Neighborhoods: A Citizen Voices Issue Framework

The main problem, in this view, is that as jobs and middle-class residents have fled to the suburbs, many neighborhoods have lost or are losing the economic base they need to sustain them. It’s a problem of economic capital.

The particular vitality of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods in the bygone days when it was "the workshop of the world" derived from the ample supply in each neighborhood of jobs that could support a family. Now, many of those factories are hauntingly empty husks and those business strips tattered and half-deserted.

In this view, this situation is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Government policies (some of them tinged with racism) contributed to the disinvestment in urban neighborhoods, so government policies can help reverse the decline.

Job one, this choice believes, is to rebuild the economic capital of neighborhoods. This can be done, proponents believe, by coordinating business and government initiatives to energize neighborhood economies.

Government can do much, this view believes, to create incentives for businesses to move back to neighborhood sites. Focus on increasing the supply of "living-wage" jobs in a neighborhood and the ripple effects will take care of the other much-decried symptoms of neighborhood decline. First, retail corridors can revive when the income base in the neighborhood rises. Second, the work of scholars such as William Julius Wilson shows that the absence of work corrodes family life and community ties. And in a city that relies on a wage tax to raise revenues, increasing the number of solid jobs creates tax base to support better city services and infrastructure. Finally, increasing the supply of good-paying jobs within neighborhoods increase their ability to attract middle-class homebuyers.

• Work with the federal government to continue and expand the "empowerment zone" program of tax and loan incentives to businesses that locate in distressed neighborhoods.

• Lobby the state and federal government to soften the environmental rules that raise the costs of reusing "brownfields," vacant industrial sites.

• Set up convenient neighborhood job training centers, preparing people precisely for the jobs being attracted to the neighborhood.

• Bring the same energy that has been brought to marketing Center City to selling the advantages of vacant industrial sites in the neighborhoods to entrepreneurs. Do whatever it takes in terms of tax breaks or low-interest loans to clinch their decision to locate at such a site.

• Give neighborhood business associations technical and marketing assistance, and make sure they get the strategic support they need from police.

• Eliminate the notorious red tape that stymies small businesses from getting started, improving properties or expanding.

• Work with civic groups to attack "red-lining," the decisions by banks and insurance companies not to do business in certain neighborhoods because of their racial makeup or poverty rates.

• Create tax and other incentives for first-time, middle-class homebuyers (e.g. reducing real estate transfer tax). Encourage other large institutional employers to follow the University of Pennsylvania’s lead in giving workers incentives to live in the immediate neighborhood.

• When households have the job income to meet their basic needs, they contribute strength, not problems, to a neighborhood.

• The flight of jobs from neighborhoods that was encouraged by post-war government highway and tax policies; by reversing those policies, government can repair some of the damage.

• Being able to walk to neighborhood stores to buy most essentials is a big part of the appeal of urban living.

• Small businesses are the best engine of neighborhood revitalization, but their needs have been largely ignored in the mania to attract high-profile corporations to Center City.

• Only cynics and racists believe neighborhood economies are beyond hope. The larger economic trends that have punished neighborhood economies can be successfully countered.

• Neighborhood real estate would seem an attractive bargain to businesses and homebuyers were it not for high taxes and environmental costs.

• Government programs like empowerment zones have been tried again and again, and they never work.

• You can’t attract business or homebuyers to some distressed neighborhoods unless the city first attacks aggressively their blight and infrastructure woes.

• Businesses benefit from government handouts to move into a neighborhood, but neighborhoods often don’t. The businesses bring people from outside to work for them, and all the neighborhood gets is noise, traffic and pollution.

• City handouts to business can make a difference only on the margins; where a business locates and whether it succeeds are largely determined by market factors outside government’s control.

• Americans no longer expect to live near where they work; those who can afford it decide where to live based on a neighborhood’s look and feel, not its proximity to jobs. That’s why tending to the social connections, the civic life, of a neighborhood should come first.

• As long as its resident have jobs, it makes no difference to neighborhood vitality whether most of its residents walk to work or commute.

Tradition. Convenience. Entrepreneurship. Small is beautiful.