On May 16, 2018, Mayor Jim Kenney held a defiant press conference. Though he had some choice words for political opponents, the background did a lot of the talking. Behind him, a century-old building was in rough shape. Off and on, it’d been shut down by safety inspectors. The roof partially collapsed. You could see the steel rebar supporting one of the walls.
Vare Recreation Center — one of the largest and oldest rec centers in the city, a community mainstay for Point Breeze and Grays Ferry — was about to become the poster child of Kenney’s stalled agenda. “If we don’t act soon, we’ll have to close it again,” Kenney said at the press conference. “Rec centers like Vare are the reason we proposed Rebuild and passed the beverage tax in the first place.”
Rebuild was the name of Kenney’s signature project: Use a new tax on sugary beverages (and combine it with philanthropy) to invest in Philadelphia parkis, rec centers and libraries. Kenney had announced these plans three years earlier, originally as a candidate. But that day in front of Vare, not a single shovel was in the ground. There was blame to go around as to why. Rebuild had a budget of $500 million, but the path to spending that money was like an elaborate domino setup, with the crucial domino — the soda tax — then in limbo because of a lawsuit brought by the soda industry.
In the meantime, Kenney was trying to use the meager $8 million he had on hand for Rebuild. Except, he had to confront one more interruption in City Council, which was demanding further changes to the program before signing off on the mayor’s plan.
An exasperated Kenney stood in front of the cameras — along with the crumbling, centenarian building — and threatened to begin the renovations, with or without Council. The stunt worked. In a few weeks, Council ended its obstruction. One month after that, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the soda industry’s lawsuit. Rebuild, we thought, was off and running.
Though it played a symbolic role in jumpstarting Rebuild, Vare had to wait seven years for its own revival. In November 2024, the rec center reopened to great fanfare. Its new potential was apparent on a recent visit, when the facility was humming. The Vare gymnastics team was training for its next event (there’s a documentary about them!), adults and kids were both playing pickup basketball, and a computer lab was there for a quiet escape from athletics.
Wealthier (and Whiter) neighborhoods tend to have newer, shinier facilities in comparison to lower-income ones … City Hall spent roughly 2.5 times more money on the census tracts with the highest income levels than it did on areas with the lowest.
Led by former Eagle Connor Barwin’s Make The World Better Foundation (MTWBF), the $21 million renovations ($1 million from the Rosenthal Foundation, $250,000 from the Philadelphia Eagles, and $19 million from the City) is the most expensive of any completed Rebuild site to date. Vare’s stunning transformation includes:
- a 4,900-square-foot gymnastics gym with entirely new equipment
- a computer lab with fiber-optic high speed internet (the first inside a city rec center)
- multiple outdoor basketball courts, along with an indoor court with seating and an electronic scoreboard
- an outdoor performance stage and sprayground
- new security cameras, lighting, and tree canopy
In attendance for the ribbon-cutting, Mayor Cherelle Parker marvelled at the finished product and asked an appropriate question: “How many times can we duplicate what you’ve done here, in neighborhoods across the city?”
Looking at Rebuild’s contributions on their own, the answer to Parker’s question appears to be a disappointment. Kenney sold the public on a program that would upgrade 150 to 200 sites over the course of seven years — with some projects being major rehabs and others a simple fix, like a new boiler or fence.
As of last September, $461 million out of $549 million in the program’s coffers were committed to projects. The Parker administration says that it does not presently have plans to extend Rebuild beyond a list of 72 parks, rec centers, and libraries.
So, if the program can’t manage to get to 50 percent of its target, the real question is: Will Rebuild be remembered as a total dud? Or, is there more than meets the eye?
A generation of disinvestment
The end goal was never to funnel money and equipment into needy neighborhoods. Beyond physical upgrades, Rebuild was billed as a catalyst for economic mobility and an experiment in how to invest public dollars more strategically and equitably, including by involving those communities directly in the process.
Walking or driving around the city, there’s an obvious disparity of quality when it comes to parks, rec centers, and libraries. Every year, the City spends roughly $5 billion on maintaining and improving its long-term infrastructure, a “capital budget” that pays for everything from fire trucks to road repaving to HVACs in municipal buildings. (The capital budget is separate from the City’s $6-billion-plus operating budget.) While the disparities from neighborhood to neighborhood are decades in the making, City Hall continues to play a meaningful role in perpetuating that imbalance.
Last year, Pew released a report to quantify that impact. It looked at capital spending between 2011 and 2022 — a sample that included the earliest Rebuild projects — along with how much funding was distributed to various demographics in Philadelphia. (Pew chose to exclude roughly half of the capital budget in its analysis, including non-site-specific investments like IT upgrades, electing to focus on projects that were unique to one place.) To compare different parts of the city, the researchers developed a metric called “indicators of potential disadvantage” or IDP — essentially a blend of variables like race and ethnicity, household income, and the number of housing starts that give a broad picture of the resources in any given census tract. Areas around Center City had the lowest IDP, for example.
“What really stood out was that the per capita investment in communities where IPD was lowest was $1,235,” says Katie Martin, director of Pew’s Philadelphia Research and Policy Initiative and the lead author of the report. “But it was just $454 where [IDP] was highest.”
“Everybody talks about sustainability … If you slow down and take the time to do this right, you actually create facilities that are much more sustainable. The secret sauce is a trust and willingness to take time.” — Connor Barwin, Make the World Better Foundation
In other words, the least needy neighborhoods tend to receive the lion’s share from our capital budget. The analysis confirmed what many people, including longtime residents who live around Vare, already knew: Wealthier neighborhoods tend to have newer, shinier facilities in comparison to lower-income ones. (Also, the Whiter that the population of a neighborhood was, the more funding it attracted.) According to the report, City Hall spent roughly 2.5 times more money on the census tracts with the highest income levels than it did on areas with the lowest. It’s a pattern that only exacerbates an underlying disparity of resources on the household level.
“These are communities that are overwhelmingly disinvested in over a period of time,” says Martin.
That report, while it was independently conducted, began at the request of Mayor Kenney in his first term. Martin and co-author Alix Sullivan not only studied the baseline problem, but also tracked the early returns on a potential solution, Rebuild. When comparing the City’s capital spending as a whole to that of Rebuild, Martin saw a noticeable difference.
Rebuild spent $29 per capita citywide during the decade-plus sample, but $35 per capita in places with the highest level of disadvantage, a roughly 20 percent bump. “A main finding of this report is that when equity is an explicit goal in capital budgeting, like it was with Rebuild, there are different results,” Martin says. “There are some investments the City can’t change. But with those remaining dollars, where are you investing them? And how is the City proactive in incorporating equity into those dollars?”
The one major caveat to the good news about Rebuild is that its budget represents a drop in the bucket of the City’s capital spending overall. Pew looked at just $47 million of Rebuild spending in its analysis, or, about 1 percent of what the city spends each year in the capital budget, Martin adds.
It adds up to a conclusion that Rebuild’s funding may, at least from an equity standpoint, live up to its promise — except, to make a truly generational impact, the city needs a lot more of it.
Parks matter
Why should City Hall invest in public amenities, like parks and rec centers, in the first place? There’s quite a long list. Those spaces reduce crime. They create tax revenue. They promote healthy habits, drive economic development, and offer educational resources. They also exist as some of our most democratic spaces — creating communities by bringing neighbors together.
You could argue that without these spaces, we are hardly a real city. William Penn implicitly understood this long before it was possible to quantify the importance of these amenities. In the 1680s, Penn requested that the first city grid include ample green space and areas where citizens had free reign.
Once a leader in promoting and preserving urban green and recreational space, Philly has slipped in recent decades. Today, City Hall spends about 30 percent less on its parks than the national average of the 100 most-populous cities, according to the Trust for Public Land’s Parkscore. Compared to most of our peers, Philly relies on volunteers, philanthropy and private groups to maintain these spaces. Rebuild was an attempt to close that gap.
“When equity is an explicit goal in capital budgeting, like it was with Rebuild, there are different results,” Katie Martin, Pew Charitable Trust’s Philadelphia Research and Policy Initiative
However, Kenney sold the public on a program that was both public and private in its delivery as well. The City hired nonprofits as project managers of many Rebuild sites, for one thing. His administration stated that by not running everything through public departments, Rebuild could better achieve two of its other ambitious goals:
- First, to award more Rebuild contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses than the City usually does.
- Second, to ensure that the contracting workforce (and not just ownership) was diverse as well, as Rebuild aimed to have 45 percent of all its hours worked going to minority and women laborers. (So far, Rebuild has awarded more than 52 percent of its contracts to such businesses, but has fallen short of its workforce goal, with only 35 percent of those hours going to minority laborers.)
Another hope for using nonprofits was that they would provide a closer level of community engagement than what’s possible in the City. At Vare, for example, MTWB and Barwin — spent countless hours meeting with community members, who informed the final design — a process which Barwin hopes will lead to a new generation of stakeholders for the facility.
“Everybody talks about sustainability,” says Barwin. “One thing that isn’t talked about enough, in my opinion, is that if you slow down and take the time to do this right, you actually create facilities that are much more sustainable. The secret sauce is a trust and willingness to take time.”
By engaging scores of community partners on most sites, the City hoped to repair frayed relationships between City Hall and various neighborhoods. But that process also contributed to Rebuild falling short of its original goal of 150 to 200 projects. Extensive community engagement can’t be rushed — and by design, it often reveals a greater level of need at many sites than could initially be believed. The price tag at Vare more than doubled between the project’s start and finish.
“In our mind, we have this vision of doing something that’s entirely reflective of the community,” says MTWB Executive Director Jesse Rendell. “But when you have more partners, then you have more people involved, you have more stakeholders, you have more money. It’s very complicated. So you’re constantly managing that push and pull between the community, between the City, between others that have supported the project.”
Outside partners were involved in Rebuild’s funding as well. The City received more than $100 million from the William Penn Foundation and raised an additional $45 million in separate grants. That private funding was combined with the lynchpin of Rebuild, the soda tax. The City issued three sets of bonds totalling about $300 million using revenue from the tax. In essence, the soda tax has been used to pay down the interest and principal on a loan, in the form of those bonds.
Once the soda tax prevailed in court, the unique demands of Rebuild’s engagement and contracting process was further complicated by a pandemic and the cost of building materials soaring. Those circumstances left the Kenney administration with a choice between cutting down the quantity of projects or the quality of them. Aparna Palantino, Mayor Parker’s director of capital projects, says the depth — and location — of Rebuild’s investments are proof of success, even if the breadth isn’t there.
“Whenever you go to a place that values their young people, you are going to see high quality public spaces,” says Palantino. “I encourage anyone interested to drive by Kingsessing Rec and FJ Myers Rec in West Philadelphia, two $20-million-plus renovations of beautiful historic buildings in communities that have been so engaged from the very beginning and couldn’t deserve these projects more.”
What comes next?
Shortly after Kenney’s press conference at Vare, back in 2018, Rebuild announced another site next in line for renovations: Olney Rec Center, a facility in then-Councilwoman Cherelle Parker’s district.
An important ally of Kenney throughout his first term, Parker had shown unwavering support for the soda tax and the programs it was supposed to fund, including Rebuild. I spoke to Parker before Olney Rec Center’s official selection as a Rebuild site while reporting for WHYY. The then-Councilmember was enthusiastic in envisioning all that the space could be.
“This facility should be the nucleus of community exploration and gathering,” Parker said. “I am not an architect or an engineer, but we are talking about demolishing what is there and doing a total rebuild.”
While her predecessor’s dream is still wrapping up — including at Olney, where a $16 million renovation is now underway — advocates for public spaces and recreation would like to see Parker pick up that baton herself. As a candidate, she said that she’d like to “at least double” the City’s investment in Parks & Rec, given the funding gap between Philly and peer cities. Since taking office, however, Parker has been unwilling to commit to that campaign pledge.
Will Mayor Parker take any lessons with her from Rebuild? Or, just maybe, expand the work in her own way — to get a little more bang for our buck?
The administration says that’s exactly why Mayor Parker signed an executive order last year to revamp the Capital Program Office, which has been defunct since 2008. “What the creation of the Capital Program Office does is it allows us to take a holistic view of what’s working and what isn’t across all City projects and look for ways to not only deliver high quality projects, but to do so with greater efficiency,” says Palantino.
Still, Palantino declined to speculate if the administration plans to include additional money for Rebuild or expand funding for those public spaces in another capacity.
“Right now, we’re focused on running through the finish line to close out the remaining Rebuild projects,” says Palantino.
This story was supported in part by the Solutions Journalism Network’s Building Democracy program.
