Just about one year ago, I came back to Philadelphia after living in Tokyo for three years.
The morning after arriving in Philly, I ran into a friend as I walked to the CVS to receive my first COVID-19 vaccination. I ran into a few other friends on the way back to the hotel. A few days later, Michelle and I purchased our new home – in a building where we also have a studio that we rent to a friend. That weekend, we watched the 4th of July fireworks from our balcony, as though the show was just for us.
I immediately rejoined my old basketball game, which had recently resumed after a pandemic hiatus. I rejoined my old baseball team. My photo friends threw us a baby shower one weekend and my high school friends did the same a few weeks later. We visited my mother in Delaware and she sent us home with tons of food.
Life seemingly picked up where we left off three years prior. It was almost like we had never left.
In actuality, however, everything is very different.
There are the obvious things, like, I don’t live on Brown Street anymore. That place was the perfect hub for my old life.
JUMP is now defunct, thankfully. While I loved being the magazine guy, it was a ton of work. I still get anxious just thinking about my shed full with 10,000 magazines that need to be delivered.
My grandfather passed away in 2019, so I don’t drive to Elkton, MD or Newark, DE to see him every week. I keep thinking of going to his old nursing home to thank everyone. He was a lot, and they were very kind.
Walking the city without Mookie still makes me sad, even though I now have my hands full with a 10-month old child who is rapidly developing a mind of his own.
Holy cow. I have a 10-month old. Experiencing the world with Kenzo has been a blast.
Philadelphia is a very different place. The pandemic seems to have done a number on the city. There are so many vacant and vandalized storefronts. At the same time, there are tons of crappy, brand new apartment complexes and houses. Odd.
The number of wheelie boys seems to have multiplied exponentially while the number of cops seems to have dwindled. The whole city smells like stale weed, though I don’t think that’s new.
People have treated Philly like a giant garbage can as long as I can remember but it seems so much worse now. Maybe that’s because I spent three years in Tokyo, a city of 14 million people and almost no trash on the streets – despite not having trash cans in public anywhere!
America feels insanely tense these days. It was getting that way before we went to Japan but it seems like a tinderbox now. The in-your-face politics, omnipresent guns and overt greed make me feel uncomfortable.
I used to be a person who saw potential everywhere and I worked to help people reach their heights. Every problem was just waiting for a solution and I reveled in trying to find them.
But everything seems to be pushed so far to the fringes now. Helping individuals is a decent start but we need major changes in how the city and country operate. It feels like we are on a dangerous path right now.
Here are a few things that Philadelphia can do to help change the trajectory of the city:
Immediate steps
• Hold elected officials accountable.
I have no idea who is my state rep or state senator. I’ve never seen my city councilperson hold a general meeting with constituents. Over the years, I’ve never met with any elected officials except in my roles as a journalist or educator.
I don’t think I’m alone here.
That’s a problem. How do our elected officials know what people want if they don’t talk to them?
I’m sure they will argue that they have offices in their districts and that people can stop by or call any time. But it’s 2022. We shouldn’t have to come to you. You should come to us. Or at least make yourself available. In the theoretical democracy we live in, these elected officials represent your will and desires. You should know them. Demand open community meetings every month where politicians can share what they are doing and constituents can share their concerns.
Also, people need to pay attention to what their local elected officials are doing (or not doing)! It’s not enough to pay attention during election cycles.
These people are supposed to be leading the city. Make sure they are.
• Change the perception of the police.
We need police officers who work proactively with residents. What we do not need are oppressive, military-style troops who simply react to incidents.
Police drive everywhere now. They don’t often walk beats anymore. That means that the only interactions they have with the general population are after bad stuff happens. That’s not great. Because they don’t know people, they assume the worst about everyone. And because residents don’t know individual cops and they only know about the history of abuse, they assume the worst about the police.
Community policing is not a new idea. The new idea would be for police to hold open meetings every month with residential community members.
The best way to simmer the mutual antagonism is to communicate honestly and effectively.
If you meet monthly, you can share concerns, suggestions, data and contact information. You can ask each other for help. You can build the foundation for moving forward. That way, when bad stuff happens, you have a relationship and connections and you don’t assume the other side is out to get you.
The reality is that the people who attend these sessions will likely be the community organizers and leaders who are already doing the work. That’s fine. Building trust needs to start somewhere.
Mid-range steps
• Create a Philadelphia Futures Corps.
For an investment of $3 million per year, the city could hire 500 students to work after school for $10 per hour, from 3 until 6, five days per week from August through June. That would get kids off the streets, it would put money in their pockets and into the local economy, it would give them valuable experience that could help them land jobs, and it would create a much needed workforce to take care of quality of life things in Philadelphia.
I think about places like Pennypack Park, which is beautiful but full of trash. The Futures Corps teams could clean up the park and repair or build amenities like tables, bridges, walkways and .gardens. Participants could design projects, develop management skills, run programs and build things they would be proud of.
For an additional $2 million annually, you could hire 500 teenagers in the summer (at $10 per hour for 40 hours per week for the 10 weeks between academic years).
Corps members would need supervision, so you’d need to add 25 people (1 for every 20 Corps members) who could serve as direct mentors. These could be college students or other inspiring young people. That would tack on an additional $375,000 per year ($15 per hour for each mentor for 15 hours per week during the school year and 40 hours per week in the summer). The actual work would be overseen by local unions and city departments, like the Parks & Recreation Department or the Office of the City Representative. You’d need a manager and staff to handle things, so tack on an additional $125,000 per year for overhead.
The city isn’t even opening some city pools this summer because of lack of funds, right? But there are major organizations in the area for whom $5.5 million per year is chump change. I’m thinking about big companies like Comcast, the Philadelphia Eagles and/or the University of Pennsylvania. There are also philanthropic organizations, like the William Penn Foundation, that already work in these sectors.
That money would be an investment in young people and an investment in the future of the city.
My grandfather left Delaware County when he was a teenager to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps in the Dakotas. He drove heavy equipment to build roads through the mountains. He went into the military and built roads in the Pacific theater. When he returned to Pennsylvania, he joined the operating engineers union and paved roads all around the region for the next 40 years.
Giving young people opportunities now will help them build successful futures.
• Create a Philly Volunteers Corps.
Our young people need role models and parents and family aren’t always around. We can’t let young people look to TV or the Internet for role models. We need to show that success can be modest, work can be rewarding and that life doesn’t need to be a constant competition.
A program like this could be run out of local schools and rec centers so that volunteers would not have to travel far. If people donated an hour every few months to meet with groups of young people, they could start building relationships. Then, maybe they could be on-call for whenever the young folks had questions about school, work, life or whatever.
It takes a village, right? This could be an easy way to develop positive, rewarding relationships, and it would ground the volunteers to their communities.
It would likely take some time for people at the schools and rec centers to organize things but probably only a few hours per week. They should be compensated for their time. There are 217 schools in the city and hundreds of parks/rec centers. There is a lot of overlap between schools and parks, though, so estimate around 100 people putting in 10 hours per week at $40 per hour and you get to around $2 million per year.
Again, there are wealthy organizations in town that would benefit by seeing reduced crime, higher high school graduation rates and an increase in skilled workers in the region.
Long-term solutions
• Tax the wealthy at a higher percentage. Not a lot more, but more.
• Give tax breaks to people in the creative economy. We don’t manufacture stuff in Philadelphia anymore and we are neither the financial nor political capitol of the country. We need to justify our existence, you know, as a city. We are a place that has a lot of creative talent. We should foster and exploit that similarly to how Nashville does.
• Give tax breaks to public school teachers. We need to draw the best and brightest to come here from across the country and around the world, and then retain them. Plus this would show that the city values education.
• Lower the city wage tax so that you aren’t financially punishing people for working in the city.
• Stop corporate welfare. Private companies should not get massive tax breaks or public funding. Period.
• Elect people who are leaders, not stewards. Things are changing too quickly for anyone to sit back and wait for their powerful friends to tell them how to react.
• Our elected city leaders should be leveraging the strengths of the big companies, rising upstarts, all of the universities, and the successful, longstanding nonprofits to create a citywide workforce development plan and long-term regional employment strategy.
• Crime and violence will be the death of the city. But if you have a working population that sees a path for themselves and their families, you won’t have to worry as much about crime, in theory. At minimum, we should be able to reduce the number of crimes of desperation.
I’m not sure if these ideas are enough to drag the city out of the massive hole we’ve dug for ourselves but these sure beat the complete lack of creative thinking currently being offered by the people who should be thinking big.
How can you sit there and watch things deteriorate? How can you live with yourself?
My guess is that nothing changes in the city.
Our elected officials will continue to blame irrational behavior and the federal government for the violence on the streets. Public education will continue to leave 1/3 of our young people – mostly male – without a pathway to success. People will start leaving Philadelphia in droves over the next few years.
I am definitely considering it.
I have a family. Things aren’t great here. Within the past few weeks, there have been shootings on blocks that I walk nearly every day. One was in the middle of the afternoon on the 4th of July. My wife, son and I had walked that area the day before around the same time.
The violence is everywhere in America these days.
Conservatives respond by pushing for personal responsibility despite the fact that these are social ills. And they are winning, as liberals and progressives don’t seem to be able to message properly.
What the country is left with is a declining public – public education, public parks, public safety, public infrastructure, public health, public transportation, public interest, etc.
We live in a nation of individuals. It’s every person for themselves. And when you pit people against each other, there will always be losers.
I’m not interested in playing that game.
G.W. Miller III 