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Clarke's Conundrum: Residents aren't buying logic of North Philly NID
In a long, contentious Council committee hearing last week, Council President Darrell Clarke looked somewhat baffled by the fact - and fact it was - that no small number of his constituents had showed up to stage a rebellion against him.
Clarke's Conundrum: Residents aren't buying logic of North Philly NID
In a long, contentious Council committee hearing last week, Council President Darrell Clarke looked somewhat baffled by the fact — and fact it was — that no small number of his constituents from the 5th Councilmanic District had showed up to stage a rebellion against him.
Clarke has been working for months on a bill that would create a Neighborhood Improvement District (NID) in the Temple area. It would impose an assessment (like a tax) on non-homeowner-occupied residential buildings, aimed at investors and owners who cater to the growing local student population.
What seemed to surprise Clarke was how many home-owning residents seemed to oppose it. After all, they wouldn't pay the tax. Instead, it would be paid by the very developers whom residents accused of irresponsible development and disrespectful practices — to the benefit, in theory, of longtime residents.
Clarke has characterized much of the opposition as a matter of a lack of "education" on the law. But it's more complicated than that.
While the tax itself would not be imposed on home-owning residents, its origins are part of what many see as a larger compromise: more neighborhood benefits as a way to mollify neighborhood opposition to continued (and perhaps inevitable) development around Temple.
The law, as (as this writer reported in a lengthy, but thoroughly enjoyable, profile of the new Council President) is widely seen by insiders as a way to rein in cowboy developers, but also to accommodate the needs of TAPA, the Temple Area Property Association — a trade group of big-time developers in the area (several members of which have donated heavily to Clarke's campaigns for office).
TAPA members, by and large, seem to want to build more (and many say much-needed) student housing in the area. Many locals simply don't want that — and it's not crazy for residents to see in the proposed NID a certain level of cooperation with developers whose goals they don't share.
After all, TAPA — whose members would be paying the new assessment — supports the bill.
That fact alone seems to have raised red flags with home-owning residents, even though they wouldn't pay the new assessment and would, ostensibly, benefit from it.
But there's reason to question that, too: Clarke repeatedly acknowledged rampant L&I violations by private developers — and said that the NID is his solution to the problem. But NID funds can't pay for L&I inspectors; only the city can do that. NID money might pay for street cleaning and other services, but it's not obvious why anyone should expect it to solve code problems.
And while President Clarke described these violators as private developers working with private property, something he ostensibly had nothing to do with, Clarke — like any other district Councilperson — has, in fact, passed dozens if not hundreds of pieces of legislation enabling various private development projects.
It's a heck of a political knot. Clarke's conundrum is to untie it — or pick which part to chop.
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