To proponents of this choice, the main reason that city neighborhoods struggle is written in brick and stone. To them, physical blight - rundown housing, vacant eyesores, trash-strewn empty lots, graffiti, broken streetlights, abandoned cars _ is a daily affront that corrodes hope, invites crime, drives away residents and repels potential newcomers.

On the other side of the ledger, the lingering physical beauty of this old, tree-blessed city remains its strongest asset in attracting stable families to its neighborhoods and keeping them there.

So, in this view, the city government’s effort for neighborhoods should have two prongs: Where a neighborhood’s physical infrastructure is broken, repair and rebuild it. Where neighborhoods are green, historic and charming, preserve them. Tending to the city’s skin, this choice argues, will nurture its soul.

Proponents cite the "broken windows" theory, which maintains that untended physical decay leads to vandalism, crime and a decline of civic spirit. And they argue that the history and the beauty that reside in many of the city’s bricks and byways should be a seen as a precious, unique advantage in the competition for homebuyers, small businesses and tourists. Likewise, its extraordinary park system and the legacy of mature trees that justify the nickname Green Countrie Towne should be cherished.

Preserve and rebuild it, this choice contends, and they will come.

• Enforce zero tolerance for graffiti, litter and abandoned autos.

• Set up uniform service districts for all city departments, so that basic services such as trash pickup and road maintenance can be coordinated and provided evenly across the city.

• Create equitable infrastructure improvement budgets for all city neighborhoods.

• Have a coherent, aggressive strategy for vacant properties. Create a computerized inventory of them. Put a priority on tearing down vacant buildings that are beyond repair before they become drug dens. Renovate salvageable housing using community labor. Expand the successes achieved by the Philadelphia Green program at turning empty lots into tiny parks, gardens or sideyards.

• Where possible, consolidate vacant properties to create attractive parcels for new development. Rebuild blighted areas at lower density, to give the new housing more of a "suburban" feel with yards and driveways.

• Enact and enforce strong preservation rules to protect historic character of some blocks and neighborhoods

• Enact strong rules to preserve shade trees.

• Make sure neighborhoods are walkable and safe for pedestrians.

• Change real estate tax policy so that people are rewarded for maintaining and improving their properties, not punished (e.g. land-based taxes, fairer reassessment policy, reduced transfer tax)

• Invest in the Fairmount Park system.

• Crack down on slum landlords and slovenly homeowners.

• Aesthetics matter. Ugliness, litter, graffiti create a sense of despair and embattlement that drive people out of the city. Conversely, clean, picturesque streetscapes lure homebuyers and create a sense of trust and energy among residents.

• The city government should concentrate on what it’s best equipped to do and what individual neighborhoods can’t do for themselves: basic property services, capital improvements and urban planning.

• No jobs strategy will succeed unless blight is removed first. Businesses won’t locate and homebuyers with options won’t buy in areas that look and feel unsafe.

• Philadelphia can turn its central problem - it’s a city of 1.5 million that was built to hold more than 2 million - into an asset by redesigning residential neighborhoods to be much greener and less densely built.

• The city’s historic architecture and parks are assets that few other cities or suburbs can boast, so they should be preserved at all costs.

• Civic spirit grows out of a clean environment, not the other way around.

• People matter more than bricks. Invest limited city resources in human needs, not property values.

• The real problem behind blight is people’s lack of respect for property and other people’s rights. Until you address that, spending on repairs is throwing good money after bad.

• The city doesn’t have anywhere near the resources to handle all these projects in every neighborhood. And it won’t until a) it rebuilds the job base in the neighborhoods or b) mobilizes civic groups to do more for their neighborhoods to pick up the slack.

• Much of this smacks of gentrification, which is another name for government spending money to move longtime residents of neighborhoods out, and richer newcomers in.

• Rules that enforce an elite’s sense of aesthetics violate the rights of property owners.

• Government meddling with housing and building aesthetics raises the costs of property ownership and depresses the real estate market.