Phil Bradshaw, Sean Maher, and Wayne Forchic bring us today's film, "Hopes and Fears." Bradshaw's biography on the Great Expectations website says that he "is inspired by the little things that often go unnoticed" and it shows in many of the shots that appear in this film. The film is visually rich, from a brilliantly shot opening of the Ben Franklin Bridge in what appears to be an early morning haze to an ironic shot about 2:25 in of a sink hole that appears to have become the neighborhood trash can. (My favorite shot.)
Act I lays out the hopes. Among them, judging from the range of interview subjects, is the belief that our diverse, multicultural city provides a vitality that we can draw on to solve many of the city's problems. "We are a city neighborhoods," says one trendy-looking young adult. And in those neighborhoods lie our strengths. Yes, sometimes there's "attytood" that comes with tension between these neighborhoods. But for the most part it's the same attitude that says, he's my brother. I can fight with him but I'll be damned if I'm going to let some outside beat him up.
Act II moves to the fears - all of the ones that we've heard so much about. Bad schools. Crime. People moving on up and leaving the neighborhood behind, not giving back.
Act III talks about the future through the lens of the past. One woman makes an observation about the fact that the city has a higher percentage of native born people than any other city. The words she chooses belie the positive and negative attributes to this statistic - "if your from Philadelphia and your parents are from Philadelphia, you have slim to no chance of ever leaving Philadelphia." The smile on her face leads you to believe that this is a good thing, no matter how much her words seem to connote a fate worse than death. That slim chance happens because people choose to stay, not because they can't escape. She continues later in the film by saying that while she wants to change the image that outsiders have of Philadelphia, "she doesn't want to do too good of job" lest we have to share this gem of a city with everyone else.
There's such a passion represented by each of the people in this film. "If we give up on our city, who else is going to come to fight for it?" asks one woman who grew up somewhere else and has since found a home here.
And that's why, no matter how many times the baseball team falls short, we turn out the following year on Opening Day believing we can win it all. That's why, no matter what a previous mayor has done, we believe that the next one can lead us to glory, because we'll never give up the fight.
Click on "Continue Reading" to check out the film. Feel free to comment about it and I encourage you to share those comments over on the Great Expectations page about this film.
Comments (4)
That was really good. They've all been good, but that one really looked at Philly broadly.
The intro was magical.
My question is still why the city won't collect the overdue property taxes to fix the stuff not in CC?
All this money is right there. Even Street admits it in the www.phila.gov press release about collection overdue taxes issued in 9/07:
"The average real estate delinquency among the delinquent accounts is $8,965 and dates back 13 years.
The average delinquent taxpayer among the top 1,000 delinquent accounts owes more than $32,000 – debts accumulated over the last 15 years."
What film is going to cover that? We can't talk about fixing anything if the cash to pay for it isn't at the ready.
The city can't keep dragging its feet. What kind of city can survive not collecting property taxes of NINE THOUSAND BUCKS per delinquent property owner dating back THIRTEEN YEARS?
No wonder the schools are crap, the streets are filthy, dangerous, and people have to pay for and do everything themselves.
Even the press seems like it won't investigate the issue. This money is right there, you just have to get tough on the owners getting a free ride for more than a decade.
What is up with that?
Not collecting what is already billed and owed = no money to fix the city infrastructure, safety, schools, all the things people listed in the film.
Posted by Anonymous | December 8, 2007 7:20 PM
If we are begging the state and blaming the Bush admin for not giving us money, why are we also not collecting the revenue we already are owed?
It makes it seem like we really can pay for our own schools, but we pretend not to in order to get money from Harrisburg. It makes it seem like we have to keep the slums intact without offering the houses for sale to the highest bidder, because how can we persuade the HUD rep to get money for us if we don't have rows of run down blighted properties?
Seems like the market can fix a lot of this, like it already has, but the city tries to hold lots of property out of the market that is blighted. Same with PHA. They have all this old housing they can't afford to fix, that no one can live in. So sell it.
But they won't.
This is the type of thing that keeps the city down, and Nutter has to put a stop to it.
Housing costs go down, we can see now, if you have enough supply. So why does the city keep so much potential housing stock from entering the market where it will start to contribute again to the property tax base?
Nutter has to let the tax base work and stop trying to make a beggar's portfolio.
I have to say that this is the way that large government monies in the city have utterly failed, even have done the opposite of the intention to rebuild the city.
"Urban renewal" dollars just end up creating bureaucracies that create more blight to continue to get funding.
How do we stop this without having the "housing" advocates go nuts because the government is getting out of the business of real estate holding, speculating, and development?
Posted by Anonymous | December 8, 2007 7:28 PM
Perzel has to take over the Sheriff's collection function, and the real estate tax certification part of the Department of Revenue.
Then the old Dem cronies have to get removed from the BRT Board.
Then the city will start to stop using highly skewed noncollection or tax rates.
There's no way for these groups to work if there isn't some kind of outside accountability.
There's always going to be a climate of abuse -- from Fumo's mansion being taxed at 1/100th of its real value, to property taxes getting billed by never collected.
Ever notice how the pets of the pols don't pay property taxes?
I would like to make a film about that.
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