Great Expectations

Why do we simply hold on to the idea that this city is a donut of poverty and that is how it has to be?

Cities are expensive to live in, and trying to keep people from moving by incentivizing them to stay with subsidies, whether welfare, low income housing, low taxes, not collecting taxes or liens, or other means Philly abides by, just roots them in an area with few jobs at their skill level.'

There are industries that hire troubled workers by the hundreds. They're just not here in the city because costs are too high in the city for them to come here.

The best thing we can do for our tax base, and to give kids a leg up with schools that are already functional is to give their parents incentives to relocate where there is opportunity.

I can attest to the effectiveness -- I moved to work as a moving packer, a waitress, a fast food worker, a student who worked in the summer as a receptionist, then secretary, then graduated from college.

What did all of my forays have in common? I moved to where the work was.

The city can't afford to house, feed, clothe, train, re-train, nurse, and cut breaks for 20% of the population.

The simple recourse is to allow what is the case in Europe -- cities are where the wealthy live for the sake of convenience and ease, and the poor live in the suburbs, or outer suburbs where the factories, rendering plants, and industrial parks are.

Since US factories, rendering plants, and industrial parks, as well as most of the starter jobs, are in the outer rings, why not stop propping up people who have to commute two hours from the city to those locations?

Why not be honest enough to say the schools here need money, you own property, you have to pay your property taxes or lose your asset? A relocation office is more appropriate to actual need than sending joe ex-con back into the old hood and the old ways.

Why even pretend that kids are raised well in the inner city most of the time if only government does x, y, and z?

In a free market, Philly neighborhoods thrived, because you had to work to be in North Philly or a West Philly. These were desirable alternatives to the harsher, older working class/middle class areas.

Now with subsidized housing, PHA housing for able bodied people, no requirements that have teeth to pay child support, HCV/Sec 8 and the low quality landlords who cash in on this poorly supervised program, city held vacant property and empty lots, we have a policy of retaining voters who are poor by trying to house them in easy to manage wards of all one income, all one education level, with no diversity and no prospects.

Warehousing the poor is the result of many a well-intentioned, expensive policy. When are we going to admit that trying to keep multiple generations of impoverished people right here forever is not working?

There are plenty of businesses that hire ex cons, but the salary is not going to get someone by who lives in a 100 year old house that needs to be completely renovated, in a city with a wage tax.

Low income workers get a 3-4% raise the moment they move out of Philly and work outside of Philly.

Liberals have to admit that their tax structure that drives out business hurts the low income or less than perfect worker into utter destitution.

Get rid of the BPT, kill the wage tax. Use property taxes to fill the gap like all the surrounding counties.

Voila -- business comes here, people come in instead of leaving to flee the wage tax and crime.

And entry level workers will be sought after and competed for like they are in the suburbs.

The city has to get out of the real estate holding business and let the private market compete and bid on the massive properties held in limbo and out of the market.

The government, since it is funded by only a small percent of private revenue, can never replace that engine of private revenue, the marketplace.

The city has to stop trying to control the market to the point of choking it off (except where there are KOZs which is where you see lots of fresh new buildings in the city).

Your reading list is incomplete, because too many people in Philly think that capping property taxes and capping housing prices is somehow going to do something besides create a Mugabe Zimbabwe.

Yet this odd sovietism attends every community meeting, and every politician can't help themselves from promising that "we need (the government) to build more affordable housing, we need (the government) to lower your rent or property taxes, we need (the government) to give people a break on water, gas, taxes, liens, and loan them low interest, no interest loans, and train them step by step on how to balance a checkbook and start a checking account. We need (the government) to teach people to read the fine print, not use payday lenders, not take out a floating interest rate mortgage, not to "borrow trouble." Come on people.

Treat people like children, and they won't ever disapoint you.

There are middle class workers leaving Philly every college graduation while the city tries to train people with the equivalent of a 5th grade education how to do the simple things of modern life.

What's "unsustainable" about that picture?

Is it too tough of a message? Because that is what Nutter faces even now. He has to cut, cut, and cut the local government salaries and pension, so he has to shrink the local government. Is it going to be firemen, police, or OHCD?

Are we going to fund PHA to house the nondisabled or nonsenior or can we fund enough teachers and new schools with a/c so we can have much needed summer schools?

Allow the impoverished to MOVE to where he jobs are by not subsidizing them to stay here on the dole. Too harsh to say? We just lost $120 million in welfare dollars because we missed the welfare to work goals.

The already crowded programs where people stand in line once a month around the whole block are going to turn even more people away. The legislation to pass ID requirements will pass, and people will have to present ID that will show their criminal backgrounds that might exclude them from certain programs. Or it will show that they hold assets that they won't sell, such as an empty lot, or run down housing, so they won't be eligible for a Section 8 or Housing Choice rent. True story -- lady a block from me rented a section 8/HCV apartment with her newborn and her drug dealer boyfriend, but she owned two vacant lots she didn't want to sell. She wanted to "build on them someday."

Meanwhile, taxpayers pay for her to pay less than $100 a month to live in Center City. Getting ID, doing a background check, checking deed records for assets, all of this is normal controls that the city housing programs must do. Or lose funding.

That's a necessary control to limit the overuse of benefits. It will enhance the reputation of social programs in Harrisburg to show that a winnowing process occurs that is objective and fair.

This press has to play the devil's advocate honestly to at least understand where Harrisburg is on the "urban" issues. Harrisburg has less fed block grant money, less tobacco settlement money, and less patience than ever with a city that won't collect property taxes and won't institute standardized assessments on property.

Instead, we beg poverty, and Harrisburg rightly says that we're sitting on a tax base, an economic engine greater than most in the state.

They're right. When are we going to work with them, doing the things other municipalities do?

As someone who works with offenders, I can assure the public that it's not hard to find employers who want to hire people with criminal records. Plenty of local businesses do it, from Annie's Preztels, (so buy a pretzel today) to a range of auto, tire, fast food, and other labor or working class positions, such as construction laborer, with the chance to move up.

However, what discourages all business discourages all business that hires ex offenders.

I don't see the push in Philly to be a little more "red" on business on this issue.

You can't penalize busines for not hiring offenders by trying to enforce "discrimination" against hiring offenders. The courts are messy, expensive, and that will guarantee that like someone with a history of an injury, they will not get a chance.

I'm constantly surprised at the Ink's lack of writers who understand the concerns of working class people, and the businesses who hire them. It's not an antipathetic relationship. It's symbiotic.

They need them and vice versa. The obstacles are the obstacles to all development -- like the city trying to control and distribute development, property, contracts, in a closed door back room deal.

If you want to hire ex cons, let the city sell off its unused properties such as lots or vacant factories to the highest bidder. Stop trying to PIDC or RDA or PAID the properties for decades of no movement.

A demolition laborer needs old building to demo. The city of Philadelphia holds property out of the market.

See the connection? If the city gets out of the way, then the new businesses coming in -- which appear to be health care, for example, a reliable ex offender hirer, then you will have hundreds of jobs listed for still more CNAs, nursing techs, lab techs, resident assistants, nursing assistants, after the construction laborers are done building the new nursing homes and assisted living facilities out of old city held assets.

This is what private business is doing -- look at Tenet's Graduate Hospital. Upenn bought it to make a nursing home/long term care facility.

Far from needing "separate but equal" government funded subsidy, exoffenders and the working low income need a growing economy more than anyone.

More than even incentives to hire, Nutter would do well to simply allow the market place to do what it does -- buy, build, and hire.

What city owns 1000s of properties and does nothing with them? What city uses government to "mastermind" development like the waterfront, or the "authority" controlled sites?

I don't like the way casinos were put in, but it does seem to be the only way to get large scale projects going in Philly reliably -- beat the locals over the head to start business asap.

Whose going to be running that cement mixer? The guy whose done a stint at the University of Holmesburg or the Alternative Sentencing detention place on State Road.

Philly has to go from a press that hates business and taxes it and blames it, to a redder vision, a more Wharton based reading list.

Seems like these are three impassioned comments from the same source.

A couple of observations: The Inquirer has been arguing on its editorial page for accelerated cuts in wage and business taxes for a decade. In the tax cuts vs. services debate, the editorial board's position has long been: It's a phony choice. Do both. Tax cuts will attract jobs to replace some of the lost tax revenue; for the rest of the gap, stop wasting money on pay to play corruption and ill-advised New Deal programs and you'll have more money to provide core services. This topic was reviewed in last Sunday's G.E. package on fiscal issues, which can be found on the site.

So the notion that the Inquirer somehow doesn't get the issues the writer lists strikes me as off; the reading list, by the way, includes documents by the Economy League and Workforce Investment Board, hardly communist organizations.

I agree with the writer's general point that many Philadelphians have a perverse antipathy to businessa and an unfounded faith that somehow government can serve as the great generator and guarantor of jobs. It's one of the key attitudes holding the city back.

Still, the notion that somehow poor Philadelphians with minimal work skills should just up and move to the suburbs to be closer to the mall jobs and industrial park jobs seems simplistic to the point of being hilarious. Where is the housing in which they would live in counties with median housing prices over $200,000? Does the writer really believe those towns would welcome those people with open arms?

Yes, Philly does have a real blind spot on property taxes, and how small its effort looks by comparison with other Pa. communities. But no other city has such a wage tax, something Harrisburg conveniently forgets. The implicit deal between state and city is, or should be: You'll house most of the state's poor, to take them off our hands, and we'll give you money to deal with the social ills that creates.

Still seems to me it's the state that doesn't live up to its end of that bargain.

Chris Satullo