In an effort to seek answers to Mayor John Street's cure for the city's blight epidemic -- the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative -- Fels Center of Government Senior Scholar Mark Hughes pulled a little stunt.
After City Council President Anna Verna presented the Mayor on July 18 with a list of 50 questions on NTI that needed to be answered by August 1 in order for funding hearings to be held, Hughes decided to offer the Street administration a challenge of his own: an alternative plan. In the same two week window allotted to the Mayor, Hughes vowed to publish his own blight solution in his weekly Philadelphia Daily News column.
His column ran on Tuesday, and the requested response by NTI head Patricia Smith and top NTI consultant Jeremy Nowak appeared in the News yesterday.
But after reading their replies to his and Verna's questions on who will run the program, how the total $1.6 billion allocation will be spent and what state and federal laws will need tweaking to get it done, Hughes was still left wondering.
"I was supposed to be a decoy to draw fire so we could figure out where they were and see what their plan is -- I didn't see that today," Hughes said Wednesday evening at a meeting of Young Involved Philadelphia, a city-wide policy action group, on College Green.
"Everything that was said today is unfortunately consistent with their still not having a plan."
In April, Street unveiled a sweeping proposal to change the face of Philadelphia. Vacant lots would be cleared, a "land bank" would be created to pool developable land and city government would be reorganized, all to make way for an influx of private investment.
Although the vacant lot cleanup began in June, City Council has refused to fund further parts of the program pending more information from Street.
To beg further action, Hughes' column criticized the Street plan on several fronts. He said that rather than shirking the issue of relocation, as he accused the Mayor of doing, it should be embraced and thought of as a housing assistance program. Hughes also proposed to use monetary incentives to make his estimate of 6,000 relocations voluntary, as opposed to the government-mandated moves that Street tends to be leaning towards.
In their counterpoint, Smith and Nowak said that while the Administration does not yet know the number of residents in blighted areas that will need to be relocated, they said that they will "not relocate anything close to the number that Hughes suggests." They also bristled at the thought of voluntary resettlement, saying that "historical evidence suggests that most people don't volunteer to be relocated."
But the key to relocation, according to Hughes, is to treat it "as a front-end benefit, not a footnote on costs." It would reduce the cost for city services, and repopulate other thinning neighborhoods.
Actions mentioned by Hughes that were seconded by the Mayor's team were the creation of a land bank and the need to lower housing construction costs in the city, in order to make it more palatable for people to live there. Smith and Nowak said that Hughes' suggestion for a state-chartered oversight board would be considered.
Hughes said last night that the biggest fault he finds with the NTI is with public relations, saying that he believes "there's more plan than what we've been shown."
YIP member Ed Goppelt questioned Hughes about the success of other Rust Belt cities in dealing with blight.
Hughes said that while such cities like Cleveland and Baltimore had made strides in dealing with certain aspects of blight, the extent to which Philadelphia is blighted is "uniquely bad."
The 16 people present at the meeting also touched upon issues such as what positive assets Philadelphia has. Hughes said that, after a pause, Center City was a world-class feature.
But after hearing so much negative talk on the city's problems, some in the crowd were wary of any positive news.
"It's pretty shocking that I live in a city that was first rate, but that's now slowly going downhill," Goppelt said. "It's a bitter pill to swallow."
However, most present were welcome to put any news -- good or bad -- out on the table.
"It's just awesome," said YIP member Job Itzkowitz.
