Praise for the City
Philadelphians are wonderful people and every problem here can be fixed. This sounds ridiculous, of course, to those enduring dismal broadcast news. Or struggling to live amid gunfire. Or fighting City Hall or traffic or depression or illness or landlord or boss. Even so, every Philadelphia neighborhood will be revived. Grassroots networks are forming whose themes are Smart Growth, New Urbanism, Equitable Development, Sustainability, Greening. These will bring a hundred thousand new jobs and billions of dollars new cash to our city’s roughest places.
Poverty Rate: 25% School Dropouts: 42% 90,000 Working Poor 60,000 hungry children 400,000 Unemployed 200,000 Uninsured
Philadelphia’s problems grow daily: rising taxes, failing schools, rising fuel costs, declining job base, rising murder rate, budget cuts, rising hunger, gentrification, foreclosures, disease rates, sleeping bureaucracy, chemical spills, sewage in basements and rivers, sickly health insurance, creaky railroads and leaky pipes, neglected recreation centers, vacant lots, drugs.
Yet our strengths are greater. We have the humanity and technology and wealth to make Philadelphia America’s finest city again. HUMANITY: It’s a tribute to the overwhelming decency of Philadelphians, considering our poverty and dropout rates, that only one or two commit murder per day. A million and a half do not shoot, even when pushed hard. Philadelphians love and hate and hurt and help one another, doing far more good than harm. Our outstanding heroes are neighborhood activists working for love more than money, deserving both. And this city would have died decades ago without millions of common gestures of generosity, helpfulness and forgiveness that pass weekly without headlines. TECHNOLOGY: Philadelphia is being fixed even while it decays. At the same time that U.S. industrial jobs are being stolen to globalization, thousands of practical American programs are proving people can rebuild damaged local economies from the ground up-- making them better than before. Thousands of jobs are being invented by citizens dedicated to ecology and social justice. How? We are organizing local talent to produce what we need. We’re building an economy which connects people rather than controls them.