Philadelphia skyline (Photo/Dennis Yang via Flickr)
Within hours of Motor City’s ignominious collapse into bankruptcy this past July it seemed that conservatives around the country — like salivating wolves celebrating a fresh kill — began looking for other prospective big-city bankruptcies. With glee, some have settled on Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, as the next major American city to go bust. Are they right?
Philadelphia, America’s fifth-largest city, is to be sure, no urban paradise. Like all of America’s big, old-line industrial centers, it has suffered decline as white flight, de-industrialization and population shift to the warmer climes of the Sunbelt have manifested themselves. Since reaching a population peak of more than 2 million in 1950, Philly has shrunk by a quarter to an estimated 1.5 million today — severe, but by no means as bad as Detroit’s population collapse. Still, afflicted with many of the ills that killed Detroit, one might be forgiven for being gloomy about Philly’s future.
A Crumbling School System
Of these, the problem with Philadelphia’s wretched school system is by far the most pressing. It is, quite literally, belly-up broke, and started the year with a $304 million deficit that has forced “doomsday” cuts on a system already stripped to the bone. This past June, for instance, Philadelphia’s school system was forced to close 24 schools and lay off 19 percent of its workforce — a veritable army of assistant principals, teachers, janitors and teachers’ aides whose loss will make doing anything more than putting a teacher in front of a class nearly impossible.
As reported in The New York Times, administrators trying to salvage what they can from the fiscal destruction have contemplated “opening in September with larger classes but no one to answer phones, keep order on the playground, coach sports, check out library books, or send transcripts for seniors applying to college.” Indeed, the financial situation is so bad that it was until very recently not even safe to assume that Philly’s schools would open on time for classes in the fall. The district’s Superintendent, for instance, threatened to keep the doors closed if the city did not come through with $50 million in emergency funding.
The government of Philadelphia has provided this, though the city’s money still leaves gaping holes in the district’s budget that have forced at least one Philadelphia elementary school to send out requests for a “$613-per-student donation” to parents in order to fill its budget gap. In a city where a quarter of the population lives in poverty, such requests can be devastating to those who can barely make ends meet as it is.
While necessary to ensure school starts, assuming greater financial responsibility for Philadelphia schools is an additional burden the city government can ill afford right now. The city itself, for instance, has only recently begun to climb out of a fiscal hole made worse by the 2008 recession and many preceding years of financial mismanagement that left Philadelphia with the worst credit rating of any major U.S. city with a population of over a million people.
Though this rating was raised recently due to three years of fiscal surpluses that came in the wake of politically wrenching tax hikes and service cuts, Philadelphia is by no means out of the woods yet. The city has over $5 billion in unfunded pension liabilities it has to deal with, a loss-making public gas works, and, as noted above, a financially crippled, debt-wracked school system that barely functions.
All this has made upcoming negotiations with the city’s public service employees and the school district’s teachers’ union crucially important, and bond holders — much more leery of holding big-city debt after the Detroit debacle — are watching closely. With the state government held by a Republican Party permanently hostile to big-city Democrats, and little in the way of help coming from a Tea-Party choked Congress in Washington, Philadelphia, like Detroit, seems to be on its own.
Divergent Paths
Still, while Philly shares some of the same problems as Detroit, there are also major differences. Whereas Detroit for too long remained dependent on a 20th-century industrial model that was clearly going extinct as early as the 1970s and 1980s, Philadelphia more or less accepted the demise of heavy industry early on and, as a result, courted next-generation industries to set up shop — a mission greatly facilitated by the existence of the University of Pennsylvania within the city’s confines and Philadelphia’s many top-notch hospitals and medical centers. The Philadelphia economy is thus much more diversified and high-tech than Detroit’s ever was.
Second, geography is another important factor in Philadelphia’s favor. It is a port city located on the Atlantic coast and, even more important, is part of a network of intertwined east-coast cities stretching from Boston to Washington D.C. that is home to nearly 17 percent of the nation’s population and 20 percent of U.S. GDP. This gives Philadelphia a much firmer foundation for economic reinvention since it is part of a larger, interdependent economic bloc of cities, suburbs and towns that are closely linked through trade, transport and communications. Detroit, though ostensibly linked in a similar midwestern urban network, is more geographically isolated in what is a much less dense, and much poorer, multi-state, inter-city system.
Third, political leadership in Philadelphia has also been much more proactive in heading off potentially devastating crises. In Detroit, for instance, city government fell into increasingly feckless hands until the mayoralty was held by the now-imprisoned Kwame Kilpatrick, who looted the city in an illegal kickback-for-contracts scheme between 2002 and 2008. In contrast, Philadelphia has had a string of relatively competent mayors, including in the 1990s Ed Rendell, who subsequently went on to become Pennsylvania’s governor in 2003. Philadelphia, too, has had its corruption scandals in recent years, but the political system in Philadelphia seems much more capable of limiting the scale and scope of public corruption than seems to be the case in Detroit.
As a result of all this, Philadelphia as a city is much healthier than Detroit in almost every way. In addition to having retained more people, crime is lower, Philadelphians are richer and better educated, and in Philly there is still a relatively vibrant middle and upper-middle class that play an important role in balancing off the demands of the poor and super-wealthy who call the city home. Population has even registered an uptick of late, a trend that — if it continues — could do much to solve underlying fiscal lows. More people, especially middle and upper-middle class people, mean more tax revenue, better credit, more services, and, ultimately, even more people — an upward spiral to contrast with decades of the downward variety much of urban America, especially Detroit, has experienced over the past several decades.
So, there is hope for Philly yet, and just in time, too. America of late has seemingly been a country implacably hostile to cities and urban life, something that desperately needs to change if many of our most pressing problems are to be resolved. While rural-urban divides are present in every country and society on Earth, it is in the United States in particular that urban areas are deemed somehow apart from the country as a whole — not, as Sarah Palin might say, part of the ‘Real America’ comprised of lily-white, Norman Rockwell-esque small towns and countryside.
In large part this cultural aversion to cities stems from ethnic, racial and even religious differences in a country constantly open to waves of immigration from overseas. Cities, in the view of nativists, are not merely not ‘Real America,’ they are portals of subversion through which foreigners and foreign ideas contaminate a pristine, more culturally “authentic” rural culture. They are, in short, both figuratively and literally dark metropolises where upright — read white — Americans go to lose their soul by intermixing with alien, urban hordes.
Thankfully, this view is now not nearly as strong as it once was. Rural America’s grasp over our cultural narrative is slowly losing its death grip as demographic change and economic globalization suck people and wealth away from rural areas and deposit them in globally interconnected urban centers like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Boston and, yes, Philadelphia. It is in these places, enriched by their connections to foreign lands and peoples, that the next American future will be built. Rural America is the past, and our polarized politics is at least partly about those who benefited from the past fighting, against the forces of history, to retain it.
Despite this atavistic turn in our politics, current economic reality speaks to a growing need in our country to understand how and why cities — those quintessential inventions of mankind — succeed or fail and to act accordingly to save them. Indeed, America needs to once again accept and fully embrace our urban centers for the valuable contributors to economic growth and cultural life that they naturally happen to be. Cities, much as rural conservatives gnash their teeth and wail against them, are where civilizations are built, and the health of a civilization’s cities are a good indicator of the overall health of the society they reside in. Declining cities, in all times and all places, inexorably and universally means a declining culture.
Given that for over 50 years American politics — led by conservatives — have systematically deprived our cities of the resources they need to sustain themselves, let alone thrive and grow, it is no surprise that now America, too, is in decline. It was not foreigners, however, who caused this to happen — neglect of our urban areas largely stemmed from politicized issues of race and class that exploded into partisan, culture-war animosity after the 1960s.
Many American cities, most notably Detroit, declined precipitously as a result. Whether Philadelphia, and by extension many other parts of urban America, can avoid a similar fate likely depends on how well we as Americans can overcome these past divisions as we head ever deeper into the future. Detroit doesn’t have to be our collective future — not unless we let it happen.
The post Could Philadelphia be the Next Detroit? appeared first on Mint Press News.