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Archive: February, 2013
Step aside, Paws and Gentry. There's a new PSA campaign in town. It's a snarky attempt to get Philadelphians to stop, well, acting like idiots.
"It's road safety. Not rocket science," is the tagline of the "Ride Right Walk Right Drive Right" campaign just rolled out by Philly's Mayor's Office of Transportation and Utilities (which has in the past tried to meld humor with road safety by painting a distracted walking lane on the sidewalk near City Hall for April Fool's Day). Messages include things like "Thank you for not running pedestrians over" and "Objects in mirror appear only when looked at." The campaign cost $125,000, and is running on buses and bus stops. It will last for 10 weeks or longer. The funding came from a state grant.
Andrew Stober, chief of staff at MOTU, says PSAs are an accepted part of traffic safety practices: "We talk about the three 'E's of traffic safety: engineering, enforcement and education." At $125,000, education is clearly the most affordable to address, given tight budgets for police and transportation infrastructure. Stober says a pedestrian is hit by a car on average once every four hours in Philly. "All of these ads are targeted at the hghest-risk behaviors."
"Hopefully a little bit of snarkiness will engage people and get them to take that extra moment to think abou it," he says. "We just want people to get home safe at the end of the day and hopefully have a little smile on their face."
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The 2010 video went viral on Youtube quickly: Philadelphia Police Officer Jimmy Leocal beating Askia Sabur repeatedly on West Philadelphia's Lansdowne Avenue. In the video, Leocal then pulls his gun on the alarmed crowd.
The beating sparked an uproar, local and national media coverage, and was discussed during City Council hearings on police brutality. But busy reporters moved on, and Sabur spent the last two years in jail awaiting trial for the charge of assaulting Leocal's partner, Officer Donyul Williams.
Today, a jury found Sabur not guilty of aggravated assault, disarming a law enforcement officer, simple assault, recklessly endangering another person and resisting arrest.
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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| From the Hutchinson Street side. |
139 N. 10th St. & 100 Block of North Hutchinson Street -- Here's another Chinatown lot that doesn't make any goddamn sense. Though it's actually three lots combined, the center property on this location has been a surface parking lot for more than 70 years. Though mostly hidden by buildings, any empty space in Chinatown becomes extremely conspicuous, due to the rest of the neighborhood's crowded nature.
The earliest known development on this site was from 1809. The First Dutch Reformed Church was one of several churches that had purchased land on Franklin Square from William Penn's greedy descendants for use as a burial ground. In 1795, the city finally put its foot down and took back the public squares from private ownership. The churches that were holding bodies there were all given new plots on city-owned land and the corpses were moved. A plot in the middle of the block bounded by Cherry, 10th, Race and Elwyn (now North Hutchinson) streets was given over to the First Dutch Reformed Church. It took until 1809 to get all the bodies moved. Almost immediately, the church hated the new burial plot. The land was wet and full of clay. Only family members of the bodies that were moved there contributed new corpses to the graveyard. In all, 614 people were interred there between 1809 and 1857.
As debate over raising the federal mininum wage begins in Washington, a bill, applying the city's "21st Century Minimum Wage and Benefits Standard" to airport workers and others employed by companies that have concessions or leases from the city, passed out of City Council committee this morning. The living wage standard is $10.88 per hour; many airport workers make the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour or less.
The Mayor's office is supporting the bill, and no one from the airport showed up to speak against it or suggest that it would lead to a loss of jobs, a common argument against minimum-wage hikes. Supporting the bill were airport workers rounded up by Fight for Philly to put a face on what they're calling "poverty wages."
"I work fulltime, but I'm hungry," Tara Russell told the committee. Russell has been working as a wheelchair attendant at the airport for four years and still makes $6 per hour. Theoretically, she also works for tips, but "the last two weeks, I got nothing. ... So how do I survive? I don't. I borrow $20 here and $20 there. I get $300 in food stamps but I'm broke." She told Council: Please make sure that no one at the airport goes hungry working fulltime."
Philly City Council members — and residents at large — are only beginning to absorb what the full impact of new property tax assessment figures released by the city on Friday will mean in Philadelphia's neighborhoods. But Councilman Jim Kenney is upset enough by the numbers that he's promising to take on the administration to ensure residents don't get driven out of their homes, which he now sees as very real possibility. "We're looking at everything from legislation to suing. I'm not just going to turn my back on these people after all these years. ... We're exploring every possibility and it will be a militant effort."
Kenney and Councilman Mark Squilla are planning to educate and organize residents about the new assessments, which were generated as part of the Actual Value Initiative (AVI).He says that will probably include "busing in whole entire streets at the same time" to submit appeals. Kenney says he's also heard that Councilman Kenyatta Johnson, Councilman Bobby Henon, Councilwoman Cindy Bass and Council President Darrell Clarke share some concerns about the assessments' impacts on poor and working-class neighborhoods from Port Richmond to Whitman. Squilla told the Daily News the assessments were unfair, and he'll be challenging their accuracy. How he'll be able to do that through legislation is unclear.
Kenney also wasn't sure yet about the legal grounds for suing the city over the assessments. (Individual homeowners do have a couple ways to appeal their assessments.) But he said Council is not out of options: Possiblities include looking to roll back the "temporary" tax increases that Council made permanent last year, or forcing the administration's hand by refusing to match its revenue goals. "If I can't get any cooperative relief, I'm not voting for anything over 1.0-percent millage rate," he said.
Most people who dislike bandit signs — those ugly and illegal posters urging passersby by to sell their house, hire a roofer, or enjoy cheap diabetes meds based on ads stuck to utility poles and fences around Philly — simply tear them down. Huggie has a different idea: he coopts the messages for his own twisted, artistic purposes. The latest — a take on the ubiquitous "I will buy your house in 10 seconds. Those other guys won't" signs — is an homage to Philly's Actual Value Initiative. (OK, so it's been several years in the making, not 10 seconds, but we'll let it slide this time, Huggie.)
More such hijinks are at GorillaUpskirts.com, where "ads" for other offerings do include fliers for "gorilla upskirts."
If you own a home in Philadelphia, you've probably already looked up your property tax assessment (and maybe those of your neighbors) on the city's new tax-assessment look-up service and AVI calculator, released on Friday. But what does the landscape look like for the city as a whole? Where are the winners and losers under the Actual Value Initiative? AxisPhilly's mapping gurus have released a map that shows just where the changes will have the most impact. Seeing the massive numbers of homes in, for example, poor neighborhoods of North Philly that are facing 400-percent-plus tax increases is one way to understand what's at stake here.
Fair warning: Don't click through unless you have time to get sucked in by the strangeness that is Philly property values.
Follow on twitter @rw_briggs
A pornstar named "Xotic Esmeralda" tweeted to a horny follower named "Avi" using "#avi," unintentionally bombarding a twitter discussion of the Actual Value Initiative with giant boobs and bringing much needed levity to the subject. This image has been made safe for work with the help of Mayor Nutter and Finance Director Rob Dubow.
Apologies to City Paper alum Holly Otterbein for being the last person we follow to bring insight to the AVI process before it became hilarious in a high school kind of way.
Adults are urging people who are still interested in tax policy and not just furiously masturbating because they saw a breast on the internet to use #phlavi from now on.
View galleryFollow on twitter @rw_briggs
John McDaniel, the former city employee/political operative/fraudster, plead guilty yesterday for stealing $103,000 from a PAC he controlled, and then fudging disclosure forms to cover his tracks. Speculation is rampant that the former campaign manager for City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown will cooperate with federal authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence, as part of a larger FBI probe into the wheeling and dealing of Congressman Chaka Fattah's son, Chip Fattah. What incriminating information McDaniel has remains a mystery for now.
But the greater mystery is McDaniel himself. The man who held cushy patronage jobs under mayors Nutter and Street has proven an elusive figure. Throughout a political scandal centered around his actions, his personality and the reasons for his extraordinarily favorable treatment by city politicians remaining unclear. Aside from apparently cozy relationships with politicians like Nutter and Brown, both of whom reside in the same Overbrook/Wynnfield area as McDaniel, the self-described political consultant's only other major tie to local power structures has been to a local chapter of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA).
A minimum wage of $7.25 an hour in Philadelphia is just not enough to live on, workers told acting Secretary of Labor Seth Harris at Philly AFL-CIO offices today. Organized with help from the Philly Unemployment Project, a group of women — and 60 percent of minimum-wage earners are women, Harris noted — described choicing between various utility payments, food and shelter, bunking with family members and going winters without heat.
Harris was in town to gather support for President Obama's push to increase the minimum wage to $9 per hour and to index it to the cost of living, an initiative the president announced in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. "That would be a 24-percent pay increase for some of the hardest-working and lowest-paid people in American society," Harris said.
Cheryl Henderson, a baggage handler at the airport who has been making $7.25 for three years, said she and her son could get a place of their own, instead of crashing with family, if she could take home anextra $1.75 per hour. Tracy Mulvehill called her old minimum-wage job at Parx Racetrack "degrading." And Jessica Nuñez said her life as a minimum-wage worker with two jobs is filled with constant choices: "Do I want to feed my kid? Do i want my kid to have school supplies? … Do I want him to have a roof over his head?"
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