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Archive: November, 2012
It's that time of year when reporters' inboxes get filled to bursting with press releases on turkey giveaways. State legislators, City Council members, clubs and professional associations, private companies and the city are all giving out birds for Thankgiving tables. Even the administration, which wants to move homeless-feeding programs off of the Ben Franklin Parkway and other public spaces, has found a site where distributing food (actually, vouchers for food) is acceptable, down in South Philadelphia.
The press releases come complete with offers to interview grateful recipients, and canned quotes like this one from FreshDirect, which gave 100 turkeys to Project H.O.M.E. residents: “My family and I are very grateful to FreshDirect for helping to provide us with a Thanksgiving meal,” said Bonita Smith, long-time Project H.O.M.E. resident. “We are truly blessed to have the good people at Project H.O.M.E. and FreshDirect help make our holiday special.”
It's a nice gesture, sure. It doesn't answer what Philly's hungry will eat the other 364 days of the year, or answer how people like Smith and organizations like Project H.O.M.E. will manage on even less this year.
Philabundance reports need is up 29 percent this year over last, and has increased 98 percent over the past three years. Further, 62 percent of the 500 food pantries and neighborhood distribution centers it works with are having trouble providing enough food, and are either reducing rations or turning people away. Philabundance itself recently went through a dry-food shortage and had to look to neighboring agencies for assistance.
A turkey on Thanksgiving may help a family celebrate the holiday with dignity. It may even fill a news hole. But it's also a distraction from a gaping, growing need that can't be filled in a day.
Humility isn't a trait you expect to see much of on City Council, but last night 2nd District Councilman Kenyatta Johnson was issuing mea culpas left and right as he told the Eastwick Friends & Neighbors Coalition that he would not be moving forward with legislation to clear the way for more than 100 undeveloped acres in the area to be divvied up between the airport and Korman, which wants to build 722 apartments. "I learned some things form this process, and I'm not arrogant enough to say I didn't," Johnson told the group at Pepper Middle School. The administration and Korman "kind of just assumed the Councilman was going to rubber stamp the process," he said. Now, the proposal is liable to end up back in court instead.
Eastwick residents had protested the legislation clearing the way for the development, arguing that building on the now-open space was likely to exacerbate the frequent flooding experienced throughout the neighborhood during periods of heavy rain. Though this has been an issue since 1999 at least — and although there were at one point plans afoot to buy out some of the residents on the hardest-hit blocks — Joanne Dahme of the Water Department told residents that the PWD "became aware of the flooding" due to their efforts over the past year. She said the department was now committed to dealing with the issue, working with the Army Corps of Engineers to deal with the Cobbs and Darby creeks overflowing their banks, and with the Environmental Protection Agency, which is planning a cleanup of the Clearview Landfill, a Superfund site in the area. The Water Department conducted a study and found part of the flooding was due to creeks overflowing, and part was due to storm drains being overwhelmed and backing up.
An Army Corps of Engineers study will be complete by next fall, Dahme said, at which point potential remediations could be investigated.
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
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| This low-res corner of a picture from an unrelated dead-ass proposal is the only surviving picture of this one. |
"There is no question in my mind that over the next four to five years, this street will be a very, very exciting place to visit." -Mayor Wilson Goode in reference to Market East, September, 1989.
800 Market St. -- You know what? Fuck Market East! Especially between 7th and 11th Streets. This area seems to be some kind of development vacuum -- even when an experienced developer comes along to blast the hell out of it and bring it back to life, this cursed location finds some kind of way to bring them down. After spending over a century as one of the most premier shopping streets in America, Market East is now a big sopping pile of dogshit.
The worst part of Market East is what we now call the "Disney Hole," the 84,000-square-foot sea of asphalt at the southwest corner of 8th and Market. Ever since the old Gimbels Store was demolished in 1979, this corner has seen dead proposal after dead proposal after dead proposal come and go over the last 33 years. This is the story of just one of those many proposals: the Corestates Financial Center.
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Charlie Plaskon didn't start running until after he retired from his 32-year teaching career. But once he started, he never stopped. So when super-storm Sandy hit his home in Center Moriches, Long Island, he was in the Washington, D.C., area having just run the Marine Corps Marathon. In fact, he was stuck there for days: All flights were canceled. But Plaskon, 69, who is essentially blind and runs with Achilles International, was determined to get home in time to run the New York City Marathon.
But upon his return, he found "a pretty nasty, messy situation." His town had lost power for days, and seen its share of damage, though it wasn't as hard-hit as some areas of Long Island. And then came the news: The marathon was off. "There was a void," says Plaskon, who has also completed multiple Ironman triathlons.
Plaskon says his Achilles International coordinator predicted something positive would emerge from the disaster. Then Philly added 3,000 marathon spots for displaced New York Marathon runners. Plaskon was selected in a lottery.
Several members of his NYC support team will also be running in the race. "To have [this plan] disappear and to have somebody make a prediction that something will come out of this -- and then the city of brotherly love opens up its heart to the victims of this tragedy. Who could predict a hurricane could change a person's situation in this way?"
The marathon starts at 7 a.m. tomorrow, Nov. 18. If you haven't made a sign yet, here are a few ideas.
Some developers and civic groups breathed a sigh of relief when the city's new zoning code was approved complete with guidelines over what makes for a Registered Community Organization (RCO) qualified to give feedback on zoning exceptions within given neighborhoods of Philadelphia. And now that Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell is looking into changing up rules on community feedback -- not three months after the zoning code was put into place -- some of those citizen participants are pretty agitated.
This morning, a City Council rules committee hearing on the topic got heated, revealing tensions between Council, the administration's city planners who crafted the RCO plan with community and Council feedback, and neighborhood association members who felt they were facing potential disenfranchisement.
Some community members complained that the new regulations -- which require RCOs to have basic structures like regular meetings, a list of board members, bylaws, a mission statement and clear neighborhood boundaries -- had already engendered confusion and conflict. New groups seemed to have sprung up in the same neighborhoods as longstanding civic associations, while other organizations with perhaps less formal structures felt they had been cut out.
But not everyone was satisfied with Blackwell's proposal, which would among other things get district City Council members more involved in the conversation, subbing in to represent the community where there is no RCO and, in case of conflict, dictating which organization should be allowed to hold meetings for a given zoning variance.
New York, New Jersey and 12 other states have laws curbing health insurers' ability to raise their rates for those who happen to lack a Y chromosome. Pennsylvania does not. As a result, insurers charge women in Philadelphia more — way more — than they charge men.
The Maternity Care Coalition recently studied individual insurance rates and found out just how severe the problem is: "A 25-year-old non-smoking female is charged an average of 38.3 percent more in annual
premium costs than a 25-year-old non-smoking male," they found. "A 40-year-old non-smoking female is charged an average of 28.5 percent more in annual premium costs than a 40-year-old non-smoking male."
Letty Thall, public policy director at the Coalition, notes that the Affordable Care Act will, in 2014 stop that discrimination, which especially effects women in pink-collar positions who earn too much to be eligible for Medicaid.
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The Chicago Teachers Union's September strike focused unprecedented national attention on the fight over the future of public education, crystallizing for the first time widespread concerns of charters, privatization, high-stakes standardized tastes and the demonization of teachers and organized labor. After years of corporate-model school reformers dominating a conversation about "accountability," Chicago teachers put the emphasis on adequate funding, poverty, racial segregation and inequality.
Now, they're coming to Philly to share their experience. The event is Saturday, Nov. 17, at Science Leadership Academy, 22nd and Arch streets at 1 p.m.
Philadelphia, which has the largest portion of public school students enrolled in charters of any major city nationwide, has suffered severe cuts under Gov. Tom Corbett and been the site of a bitter confrontation over a radical restructuring and privatization plan advanced by the state-controlled School Reform Commission and backed by the powerful William Penn Foundation.
Chicago teachers were successful because militant grassroots leadership: The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), took over the union in 2010 and worked hard to educate and organize their members — and to build unprecedented community and parent support. On Sept. 22, hundreds gathered to found the Philadelphia Coalition for Advocating for Public Schools (PCAPS), a broad union-community coalition set to counter the Boston Consulting Group-drafted restructuring plan. The discussion that dominated the day was: How did Chicago do it?
The event is sponsored by the Labor Work Group (created during Occupy Philly) and the progressive Teacher Action Group (TAG).
It was a diminished crowd that attended the most recent meeting held by the city, Councilman Kenyatta Johnson and the Water Department to discuss the water main break that flooded houses around 21st and Bainbridge several months ago. But those who remained were no less agitated than back in August, when dozens of residents who had been flooded by the break worried they wouldn't be able to rebuild.
At last night's meeting, at least one resident said he's still without hot water since the main broke this summer; the Water Department's promise of a replacement heater had never materialized. Many others had their equipment replaced after the break, but those who paid for their own repairs still don't know whether or how much they'll be reimbursed.
That's because only 70 percent to 75 percent of the claims are in, according to city Risk Management director Barry Scott. "We are still tabulating," he told the residents. If total adjusted claims exceed a $500,000 cap set via a statewide tort limit, a court will decide who gets paid what. Scott said, "We are close to that cap value."
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It's now a family affair at The Inquirer and Daily News.
The daughter of famous/notorious South Jersey Democratic political boss and newly minted owner of both papers George Norcross is listed on the masthead as a "Director" of Interstate General Media LLC. Alessandra T. Norcross is, according to a September report, 25 years old.
Likewise with "Director" Drew A. Katz, Interstate General Media co-owner Lewis Katz's son. The junior Katz is also the CEO of the similarly named Interstate Outdoor Advertising. Katz's partner Nancy Phillips, formerly an Inquirer investigative reporter, is now reportedly a special assistant to the publisher. But she is nowhere to be found on the corporate masthead. City Paper has not, to be clear, received any complaints about the work ethic of any of the three. Newsroom ire has instead focused on what many journalists and the Newspaper Guild charge is an effort to push out older reporters.
IGM management has consistently declined to speak to City Paper about internal affairs.
Pew's Philadelphia Research Initiative crunched the numbers from the election and found Philly was, out of the 10 largest cities, the most consistently pro-Obama. Some 85.2 percent of Philly voters (or those counted so far anyway) cast ballots for the president, a greater share even than in Chicago.
Turnout in Philly was exactly average for the 10 urban areas reviewed, at 60.7 percent.
The results aren't too surprising, given reports that Gov. Mitt Romney, got absolutely no votes in 59 of the city's voting divisions.
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