborhoods in jail, probation or parole. Once young men are in jail, they tend to come out harder than they went in, and they are even less likely to break out of the cycle.

To break this cycle, we should follow the evidence of what has been tried and worked, of course. But just using logic and system thinking, the most obvious and quick way to break this cycle would be to legalize drugs. Then there would be no driver for the violence. Legalize, tax, and use the proceeds to fuel substance abuse and mental health programs that have been proven to work. Or just set up a universal health care system that provides these things to all citizens.

Then there is the harder long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own. Childcare, education, health care, unemployment, disability, retirement. The process of building a stable, fair, and democratic society for the long haul would be a hard and long-term project, but other countries have figured out most of it and the United States could learn.

bodies stacked like cordwood

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Here goes…I generally support police-court-prison reform and policies to reduce violence in all its forms. I support policies to help right past and present injustices, both race and class based.

I’m very concerned about thousands of people out on the streets just when we thought we were getting Covid-19 under control. This is a disease that has killed black people and poor people disproportionately. About 100,000 people dead in the last couple months vs. about 1,000 per year killed by police (which is certainly too much). Now is just not the time, in my view. If we wanted to devise an experiment to find out whether people gathering in the streets by the thousands, packed in like sardines but largely wearing masks, would reverse our progress on Covid-19 or not, this would be the experiment. It would not be an ethical experiment!

A history lesson: In 1918, Philadelphians took to the streets by the thousands in the midst of the flu epidemic that year, with devastating consequences. From Smithsonian:

When the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade stepped off on September 28, some 200,000 people jammed Broad Street, cheering wildly as the line of marchers stretched for two miles. Floats showcased the latest addition to America’s arsenal – floating biplanes built in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard. Brassy tunes filled the air along a route where spectators were crushed together like sardines in a can. Each time the music stopped, bond salesmen singled out war widows in the crowd, a move designed to evoke sympathy and ensure that Philadelphia met its Liberty Loan quota…

Within 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled. In the week ending October 5, some 2,600 people in Philadelphia had died from the flu or its complications. A week later, that number rose to more than 4,500. With many of the city’s health professionals pressed into military service, Philadelphia was unprepared for this deluge of death.

Attempting to slow the carnage, city leaders essentially closed down Philadelphia. On October 3, officials shuttered most public spaces – including schools, churches, theaters and pool halls. But the calamity was relentless. Understaffed hospitals were crippled. Morgues and undertakers could not keep pace with demand. Grieving families had to bury their own dead. Casket prices skyrocketed. The phrase “bodies stacked like cordwood” became a common refrain.

Smithsonian

Let’s hope this is a history lesson and not history repeating itself!

In another case of “let’s hope this is a history lesson”, Trump is calling for a military crack down almost exactly 50 years (May 1970) after the Ohio National Guard mowed down protestors with machine guns at Kent State.

online educational resources

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There are a ton of articles about online education resources right now, when so many of us are trying to work from home, take care of children, and keep an eye on older relatives all the same time. None of this helps those of us with small children very much. There are a ton of educational materials available, but very young children are still going to need constant attention in order to make the most of them, and you would also need to somehow find some prep time away from the children in order to make the most of them. For most of us, there is almost no time away from the children, and if we get a precious few moments we may want to invest them in our own mental health, maintenance of which is necessary for the children in the long run. The only advice I have there is for adults to take shifts to give each other some down time if possible, and spend that precious limited downtime on things like exercise (outside if at all possible), yoga, meditation, hobbies like gardening or reading things that are fun and not stressful. I am finding the situation moderately stressful, but I recognize it is much harder for lower income people, single parents, people in the medical field, and anyone who is sick or taking care of someone who is sick.

Anyway, now that I have said they are not helpful, here are a few resources I have come across in the last few days. Some of these are Philadelphia-area specific but other cities might have similar things.

To my fellow parents, I really do wish you all the best. To those thinking about becoming parents, being a parent really is a wonderful, rewarding experience on balance. It’s just that if you live in a country without much family or government support, and plan to work full time while raising said children, you should be aware that you are giving up pretty any semblance of personal leisure time for several years until they become more independent.

Philadelphia in the twenteens

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Inga Saffron, the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tries to use the cell phone to tie together trends in Philadelphia in the 2010s. I don’t know if I buy her argument 100%, and I don’t know how serious she is about it, but the list of trends is interesting, and it’s interesting to compare her assessment to my own experience living and working in the city for most of the decade.

  • young adults moving back to the city – this was a huge trend and hard to miss. Apps made it easier to get food and stuff to their homes without driving, and ride sharing made it easier to get around. Inga argues a lot of people “ditched their cars” – this may be true, I haven’t seen the data, but one thing I observed is that a lot of new homes featured garages, and larger developments featured big garages and even surface parking in some cases. This changed the walking experience in some neighborhoods quite a bit, and not for the better. Overall though, it is great for the city to have the people.
  • Tech jobs are one reason the young professionals came back. Tax policy and zoning code changes also had an effect. Inga doesn’t mention “councilmanic prerogative”, but in my neighborhood this means that the 2011 zoning code, considered a national model, still has not gone into effect at the end of the decade. The council person and developers he favors benefit from this by being able to negotiate every new development in their favor. This means that what should be the main street in a densely populated neighborhood underserved by shops and restaurants is mostly still a bunch of building supply warehouses. This also plays to anti-gentrification voters, which has an ugly racial element to it that is hard to talk about. In my view, Inga correctly diagnoses the problem of lower-income residents being pushed to more affordable housing farther from jobs in the city center, without corresponding improvements in public transportation.
  • People are giving up their cars, according to Inga, but traffic is worse and buses can’t run on time due to all the ride sharing and deliveries. Parking garages are disappearing because they are under-subscribed. I would like to examine the numbers on all these issues. Traffic does seem worse, but my instinct is that it is due to poor street design and maintenance, traffic and parking management/pricing, and an almost complete lack of law enforcement effort. Solutions to these problems exist, and all these things in the public realm need to be brought into the 21st century in concert with the new technologies coming from the private sector.

my campaign platform for Philadelphia

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I have to figure out who to vote for in local elections on Tuesday (I’m writing this on Sunday, November 3), so I like to think about what I would do if I were somehow put it charge. Now, I focus on policy rather than politics, and good policy is probably not good politics, so if you are trying to get elected you should take my advice with a grain of salt.

Policies that I would support at the federal and state level do not translate well to the local level in my mind. Looking at the whole country, a fair distribution of the wealth we have is important. At the local level, we have concentrated poverty within a narrow political jurisdiction, so there may not be enough wealth to go around, and if you try to grab what wealth there is and redistribute it, you may just scare the wealth across the jurisdictional border, which is just a couple miles away in any direction. So you have to focus on growing the pie if you want to have a chance at helping the poor. The local Democrats don’t do this – they are all about redistribution, skin color, sexual orientation, etc. The local Republicans are mostly racist jerks. There are a few independents who support pieces and parts of an agenda I could get behind, but nobody comes close to supporting a complete agenda to really explore real solutions to systemic problems.

So I thought about it and here is what I came up with:

  • Improve management of all city services and departments. Does this even need to be said? Yes, absolutely. We have a political and bureaucratic culture that resists learning and is tolerant of amateurism. We need to be open to learning about and adopting best practices from elsewhere, in all areas of government. We need to recruit, train, and retain talented individuals at all levels. We need to develop the leaders of tomorrow. The end result can be better services at lower cost.
  • Grow the work force and tax base. We can make it easy to start, license, and operate new businesses. We can connect the public, private and education sectors to provide education and training that matches actual skills with actual jobs. We can expand the innovation ecosystem to encourage startups and incubators, research and development, particularly in the biotech sector which is a local strength. None of this requires huge public spending. Philadelphia was a city of 2 million that has shrunk to about 1.5. We have room for at least half a million more workers and taxpayers, even more if we are willing to densify some neighborhoods. The gentrification issue makes this hard to talk about, but these could be highly productive, educated, talented professional people. Growing the pie with new taxpayers of some financial means would ultimately be good for everyone. Perhaps the gentrification issue could be somewhat defused if these new people were encouraged to spread out across many neighborhoods, all with excellent and equal transportation, education and other city services.
  • Replace regressive taxes with progressive ones, without increasing the overall tax burden. With the overall tax base growing, we could finally think about how to make it more fair and less burdensome to hardworking people and productive businesses. I don’t have all the answers here because this is not my area of expertise, but we need to follow the evidence, best practices from elsewhere, and try to at least bring local taxes in line with the larger metro area. We need to chip away at the public pension funding problem, because that will eventually come back to bite us if we don’t.
  • Law enforcement, criminal justice, and incarceration reform. I don’t have all the answers here, but again, look at best practices from elsewhere and follow the evidence. There are enormous potential financial savings here.
  • Preschool to community college education reform. Do I have to say it again? Learn about best practices, follow the evidence and innovate continuously. This is enormously difficult in the United States, but we have to keep chipping away at it.