In 2017, my two best friends moved to Phoenix. We had all moved to Philadelphia about the same time, four years earlier. We struck up close friendships, explored the city together, and came to love the word jawn. I doubt I’d call this jawn home today if I’d never met them.

Oddly enough, 2017 was also the same year that Phoenix leapfrogged Philly in population. (Do I blame my friends? Absolutely.) It turns out they were a harbinger for migration patterns that have emerged since then. After gaining population in the early part of this century, reversing decades of steady decline, Philly has been shrinking of late — declining by about 50,000 people since the pandemic began. Now, it seems likely that we will slide behind San Antonio in the ranks of most populous metropolises over the next five years.

While that’s troubling, Philly has a particular problem when it comes to attracting and retaining middle-income-earning adults, a cohort my friends belonged to. The share of Philadelphians in the middle class has fallen precipitously since 1970, and today hovers around 40 percent of the city’s population. That demographic is also overwhelmingly White. Despite efforts to grow and diversify the middle class through economic development and upskilling initiatives, our numbers remain bleak in comparison to peer cities.

But what if the city could find residents who fit that demographic and convince them to move here?

That’s the focus of a new resident-attraction program, Live Work Philadelphia, which is targeting middle-income earners who live elsewhere as a means of fostering inclusive prosperity for the city as a whole. “Our mission is to address Philly’s underlying problem, which is our demographic imbalance,” says Javier Suarez, executive director of Live Work Philadelphia, “because if our middle-income population is small, it makes everything harder.”

Suarez, who previously worked at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and remains a consultant for them, says that population growth is not the end goal of Live Work Philadelphia. Rather, it’s to push a more thoughtful strategy around how we’re growing. Creating a more diverse middle-income population, he says, is the best chance the city has to solve our most intractable issues, like crime, poverty, and low levels of educational attainment.

Underpinning this approach is a belief that points back to my friends who now live in Phoenix: Personal connections are the key to accomplishing that goal.

“What currently is happening in many cities with these resident attraction programs is that they basically say, ‘We really want you to know how awesome our place is,’ and I’m basically saying ‘nobody cares,’” says Suarez. “At the end of the day, it’s not about the city. It’s about the personal.”

I connected with Suarez to learn more about his plans. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did Live Work Philadelphia come about?

I kept hearing, year after year, from elected officials and different stakeholders that Philadelphia is this really diverse space. Philadelphia has diverse people, but it’s not a very diverse population [within racial groups].

The Asian community here is dominated by the Chinese population. We don’t have a true reflection of the Asian diaspora. We don’t have it in the Latino space. We have traditionally been a Puerto Rican market. We are a city that has been traditionally labeled as a low immigration city and that has its consequences.

And on top of that, the minorities that are here in Philadelphia have tiny middle-income populations. When you peel back the onion, you begin to reveal one of the true issues that we need to address, and one that I think is Philadelphia’s biggest problem: our demographic imbalance.

Elaborate on why you’re focused on growing the middle-income population in particular.

Our goals are basically guided by the principles of [Drexel’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab Director] Bruce Katz, who often contributes to The Philadelphia Citizen. He said this almost 20 years ago, and it’s still true for Philadelphia: He said that you’re going to need a broad mix of incomes throughout communities. You can no longer be dependent upon these pockets like Rittenhouse Square and Fairmount and East Passyunk. Our belief is that a larger middle-income population contributes to the restoration of crucial rungs on the social and economic ladders that have eroded over time in Philadelphia, preventing many low-income communities from accessing greater social and economic mobility.

We’re trying to capture the attention of people who may already be considering leaving high-cost cities, not because they want to, but because it no longer makes financial sense for them, despite having a middle income.

Within minority communities, there is no middle-income population. When you want to find employment in your own neighborhood, you can’t. When you want to find stability in your own neighborhood, you can’t. This is why people leave North Philadelphia and go to the Northeast. They’re not just looking for more space. They’re looking for stability.

Philadelphia is becoming less and less a competitive city when it comes to business startups, talent for employers and many other aspects of the economy. We’re not going to get out of this problem by simply upskilling people into professions. Those are very worthy initiatives, and they should be supported, but they are mid- to long-term ideas.

So if Philadelphia wants to be a competitive city, as a big city, it’s going to have to be more diverse. And it simply is not from an ethnic standpoint. And it is not diverse from a socio-economic standpoint.

Let’s take a step back. You grew up in Philly. What do you think makes Philly special enough to move here?

You know, the first 10 years of my professional career was in the radio business, not on the air, but on the business side of things. And at the end of the day, in order to figure out what was good for this market, you had to really understand what was good about other markets.

On the East Coast, a person trying to do something in Boston, D.C., or New York is not easy. You kind of have to be “in the know.” What I found special about Philly was that you could be anyone with a good idea and build community around it. And you could push your ideas forward. You could literally contact your City Councilperson or elected officials, and then really take your idea to market. That was really cool. I could not find that elsewhere.

What’s your strategy for attracting your target audience? Billboards? Ad campaigns? Policy? All of the above?

What we’re trying to do is similar to what Visit Philadelphia does, and has been very successful at doing. They develop campaigns — like, “Get your history straight and your nightlife gay” — targeting specific audiences. Of course, everything they do is about getting people to come here for a temporary amount of time. Our focus will be about getting people to relocate somewhere new. We’re trying to capture the attention of people who may already be considering leaving high-cost cities, not because they want to, but because it no longer makes financial sense for them, despite having a middle income.

What we’re looking to do is strategically inject Philadelphia into those conversations. Right now, there isn’t much information online where they can begin their search. Depending on your racial, ethnic, and cultural identity, the approach can shift. What we’re doing is understanding who our targets are, and promoting the idea that Philadelphia can fulfill their financial aspirations and that they can be a part of those individual communities.

Eventually, through our website, there will be other organizations — I don’t want to name them now, because it’s premature — that will engage people once they are here. On our website, there will be ways in which people can opt-in, saying they want to visit and then connecting with people on the ground to tell them what it’s like. For example, it could be a real estate broker who could take you around the city.

What’s an example of a resident attraction program from elsewhere that you’ve taken inspiration from?

There’s a program called Tulsa Tomorrow. All they do is attract Jewish people to Tulsa, Oklahoma. And the way they do it is through relationships with organizations in big cities where there are large Jewish populations.

If they can attract the one person, that one person can be an anchor, and then family and friends can follow, which is how things have happened since the beginning of time.

They basically say, “Come to Tulsa, and when you’re here, we kind of want to show you the town.” Literally like an ambassador program. And then, by the time the person leaves, they didn’t just check out the sites. They are literally being led around by people within the Jewish community who willingly want to say, “Hey, we’d love for you to join our community.”

It’s about the social connection. Their methodology means that their numbers aren’t big [annually, they’re credited with about 20 relocations, with a retention rate above 85 percent but what they do is steady. They understand that if they can attract the one person, that one person can be an anchor, and then family and friends can follow, which is how things have happened since the beginning of time.

It strikes me as an interesting moment to launch Live Work Philadelphia, coming out of the pandemic, when the city’s population declined. Do you think stakeholders will be receptive to your message?

The last time I overwhelmingly felt that local residents were feeling very positive about the city was probably around 10 years ago, which was the tail end of Philadelphia’s last real population bump. If we get this right now, the results will take 5 to 10 years. Down the road is when people in the city will truly benefit.

We talk about the middle-income population, but our mission can get misinterpreted. Why are you prioritizing people who don’t live in the city over those that do? And our answer would be, You’ve got it backwards. We are completely focused on the people that live here, and we understand that for many in this city, the city doesn’t work for them. If you’re Latino in this city, there’s not a lot to do. We get one Latino concert a year at Wells Fargo Center, when every other city — Boston, New York, D.C. — gets six to a dozen Latino concerts a year.

At the end of the day, local residents have to believe that Philadelphia is worth sticking around for.

Are the things that attract residents the same as those that help retain them here?

The answer is yes. I’ll roll it back to what I said earlier. It’s personal. In other words, I love Philadelphia, but there’s a part of me, half of me, that doesn’t enjoy it here. I can’t find enough people like myself. The Inquirer put out an article a year ago calling Philadelphia the biggest city with the most amount of singles, which basically talked about how if you’re a minority in this city, it’s really hard to date. It’s hard to plan to build a family here, because you just won’t find enough people like yourself.

How many people does Live Work want to attract? Is there a specific target?

Our goal is not to create a wave of new residents, it’s to create a drip. Resident attraction strategies often try to generate a wave, but waves are unsustainable. They’re unmanageable and they don’t last. The drip never creates anxiety, because you build things one by one.

If we’re driving, let’s say, 1,000 new people to the city on an annual basis, well, I now have 1,000 new networks that can become aware of Philadelphia, which means that five years from now this will have worked.

People tend to relocate for jobs. Does Philly have enough middle-income jobs in order to attract the middle-income earners and kick off this cyclical growth for everyone else?

This is designed to appeal to that first adventurous person. And then ultimately, what happens is, that person promotes out to their networks. For our program, we’re going to use a lot less traditional media, and much more digital applications that appeal to our target audience.

Oftentimes when people talk about solutions, there’s this certainty about it, like, if we lower the taxes, then we’re going to be okay. Well, I wish it were that simple. Too many resident attraction efforts are built around the transaction. This is going to be about positioning Philadelphia and creating a brand that aligns with people’s aspirations and needs. The driver of all of that will be the lower cost of living. And then, after that, my messaging to them will be based on their individual profiles.

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