About 25 residents of University City gathered at Intercultural Family Services on Jan. 21 for a Citizen Voices forum. The moderators were Harris Sokoloff and Michelle Charles.

Give Philadelphians a chance to dream and there's no telling where they'll go. This was evident in the Citizen Voices meeting at Intercultural Family Services.

And when they dreamed about how to make Philadelphia America's most livable city, the biggest dreams, touching on the city's most persistent trouble spots, were evident in the questions raised:

Education:
How did you pay for the improvements? What creative measures did the state employ?

How did you help the students and families not lost to charter schools and not using vouchers to go to private schools?

How did you get labor and management to work together?

Housing:
Where did all the dilapidated buildings and empty lots go?

How did you persuade local colleges to offer courses on rehabilitating houses?

Now that the city has eliminated blighted housing, what are you doing to keep it affordable?

Crime:
How did you get rid of the drugs without violating people's rights?

How did you get a consortium of cities to legalize drugs?

What did you do to help the released prisoners?

How did you punish nuisance crimes without overcrowding the prisons?

How do you keep your police motivated now that crime is so low? ``The Maytag policeman'' one person called them.

How did you increase the quality of police recruitment?

Mass transit:
How did you modernize without fare hikes?

How did you get the suburbs to pay more?

How did you increase regional cooperation?

How did you go 10 years without a strike, gain riders, make the cashiers friendly, make everything accessible to those in wheelchairs?

How did you get the city speed limit to 15 miles per hour?

How did you make school buses safer?

Community involvement:
How do you get your streets so clean?

How did you harness the energy of all those retired boomers?

How did you get the neighborhoods involved in city government,and the city government involved in the neighborhoods?

How did you get different ethnic groups to work together, maintaining pride in their own group without promoting divisions?

How did you come up with 20,000 community gardens?

What role did the churches play?

How did you encourage small businesses to grow in neighborhoods?

How did you flatten the city bureacracy and move power to the neighborhoods?