Imagine for a minute that you want to put an addition on your house, but it would be a couple feet over the legal limit. The City of Philadelphia refuses your application, but you decide to appeal. The City directs you to present your plans at a neighborhood meeting to try to win over the attendees.
Depending on what neighborhood you live in, what happens next could play out very differently. You might encounter a fairly professionally run meeting where you get a fair shake. Or you might find yourself in more hostile terrain with a group explicitly opposed from the get-go. The City requires these meetings, but does not really monitor what goes on there.
The organization that hosts each of these meetings is your neighborhood’s Registered Community Organization (RCO), an advisory group that is a formal part of the City approvals process for housing, businesses, street changes, and so on. The good news is there are a lot of civic-minded people who participate in this layer of municipal politics who earnestly want to be helpful. The bad news is some of these RCOs are mini-fiefdoms of (mostly) naysayers who do not necessarily represent the neighborhood.
That’s what former City Council candidate Jaron Alexander says is the case in his Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, where a proposed 57-home affordable housing project was denied because the Strawberry Mansion Community Concern (SMCC), designated by Councilmember Jeffrey Young as the “coordinating RCO” for the project, refused to hold any meetings about it. As Alexander wrote in The Inquirer:
“So, what’s stopping the kind of development we need to bring our neighborhood back to life?
One factor is what I call the “Army of One” RCOs, or registered community organizations, that seem to reflexively oppose development projects. They block proposed development because of their own self-interest, which can be something as simple as preserving the number of existing parking spaces.
Strawberry Mansion Community Concern (SMCC) is the RCO that, under city guidelines, developers must engage in our neighborhood whenever they seek to build on city-owned land. I’m not aware of any meetings this RCO might have held, nor does it have a website or a publicly available list of existing members. It also routinely opposes an overwhelming majority of development projects or commercial enterprises in Strawberry Mansion.
Bonita Cummings, who worked for Councilmember Young until last December, runs the SMCC. The broader-reaching local RCO is Strawberry Mansion CDC — but Young selected SMCC instead to host the required meeting, which they allegedly refused to do, dragging things out. (Cummings did not respond to a request for comment.)
In American politics, the usual way we resolve power struggles between multiple constituencies in a given area is to hold elections. The City’s RCO policy gestures at this, requiring RCOs to be minimally joinable and submit their bylaws to the Planning Commission. But the standards for what counts as an election vary widely. Some Center City RCOs require residents to be dues-paying members in order to vote in their elections, which The Inquirer Editorial Board recently compared to a poll tax. Some other groups only pretend to have elections but still get re-approved by the Planning Commission anyway, which seems to do nothing to actually check up on any of this.
Even when RCOs do hold something approximating real elections with decently low barriers to entry, neighbor participation is still drastically lower than in even our most low turnout of low turnout municipal elections — basically they are insular club elections more than open public elections even in the best-case scenarios.
That’s why I think we would be better off putting RCO board positions on the actual municipal election ballot like they do in Washington, D.C.
Official RCOs are still a recent concept
The concept of the Registered Community Organization is only about 13 years old in Philadelphia, although neighborhood civic associations have existed for decades all over the city, whether as official 501c3 non-profits or more informal groups of residents.
In 2012, the City created a system for officially registering such groups to formalize their advisory role. Some of these groups are professionalized to the point of employing staff, while others are more loosely-organized and poorly-funded, but they exist in some form in almost every neighborhood in the city.
Prior to 2012, there was an unwritten norm that developers seeking zoning variances — exceptions to the zoning rules — for some housing project or business would first seek a letter of support from the neighborhood civic association to present at their hearing before the City’s Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA). This wasn’t consistent, and the City couldn’t enforce it, but developers would often still do it because nobody wants to have neighbors protesting them at the ZBA, and getting their written support is even better.
If we’re keeping the RCO system for the long-haul, we should at least try to improve it by passing more standardized rules that apply to everyone, and bringing it out in the open by including many more voters in the process.
When City Council passed the Zoning Code Commission’s package of reforms in 2012, a common view at the time was that formalizing the process of community input would be a step toward professionalizing and regularizing the process.
It wasn’t fair that wealthier or more organized neighborhoods enjoyed a strong presumption of being able to meet with a developer in such cases, but less organized neighborhoods couldn’t always count on any consultation. There was also a sense at the time that this patchwork of informal civic infrastructure was a bit of a Wild West situation for developers, and that requiring them to meet with the local RCO within 30 (and now, 45) days of their appeal could make things less chaotic.
Today it’s clear there are some serious problems with this system that City Council has been squeamish about resolving, including what to do with duplicative organizations, democratic representation, the rules of engagement, and the broader tensions with placing unelected groups into a quasi-governmental role.
These groups are essentially performing a government function by hosting a meeting that’s required by the City as a precondition for getting a hearing on your project. Establishing some basic quality control requires some amount of city interference and regulation of their affairs.
Instead, City Council has approached this question by doing what they do best: letting the District Councilmember decide which group gets to host the meeting. And so we have what happened in Strawberry Mansion.
Democracy requires real elections
Many cities have some form of neighborhood-level intermediary organizations like this, and most suffer from a lack of basic democratic accountability because of how they’re devised.
Washington, D.C. may have the best version of this, with its 44 Advisory Neighborhood Commissions (ANC). In D.C., the political units are perfectly nested within the eight Council districts, called Wards. Each Ward has a few ANCs, and the number of Commissioner positions is determined by population, with each one representing around 2,000 people.
Like Philly’s RCOs, ANC members weigh in on a range of topics including zoning, street improvements, liquor licenses, economic development, policing, sanitation, and the District’s annual budget. But unlike our RCOs, the Commissioners are elected on the normal election ballot in midterm election years, in recognition of the political nature of these organizations’ roles in civic life.
In Philly, these RCO board positions are already substantially political, even though City officials say they didn’t set out to create units of power with this system. Any time you draw a shape on a map and tell people they can run to represent that area, this becomes a platform for political organizing. Sticking our heads in the sand about this reality, and failing to create reasonable institutional guardrails to promote representativeness, has been a massive disservice to the city.
Making RCOs elected bodies is a controversial idea in the urbanist circles I run in, because they are often seen as part of the NIMBY power structure that enables people to block housing, neighborhood businesses, and street safety improvements. Some of the hesitancy from my cohort about putting these elections on the ballot stems from not wanting to legitimize these institutions even more, in hopes that the city will one day scrap the whole enterprise.
Today it’s clear there are some serious problems with this system that City Council has been squeamish about resolving, including what to do with duplicative organizations, democratic representation, the rules of engagement, and the broader tensions with placing unelected groups into a quasi-governmental role.
The urbanist view tends to be that the mayor, who gets the most votes out of anybody, has the most democratic legitimacy to set policy, and the excessive influence of District City Council members and neighborhood organizations over various City processes is overall negative, if you care about outcomes like abundant housing, walkable neighborhoods, and more and better transportation choices. It’s a view that city government should have more scope to just do things, and that we should rely a lot less on neighborhood meetings as a way of measuring public opinion. But those consultation meetings are the bread and butter of what the current RCO system is all about.
I think the fantasy of closing down the RCO system is extremely unlikely to happen, and meanwhile the halfway official, halfway unofficial version of RCOs strikes me as the worst of both worlds: legitimacy without accountability.
Even when RCOs do hold something approximating real elections with decently low barriers to entry for residents, neighbor participation is still drastically lower than in even our most low turnout of low turnout municipal elections. And the elections still resemble insular club elections more than open public elections even in the best-case scenarios.
Making these real elections would solve a few other problems that Council has grappled with. Eighth District Councilmember Cindy Bass recently proposed a bill that would require RCO leaders to be residents of the neighborhoods they claim to represent, which seems like it would be an uncontroversial idea, but she ended up passing this for the 8th District only. Why did none of her colleagues join her in this effort? Anecdotally, I know of several examples of people who have moved away but are still serving on RCO boards or committees in their old neighborhoods. Having normal elections for RCO positions would fix this residency problem citywide.
It would also fix the “army of one” RCO problem that Alexander mentions in Strawberry Mansion. A regular election would have a set number of board seats available that people could run for, ensuring that voters are electing an actual board, and not just one person with an axe to grind. By the same token, it would make it harder for people to form splinter RCOs — which happens a lot today with the City’s blessing — just because they don’t see eye-to-eye with the established RCO in the area.
Instead, we could sort out these power struggles the same way we do for every other public office: Hold an election. Candidates compete to persuade voters why their vision is the better one, the voters choose who they want, and then the elected members have to try to work together over their term until the next election.
Normal elections would also address the issue of politicians not wanting to butt into the affairs of private organizations. By clarifying that these are in fact city elected offices, not the offices of a private organization, that issue goes away.
One thing we might see if this happens is neighborhood civic association nonprofits reverting more toward their community building activities, while the RCO — now a separate city entity — becomes the focal point for zoning politics and the like. As with the party ward organizations, we would still likely see a lot of personnel overlap between the various neighborhood level organizations, but it would be civically healthier if neighborhood associations could divest from the toxic politics of zoning and focus entirely on pro-social neighborhood activities while a more regulated city-sponsored elected board picks up the quasi-governmental functions.
City political dynamics being what they are, there’s always going to be a market for Not in My Back Yard-style politics, especially at the neighborhood level, and I’m not naive enough to claim that broadening participation would drastically improve those dynamics. But the current version of the RCO system encourages this brand of politics in its most unaccountable form. If we’re keeping the RCO system for the long haul, we should at least try to improve it by passing more standardized rules that apply to everyone, and bringing it out in the open by including many more voters in the process.
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