City Council held a hearing this week to explore just how prepared Philadelphia is to stand up to Donald Trump 2.0, and the rhetoric — while not inaccurate — was pretty predictable. There was talk of using legal means and organizing to oppose attempts to roll back DEI, and to defy mass deportation efforts. “There’s no doubt in my mind that we can’t imagine all of the disastrous things that he’s going to try to do to us,” said Councilmember Rue Landau, who called the hearing.
Before we go any further: Relax, Comrade. This is no defense of Trump. In two short days, he’s obliterated the rule of law and begun running X’s and O’s straight from the autocrat’s playbook, in keeping with the model set by his hero, Hungary’s Viktor Orban. But the reaction this time around ought to be smarter than the knee-jerk defiance of 2017 — in part because Trump himself has gotten so much smarter about how to diabolically evade and erode guardrails to power. That’s why, despite criticism from the left, it’s smart that Mayor Parker and Governor Shapiro haven’t engaged in wars of words with the new administration. Strategy trumps rhetoric.
Instead of asking Are We Prepared for Trump?, lawmakers should be asking Are We Prepared to Save Ourselves?
Trump has explicitly threatened cities that defy his immigration orders with severe clawbacks of federal dollars. And the threat applies even beyond the issue of immigration: Education, DEI, minority set-asides, local taxes …There’s a very real chance that Trump — influenced by those advisors who were behind Project 2025 — is looking to divest major municipalities of federal investment as a matter of policy, while giving himself cover by championing the building of 10 new “Freedom Cities” on federal land. They’d be futuristic enclaves that allow him to be rhetorically pro-city as he shifts federal dollars away from existing (Black and Brown) cities. It’s smart politics: Who, me? Anti-city? I’m the guy building 10 new Jetsons-like cities!!!
In the face of all this, marching and name-calling before an emotionally depleted electorate only goes so far. Instead of asking Are We Prepared for Trump?, lawmakers should be asking Are We Prepared to Save Ourselves?
The answer to that would entail lessening the city’s dependence on federal largesse. It’s a tall order, because federal subsidy is so embedded in all facets of local governance. But there are ways to at least begin to grow yourself into independence. What can Philadelphia do along these lines? Here, some ideas:
Innovative tax reform
Let’s start with a topic that may make your eyes roll. Not only is it not sexy, but we’re now on our fourth tax reform commission in the last two decades. The previous ones have all made similar recommendations — reduce the wage tax; cut or get rid of the Business Income and Receipts Tax (BIRT); tax what can’t up and leave (i.e. buildings) — but the political class has long been loath to institute lasting, growth-oriented reform.
I hear that may be changing. This current commission, co-chaired by author, venture capitalist and former State Secretary of Banking and Securities Richard Vague and managing director of Public Financial Management Matt Stitt, is about to drop a plan next month that sounds like it’s equitably pro-growth. Vague was tight-lipped about its contents when I connected with him recently, but here’s what I’ve been able to gather: Part of the commissions’ charge by Mayor Parker and Council President Kenyatta Johnson was to think boldly — and both are likely supportive of this plan’s most innovative approach.
Again, the details here are sketchy, but in broad strokes, the idea is to cut BIRT, which taxes both net income and gross receipts, and divert a percentage of the reduction into a fund that would invest in some serious workforce development for low-income workers. We’ve written about the good work of the Skills Initiative — recently given $4 million by billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott; imagine something like that, but turbocharged in mass numbers citywide.
“We act like we’re poor. We’re not.” — Bruce Katz, director of Drexel’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab
Obviously, the devil is always in the details, but this is the first time I can recall that local tax reform will be recommending investing in workers. Perhaps not coincidentally, Vague recently featured an excerpt from 1990’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations by Michael E. Porter on his (quite good) delanceyplace.com, a repository of interesting book snippets:
More important, in many respects, for specialized factor creation is the existence of a well-developed apprenticeship system, similar to that in Germany. The apprenticeship system covers all young people who do not go on to university. It involves a combination of practical on-the-job training in a company and part-time classroom work at a local vocational school. Students are not only equipped to perform at high skill levels but to grow and develop throughout their careers. Swiss companies also devote significant resources to training. Employees in Swiss companies are thought of more as technicians than ‘blue collar’ workers.
Exactly, I thought. Maybe, rather than focusing on getting kids to college, perhaps the goal should be preparing them for living wage jobs. When I called Vague, he talked about the need for workforce development, but also cautioned me as to whom we should be developing.
“I’ve been fussing around in this space for 20 years,” he said, “and biotech and AI really are our golden ticket. Everybody always talks about the need at the elementary and high school levels, as they should. But I think the crying need is for folks that are already 20, 30 and 40 years old. Those are the folks that are unemployed and underemployed. And we’ve got to do the training because it’s not like we don’t have enough workers, while the town down the road has enough workers.
“Nobody has enough workers for the future. Not here, not in Dallas, not in Chicago, not in Miami, not in New York. Everybody’s going to have to start training their own. And a lot of the folks they need to train are folks that are already 30 or 40 years old and currently underemployed and under-skilled.”
What does all this have to do with combatting Trumpism? A populace without economic complaint is less susceptible to a con man’s playing on its grievances. Imagine a city, Vague posits, that takes a cashier — whose minimum wage job is already threatened by AI —and trains her to be a lab technician at Penn. Writ large, that’s transformative. And, listen up Democrats: It says to working class folks, We’ve finally looked up from our avocado toast and we hear you and see you.
Leverage what we have.
You want to threaten our bottom line, Mr. President? Fine. We’ll grow it on our own. How? By leveraging assets we own but don’t fully monetize, enabling us to invest in ourselves.
That’s what Mayor Michael Nutter tried to do in 2015, with a $1.8 billion sale of PGW that was shamefully and pettily stymied by then-Council President Darrell Clarke. We remain one of the few cities still in the gas, water, and airport businesses. Let’s take the latter: A 2021 study by the Reason Foundation — Should Governments Lease Their Airports — found that Philadelphia would see a $3.8 billion windfall from such a divestment. (That’s the actual amount of then-Mayor Nutter’s entire last operating budget.) Keep in mind, we’re talking about our airport here, which J.D. Power ranked dead last in customer satisfaction among the nation’s largest last year.
Fact is, even if we wanted to cash in our chips, we don’t even know what we own. You try finding a list somewhere of all the City assets. It’s not just us; as a matter of course, American cities leave money on the table. In Northern Europe, on the other hand, local governments provide a road map for how to leverage city assets into much-needed public investments, as laid out in The Public Wealth of Cities: How To Unlock Hidden Assets to Boost Growth and Prosperity, by Dag Detter and Stefan Fölster.
“In Copenhagen and Hamburg, they have public asset corporations, public- or privately- owned and publicly-managed institutions that are able to take all the land owned by the government — city, county, state, port authority, airport authority, stadium authority, redevelopment authority — and put it into one corporate vehicle and get the revenue from the disposition of that publicly-owned land to invest in infrastructure, innovation, and inclusion,” Bruce Katz, Citizen contributor and director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University, once explained to me. “We act like we’re poor. We’re not.”
Which gets us to:
Treat housing like the crisis that it is.
The aforementioned Katz, along with our How to Really Run a City partner Accelerator for America, is out with From Crisis to Transformation: A Federal Housing Policy Agenda, as part of their National Housing Crisis Task Force.
It’s a best practices guide book for how to tackle what really is now a national crisis. Parker has talked boldly, committing to building 30,000 affordable housing units in her first term, but exactly how we get there is still a bit murky. (And, once elected, she seemed to back off that goal by including construction and repairs under the rubric of new housing.) That said, hers is one of 17 cities taking part in Accelerator for America’s inaugural “Data for Housing Solutions” cohort, funded by the Clinton Global Initiative.
If you’re going to take on Trump by growing the city, you’ve got to make economic development a vocal priority.
Thanks to the tech company Tolemi, participating cities gain access to a proprietary tool that aggregates municipal data so government can “map the portfolios of publicly-owned property across agencies and departments, identify site assembly opportunities, and understand where underutilized public property overlaps with redevelopment incentives and areas in need of affordable housing.” In other words: Figuring out what you own, and where you can build — for cheap.
In a city like Philadelphia, where nearly half of all renters spend 30 percent or more on rent, there is great opportunity in tackling housing while at the same time growing jobs, and, thus, income levels.
We’re stronger as a region.
If Trump is really coming after Philly, isn’t there strength in numbers? Wouldn’t it be harder to mess with Philly if Delco, Montco, Chester and even Bucks had its back?
We’ve long been challenged when it comes to working as a region. (Remember the Amazon sweepstakes, when Philly and Bucks submitted competing bids? Seriously?) I’ve written before about how Pew Charitable Trusts and the Brookings Institute have worked with stakeholders on a comprehensive regional plan for growth, and we even featured a great discussion on the topic at our Ideas We Should Steal Festival last November.
Instead of competing against one another for jobs, talent, capital, taxpayers, and federal and state handouts, Philly, Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks and Chester counties together could become an economic behemoth, with a nearly $500 billion Gross Metropolitan Product. But that would mean a level of cooperation we haven’t consistently seen, and it’s the type of thing that only happens with a metropolitan mayor leading the charge — as in Chicago in the 90s, when Richard Daley pulled together 70 municipalities in common cause. Do that here? Now, if Trump comes calling, we just might have a fair fight.
Speaking of that mayoral voice …
The arena (RIP) saga showed that, to her credit, Parker will spend significant political capital in pursuit of economic growth, but now we’re left wondering just what her vision is for growing the city.
A couple of months ago, Commerce Director Alba Martinez met with a roomful of civic and business leaders at the Cira Center, and I received a couple of phone calls right afterward. She’s a terrific leader, but most of the message was small ball, I was told: departmental reforms instead of big swings at changing the city. Oh, don’t get me wrong: Parker has done some stuff. There’s Grow Philly, for example, with its expansion of an online permit navigation tool, but the folks I’ve spoken to are wondering where the big idea is, where’s the policy embodiment of Parker’s swagger?
Where, for example, is the aggressive tenant retention plan, one that identifies businesses with leases set to expire in the next couple of years, tailoring incentives to keep them here? Where’s the explicit alignment with Gov. Shapiro’s $400 million state PA SITES program to attract businesses and grow jobs? Where’s the laser-like focus on making life easier for the small business person — like a much talked-about, but never fully realized, one-stop-shop for all bureaucratic needs?
If you’re going to take on Trump by growing the city, you’ve got to make economic development a vocal priority. Last year, in partnership with Committee of 70, we published a graphic breakdown of Parker’s first budget, and economic development takes up a mere 1.2 percent of the overall budget, down nearly 7 percent from Kenney’s last year in office. This isn’t a call to just invest in more bureaucracy. But it is a red flag when, asked about economic development, Parker heralds her City College for Municipal Employment (CCME), a training ground for hiring city workers.
That’s a fine program, but a vision for city growth it is not. When government is one of a city’s top employers, you’re not only failing to build a dynamic local economy. You’re also getting bloated government. (Why do we need roughly the same number of city workers as when JFK was president and the city population was nearly double what it is now?)
This is no time for half-measures. I spoke to one city leader this week who painted a bleak picture of this moment. “All those criminals Trump just pardoned?” he said. “They’ll be Trump’s foot soldiers. When the raids start, they’ll be heading this way. And it will be local cops and citizens with them or against them in our streets.”
Now, I’m not signing up just yet for such a doomsday scenario. But it sure was stark, hearing it. And let’s just assume there’s something to it. A new type of civil war. Well, of this I’m quite sure: Citizens with good jobs, full bellies and enough disposable income to afford a night out or (better yet) an Iggles game? They’re not the revolutionaries given to storming City Hall and raiding churches in search of fellow human beings to deport.
MORE LARRY PLATT ON GROWTH POLICIES FOR PHILLY