Connor Barwin's Civic Season

We lost a heartbreaker at home on Sunday to the Miami Dolphins. Off the field, we take the civic matchup against the city of Miami, which is quite small (36 square miles) and located in a much larger county (Miami-Dade) that includes about 30 separate municipalities. According to Professor Richardson Dilworth of Drexel’s Center for Public Policy, our differences complicate the comparison between the two cities. “The city of Miami actually is the equivalent of Center City and South Philadelphia combined, while you can fit about 10 Philadelphias within Miami-Dade County,” he says.

Dilworth points out that Miami should get points for its history as a primary site for refugees, most notably Cubans in the 1960s and Haitians in the 1990s and later; that history helps explain some of the low scores below. “Slightly more than half of Miami-Dade’s population is foreign-born, which is the highest foreign-born population of any county in the United States,” he explains. “As a result, Miami deals with civic issues—multi- and bilingualism in public schools, for example—that Philadelphia doesn’t in quite the same way.”

Finally, there is one factor our chart doesn’t explicitly note. Of all major American cities, Miami faces the greatest threat from climate change. “To put it bluntly, in 100 years, Miami may just not be there,” Dilworth says. “In Philadelphia, climate change doesn’t pose that kind of existential threat. In Miami, part of the city’s strategy is to promote economic development as the way to generate the local taxes needed to build the infrastructure that will preserve property values in the face of climate change.”

Next week we take on Tampa Bay.