The murder of an elderly man last week in Philly’s Cedarbrook neighborhood touched off an interesting debate, but a debate which I believe centers on the wrong premise.
George Greaves, 87, was killed in his own front yard on Pickering Street by a pair of teenagers looking to rob him. Apparently the old man, a former bodybuilder and Navy veteran, wasn’t about to be pushed around by a couple of young punks, and resisted - perhaps by pushing one of the assailants, or maybe just by not moving fast enough. Greaves feistiness was answered by a bullet to the chest, and now India Spellman, 17, and Von Combs, 14, are charged with his murder.
It didn’t take long for a handful of local bloggers and commenters on www.philly.com to attribute Greaves’ senseless murder to the changes in the neighborhood’s racial demographic. Greaves was one of the last white holdouts who remained when the neighborhood “went black” years ago.
Cedarbrook, still known as East Mount Airy to us old timers, was once mostly Jewish and Irish Catholic, until the 1960’s when more upwardly mobile African-Americans starting buying homes there. Like many neighborhoods throughout the city at the time, white folks moved out when black folks moved in.
Dire predictions of rampant crime and neighborhood decay sent whites scurrying to the relative safety of the suburbs, without a thought to exactly what types of blacks the community was attracting. Since they’re all alike, after all, there’s no need to make that distinction. The only equation that went through their minds - fueled by fear and maybe one wrong-turn trip through North Philadelphia – is that black people equals bad neighborhood.
Except the black folks who moved to Cedarbrook were pretty much the same God-fearing, hard-working, middle class citizens as the whites who ran for the hills.
They were police officers, teachers, postal workers and business owners. They swept their sidewalks regularly, kept their yards trimmed and tidy, and shoveled snow from their neighbors’ steps. Their children were polite and well mannered, and always looked neat and clean on their way to school.
In short, it was these people who made the White Flight exodus seem irrational and at the very least, premature. They weren’t the problem, and indeed, middle class black neighborhoods throughout the city continued to thrive and flourish for several more decades. A few of those communities are as stable today as they ever were.
Greaves himself probably would have agreed, since by all indications he got along quite well with his black neighbors for many years; and until last Wednesday, was a beloved neighborhood fixture.
That’s why I believe the above-mentioned blog posters and talk radio commenters are again, some 40 years later, still fighting the wrong fight. Their premise – the very basis of their argument – is way off base.
It wasn’t the White Flight of the 1950’s and 60’s that started the downhill spiral of many once-solid city neighborhoods. It was the Black Flight of the 1980’s and 90s.
You can probably blame a lot of things: like the explosion of crack cocaine in black neighborhoods, and the explosion of crime that went along with it; or the rise of gangsta rap and the violent, self-destructive behavior perpetrated by its heroes; or the migration of good jobs to the suburbs; and just for good measure, throw in the decline in the quality of public education.
No matter the cause - the result was that many black Philadelphians who could afford to move packed their stuff and retreated, often to the same suburbs that lured their white neighbors 20 years before. Too often, among them were the stable neighborhood influences: the community cleanup organizer, the elderly lady who watched everyone’s house, the man who coached Little League and took the neighborhood kids to ball games.
They also took with them a measure of the neighborhood’s pride. With fewer homeowners and more renters, there was less incentive to keep the property looking nice – that’s the landlord’s job. The elderly begin dying off, and their grown children - who have no real investment or sweat equity in the home - let it go to seed or end up renting to tenants who care even less. And with each unkempt yard, crumbling front step, and graffiti-tagged wall, the neighborhood dies a slow, painful death.
Strong middle-class communities do not become violent ghettos overnight. It takes years for systematic neglect to gain enough of a foothold to tear a neighborhood to shreds.
And it takes the rest of us to look the other way.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Stop, DROP, And Roll
Most Philadelphians have spent this week in various stages of disbelief and utter frustration. Horrified, dumbfounded, and hoppin’ mad, we have been staggered by revelation after revelation of what the general public would call thievery, chicanery, underhanded corruption and unbridled arrogance.
Those in government would probably call it The Way Things Work.
Where to begin? The city's independent study of DROP, the Deferred Retirement Option Program, despised by taxpayers yet adored by city workers, was finally made public.
Remember when then-Mayor Ed Rendell sold us this bill of goods, and his administrators promised that DROP wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime, but in fact would save money on pension payouts in the long run? Well, the study, conducted by Boston College researchers, revealed that DROP has actually cost us $258 million in extra pension expenses since its approval in 1999. And that number doesn’t even count the elected officials who have taken the money, “retired” for a day, then come back to work for their regular salaries.
Giving credit where it’s due, Rendell’s successor Mayor John Street tried to kill DROP in 2003, rightly predicting it would come back and bite us in the end. Say what you will about John Street, but no one in Philadelphia had a better understanding of the complex intricacies of the city’s budget than he did. Street’s valiant try at a DROP-killing initiative failed – nipped in the bud by the city’s unions and rank-and-file employees - and in the finest tradition of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, Street then signed up for DROP himself.
Giving still more due credit, current Mayor Michael Nutter has picked up the fallen standard, and made his opposition to the program well known. When the results of the study were made public earlier this week, Nutter said, "We cannot afford this program any longer and it must go."
But Nutter alone can’t kill DROP. He faces the same opposition Street did, and you’d better believe the city’s union forces are again lining up in defense of the program, prepared to guard that money tree with their very lives.
City Council can kill DROP, and that’s what the mayor, and the public, wants. Except for one tiny problem – half a dozen Council members are signed up for DROP themselves, and theoretically could be voting themselves out of thousands of dollars. Even those not signed up will be subjected to the full court union press – unions which in many cases make up a substantial portion of their fundraising base.
As if the DROP fiasco wasn’t enough, we were also treated this week to the news that even in these hard economic times of double-digit unemployment and growing public despair, we’re paying some top officials like we have money to burn.
Out of a sense of sheer decency and respect for the public, the mayor, the governor, and most of their cabinets have cut their own salaries and given back raises and bonuses. People are hurting, and it doesn’t help taxpayer confidence to see their money being spent on exorbitant public salaries.
Meanwhile, Philadelphia Housing Authority Executive Director Carl Greene is pulling down $306,370, with a bonus of $44,188, up almost 10 percent from last year. By comparison, the salary of the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who’s in charge of the entire nation’s housing programs, is less than $200,000.
But what really stuck in the public’s craw was the outing of Philadelphia School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, whose paltry $338,000 salary was supplemented by a recent bonus of $65,000. The chancellor of the New York City school system, which has seven times as many students and a budget 10 times larger than ours, makes $125,000 less than Ackerman.
Recently, the residents of Bell, CA, a small suburb of Los Angeles, found out their city officials were pulling in outrageous salaries for part-time work. Rather than just grumble, they descended on city hall with pitchforks and torches, forcing administrators to quit, flee in panic, and reduce their own salaries by more than 90 percent.
If it worked in L.A., it should work here. After all, isn’t Philadelphia the place where Thomas Jefferson penned the words, “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
If Jefferson was right, maybe it’s time to grab the pitchforks, light the torches and make some alterations.
Those in government would probably call it The Way Things Work.
Where to begin? The city's independent study of DROP, the Deferred Retirement Option Program, despised by taxpayers yet adored by city workers, was finally made public.
Remember when then-Mayor Ed Rendell sold us this bill of goods, and his administrators promised that DROP wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime, but in fact would save money on pension payouts in the long run? Well, the study, conducted by Boston College researchers, revealed that DROP has actually cost us $258 million in extra pension expenses since its approval in 1999. And that number doesn’t even count the elected officials who have taken the money, “retired” for a day, then come back to work for their regular salaries.
Giving credit where it’s due, Rendell’s successor Mayor John Street tried to kill DROP in 2003, rightly predicting it would come back and bite us in the end. Say what you will about John Street, but no one in Philadelphia had a better understanding of the complex intricacies of the city’s budget than he did. Street’s valiant try at a DROP-killing initiative failed – nipped in the bud by the city’s unions and rank-and-file employees - and in the finest tradition of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, Street then signed up for DROP himself.
Giving still more due credit, current Mayor Michael Nutter has picked up the fallen standard, and made his opposition to the program well known. When the results of the study were made public earlier this week, Nutter said, "We cannot afford this program any longer and it must go."
But Nutter alone can’t kill DROP. He faces the same opposition Street did, and you’d better believe the city’s union forces are again lining up in defense of the program, prepared to guard that money tree with their very lives.
City Council can kill DROP, and that’s what the mayor, and the public, wants. Except for one tiny problem – half a dozen Council members are signed up for DROP themselves, and theoretically could be voting themselves out of thousands of dollars. Even those not signed up will be subjected to the full court union press – unions which in many cases make up a substantial portion of their fundraising base.
As if the DROP fiasco wasn’t enough, we were also treated this week to the news that even in these hard economic times of double-digit unemployment and growing public despair, we’re paying some top officials like we have money to burn.
Out of a sense of sheer decency and respect for the public, the mayor, the governor, and most of their cabinets have cut their own salaries and given back raises and bonuses. People are hurting, and it doesn’t help taxpayer confidence to see their money being spent on exorbitant public salaries.
Meanwhile, Philadelphia Housing Authority Executive Director Carl Greene is pulling down $306,370, with a bonus of $44,188, up almost 10 percent from last year. By comparison, the salary of the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who’s in charge of the entire nation’s housing programs, is less than $200,000.
But what really stuck in the public’s craw was the outing of Philadelphia School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, whose paltry $338,000 salary was supplemented by a recent bonus of $65,000. The chancellor of the New York City school system, which has seven times as many students and a budget 10 times larger than ours, makes $125,000 less than Ackerman.
Recently, the residents of Bell, CA, a small suburb of Los Angeles, found out their city officials were pulling in outrageous salaries for part-time work. Rather than just grumble, they descended on city hall with pitchforks and torches, forcing administrators to quit, flee in panic, and reduce their own salaries by more than 90 percent.
If it worked in L.A., it should work here. After all, isn’t Philadelphia the place where Thomas Jefferson penned the words, “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
If Jefferson was right, maybe it’s time to grab the pitchforks, light the torches and make some alterations.
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