If you ask Philadelphia City Council At-Large candidate Job Itzkowitz what he’s been working on for the past decade or so, he’ll tell you he’s been, literally, picking up trash.
As executive director of Old City District, he helped run a broom-and-pan street sweeping program that brought workers out to clean the streets of the historic neighborhood three times a day for the past eight years. Sometimes the workers would sweep up trash. Other times, they’d power wash sidewalks and do other tasks to help keep the neighborhood clean.
Last year, the cleaning crew swept up 17,000 pounds of litter. But when Itzkowitz returned home to Point Breeze, his block would be covered in the stuff. He was frustrated. “There’s no reason why certain neighborhoods with means should be [the only ones] able to get basic city services,” he says.
Clean streets, safe streets
To Itzkowitz, it’s not just about keeping the city’s neighborhoods looking spiffy. Reducing trash and improving green spaces has been linked to reducing incidents of gun violence. When researchers from University of Pennsylvania’s Urban Health Lab randomly selected vacant lots to receive trash removal, tree planting and other hygiene services, they saw a drop in crime in those areas. In one neighborhood, crime decreased 29 percent.
“When you start sweeping streets and start taking care of places, all the researchers have found a very heavy correlation with crime reduction,” Itzkowitz says. “I’m not suggesting it’s a panacea — that you start sweeping up the street and guns go away — but what I’m suggesting is that we should be working to create an environment where the temperatures literally lower and there’s less likelihood of crime being committed.”
Itzkowitz decided to run for one of Philadelphia City Council’s seven At-Large seats, in part, so that neighborhoods all across the city can access the same types of services, including a street cleaning plan like neighborhoods wealthy enough to support Business Improvement Districts (BID) have enjoyed for years. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Itzkowitz is turning to other cities — even already existing programs within Philly — to find proven solutions that could help with some of our biggest problems.
About Job Itzkowitz
A born-and-raised Philadelphian, Itzkowitz grew up in Mt. Airy, where his mom worked as a psychologist. He recalls admiring how she used her work to help “one or two people at a time” and knew that he wanted a career where he could help people too.
He studied at Penn Law, dreaming that he could one day work on a once-in-a-century civil rights case, with ripple effects for millions of people, before realizing that he could make a greater impact on folks’ everyday lives by working in public policy and legislation.
While studying and working as a lawyer, he launched Friends of LOVE Park to advocate for skateboarding in the city, and served on the Board of Philly Fellows, which helped fight brain drain in the city by training students for nonprofit jobs. In 2012, he left the law firm he was working at for a position in Councilmember Cindy Bass’s office, before moving to his current position at Old City District in 2014.
“There’s no reason why certain neighborhoods with means should be [the only ones] able to get basic city services,” he says.
The idea for BIDs, like Old City District, emerged in the 1970s. Residents were leaving cities for the suburbs and taking with them crucial tax dollars that supported a plethora of city services. When services like street cleaning were no longer managed by local governments, corporations stepped in and created BIDs to keep the neighborhoods surrounding their businesses clean and appealing to consumers.
Old City District launched in 1998. Itzkowitz says running the organization has, in some ways, been like operating a smaller version of Philadelphia, allowing him to see how some of their programs could be scalable to serve the entire city.
His plan for Philadelphia
“I’ve spent the last eight years working to improve one neighborhood and I think what I’ve learned from that time can apply citywide,” Itzkowitiz says.
Take his proposed broom-and-pan street sweeping program, for instance. Itzkowitz estimates that it would cost the city $17 million per year to hire street sweepers to clean every neighborhood once per day, creating between 400 and 600 union jobs with benefits. That’s only slightly more per year than Kenney’s $62 million cleaning plan, which aimed to bring mechanical street cleaning to some city neighborhoods over five years.
In addition to looking to BIDs in the city for some of his plans, Itzkowitiz is turning to other places to see what solutions have worked for them. He points to the Portuguese model — decriminalizing drugs, opening safe injection sites and offering addiction wraparound services like counseling and housing support. He believes a program like this one could help with the opioid-fueled problems in Kensington and elsewhere.
“If we’re going to treat addiction of this nature as a public health disease, it has to address both those who are afflicted with addiction and those who are impacted by the externalities of that addiction — whether that means open-air drug markets or stepping over needles or not feeling safe on the subway,” Itzkowitz says.
“I’ve spent the last eight years working to improve one neighborhood and I think what I’ve learned from that time can apply citywide,” Itzkowitiz says.
Like with his street cleaning plan, Itzkowitz realizes that adopting the Portuguese model of treating addiction isn’t a panacea for all the city’s problems. He knows city, state and federal support are essential to implementing such a plan in the first place. But he thinks that tackling quality-of-life issues by learning from other cities can have ripple effects for the city that lead to a cleaner, safer Philadelphia.
“The way I think about the issues facing the city, globally, are what are best practices that have been adopted elsewhere that we can implement here?” Itzkowitz says. “There’s an opportunity here for me to make a difference — and that’s what I’m trying to do.”
The Citizen is writing about Philadelphia City Council candidates who are doing what for a long time was the unthinkable: Bucking the system by running for office with ideas and experience — not just by dint of being the usual suspects. Because if there’s one thing we need more of, it’s this: More people paying more attention to our local politics, running for office, offering solutions and prepping to bring about much-needed change.
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