It is arguable that foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia is already so messed up that it can’t be made much worse, but some new City Councilmen are going to try. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
A new Philadelphia City Council is taking office. Here are the top issues to watch.
by Laura McCrystal | Updated: January 6, 2020 | 5:00 AM
A younger, more liberal City Council is coming to Philadelphia.
Council members will take their oaths of office Monday at the Met Philadelphia, where Mayor Jim Kenney also will be inaugurated for a second term.
Poverty, gentrification, gun violence, education funding, and cleaning up environmental hazards in city schools are among the issues likely to take center stage in 2020. That’s according to interviews last week with several of the 17 new and returning members. Although Council members did not offer many specifics on bills they plan to introduce, they said there’s new energy and political will to focus on those issues.
“Council seems to be coalescing around those critical needs,” said Councilmember-elect Jamie Gauthier, who upset longtime incumbent Jannie L. Blackwell to represent the Third Council District in West Philadelphia. “And I think that’s because of what we’re hearing from people in neighborhoods and because we’re looking at the hard numbers.”
At the end of the last Council session, lawmakers enacted the first changes to the controversial 10-year tax abatement for new construction in almost two decades. And Council President Darrell L. Clarke has convened a special committee to address poverty, with an ambitious goal of reducing the number of Philadelphians living in poverty by one-quarter, from about 400,000 to 300,000, in the next four years.
Let’s get real here: the City of Brotherly Love has been governed by the Democrats for decades upon decades. Bernard Samuel, who left office on January 7, 1952, was the last Republican Mayor of Philadelphia. Put another way, George VI was still King of England the last time Philly had a Republican leadership.
The new Council will be younger and more progressive, as four newcomers take office. Councilmember-elect Kendra Brooks of the Working Families Party won an at-large seat long held by Republicans, one of two effectively set aside for candidates outside the Democratic Party. She will be joined by three new Democratic colleagues: Gauthier and at-large members-elect Katherine Gilmore Richardson and Isaiah Thomas.
Now, what do these new members want to do? Kendra Brooks wants to impose rent control, because, naturally, cutting the profits of landlords is going to make them invest more money into their properties. Helen Gym wants to reduce the 10-year developmental tax abatement to produce additional tax revenue to go into ‘affordable housing,’ because of course developers will want to build more affordable housing if it makes them less money. Jamie Gauthier wants to change zoning laws to ‘require affordable housing’ in new developments, because it just goes without saying that reducing the values of higher end housing by building lower-end housing next to them will generate increased profits and encourage developers.
Philly is a city in which the unions have a stranglehold over construction: while it’s possible to try to build with non-union labor, pickets and other union harassment impose all sorts of additional costs. Thus, the price of construction is higher than it might otherwise be, and the ‘progressive’ councilmembers want to lower profit margins even more.
Misses Gym and Brooks have made statements that they’d like to impose a local version of the ‘Green New Deal’ on the city, which can only increase costs on everybody, a kind of silly way to combat poverty.
Liberals have held almost total control in Philadelphia for decades, but liberal policies haven’t helped much, and the city has “lost 600,000 population since 1950, 70,000 in the last decade alone,” according to a Wharton School paper from 2017. People have been fleeing the city, because the Democrats’ policies haven’t worked. The city has a consistently high crime rate, which the City Council is attempting to solve by hiring the aptly-named Danielle Outlaw, formerly the top cop in Portland, Oregon and a Deputy Police Chief in Oakland, California — which has the Pyrite State’s highest crime rate — as Police Commissioner. Under Commissioner Outlaw’s tenure in Portland, that city had a crime rate significantly above the national average. Combine that with District Attorney Larry Krasner, who hates the police and doesn’t pursue supposedly petty offenses, and it’s a prescription for even more disaster.
Well, let’s just call it an experiment. The voters took a liberal local government, and pushed it even further to the left. Only time will tell whether Philadelphia gets better or gets worse. But it makes me glad that I no longer pay taxes in Pennsylvania.