A Prayer for the City (10 page)

It was January of 1992, shortly after the inauguration, and of all the activities that Cohen might seize during the four years of the mayor’s term in office, none was as important as this. Without the Number, they could not even try to begin to move the city forward. Of course, once they had the Number, it might also become apparent, less than one month into a term in which there were still forty-seven left, that they would
never
be able to move the city forward. Perhaps it would be better, as the previous administrations had done, to get out the pad and abacus and fairy dust and number blocks, make a calculated guess, and spin tales better than those of Charles Dickens.

Sitting at the keyboard, White punched the requisite data into the model—projected revenues based on the various taxes that the city levied, various fees the city charged, state and federal aid; projected obligations based on salaries and benefits for city workers and the cost of services that the city purchased from outside vendors. The computer paused momentarily and then returned the Number.

Emotional reactions to budget-forecast models were not part of the financial vernacular, particularly for someone like White, who saw weird numbers all the time. Numbers, after all, were numbers. But
what was this
? Then it became obvious what had happened. In the lateness of the hour, he had simply made a clerical mistake, punched in some incorrect data. With Cohen still next to him, he went through the same procedure.

The computer again paused momentarily, then returned the Number once again.

John White looked at it, and so of course did Cohen, and they quickly noticed the same thing. It was exactly the same as when White had punched in the data the first time. There had been no clerical error. There had been no mistake.

$1.246
BILLION

That was the Number glaring at them from the computer screen. That would be the budget gap over the next five years if nothing was done:
one billion two hundred forty-six million dollars
—a budget deficit bigger than the entire budget of Boston or Houston or Baltimore.

John White looked at David Cohen. David Cohen looked at John White.

“Holy shit,” said White. “This is bad.”

It was still occasionally called the City of Firsts, and it was more than mere promotional gimmick, even though so many of the firsts had occurred so long ago that few who lived in the city were aware of them—the first public school in the colonies, the first American paper mill, the first stone bridge, the first botanical garden, the first volunteer fire company, the first American magazine, the first American hospital, the first American insurance company, the first American stock exchange, the first American theater, the first production of an American play, the first carpet woven in America, the first piano made in America, the first American corporate bank, the first daily American newspaper, the first circus, the first balloon flight, the first public building lit by gas, the first American-made lager beer, the first screw-propeller steamship, the first American minstrel show, the first Republican National Convention, the first American zoological society, the first American merry-go-round, the first women’s suffrage demonstrations, the first telephone book, the first Salvation Army in America, the first black newspaper, the first revolving door, the first Automat, the first Girl Scout cookie sale, the first city wage tax.

It was perhaps a symptom of things to come that the last of these firsts occurred in 1938. Even then there were serious signs of implosion and decay, the beginnings of a two-tiered society in the city, the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor, nuggets of wealth surrounded by rings of decline. But in the headiness of the American era, particularly after World War II, the signs were largely ignored. Outwardly, at least during the 1950s, the city still managed to sustain itself rather well, and nothing but growth seemed to be on the horizon.

In 1960, an enthusiastic plan by the City Planning Commission predicted that the population of Philadelphia would be a minimum of 2.25 million by 1980 and perhaps as high as 2.7 million. The plan predicted a robust increase in manufacturing employment, with the exception of jobs in the textile industry, and an increase in citywide employment above the magic one million mark. Printed lovingly on the finest paper, the plan was bold and energizing to read, a testament to the optimism of the American spirit that existed then not just in regard to the city of Philadelphia but in
regard to all American cities, the idea that nothing could diminish regardless of what evidence there might be to the contrary. It was also one of the most wrongheaded documents ever created, a symbol of the dangers of urban myopia. By 1960, conditions in many American cities were already alarming. A social upheaval was taking place, but still no one wanted to listen to those who recognized it and issued warnings. White middle-class flight to the suburbs fueled by the crafty and relentless engine of federal policy; black migration by the millions from the South spurred by the dream of industrial jobs that were already dwindling and beyond reach; the rapid loss of manufacturing to nearby locales, where the land was cheaper and more plentiful for efficient, one-story assembly lines; the shift from downtown shopping to suburban strip malls and to the latest retail invention, the indoor shopping mall; the ravages of the slums and the ignoble record of urban renewal—these were just some of the evident problems that would multiply exponentially over the next thirty years.

“The modern city can be the most ruthless enemy of the good life, or it can be its servant,” President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965. “The choice is up to this generation of Americans. For this is truly the time of decision for the American city.” The generation Johnson beckoned to clearly responded. By leaving.

In 1950, ten of the country’s twelve largest cities reached their highest populations ever. After that moment, the American city was never the same. By 1966, the proportion of nonwhites living in cities of more than 250,000 had nearly doubled, to 23 percent. For the vast majority of these residents, it was a wrenching and almost horrifying transition to urban life, and this was a demographic shift that only intensified in later decades. Between 1950 and 1990, the population of Detroit dropped 44 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 79 percent. The population of Cleveland dropped 45 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 53 percent. The population of Milwaukee dropped 15 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 39 percent. The population of Chicago dropped 23 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 60 percent. The population of Newark dropped 38 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 82 percent. In Philadelphia, the population of the city dropped 23 percent from its peak, and the proportion of minorities increased to 45 percent.

For many of these minorities, the move to the city was beset with hostility and alienation. Instead of finding the promised land, they found only the sealed-off physique of the ghetto, and what made these statistics even
more distressing were studies showing that the incidence of poverty in cities was growing. Between 1980 and 1990, according to one such study, the number of blacks living in urban ghettos had increased nearly 40 percent, from 4.3 million to 5.9 million.

Philadelphia itself continued to compile firsts during the 1970s and 1980s, but they were different firsts: the first city in the country to have as its mayor a former police chief who didn’t have a high school education and once wore a nightstick in his tuxedo cummerbund; the first city in the country to be sued by the Justice Department for systematic police brutality; the first city in the country to have a mass murderer who was fond of torturing his victims and also invested rather well in the stock market; the first city in the country in which a remarkable number of people thought the statue of a movie prizefighter belonged at the top of the steps leading to the art museum.

After 1960, the city of Philadelphia did not gain a minimum of 225,000 residents, as the Planning Commission had so rosily predicted. Instead, between 1960 and 1990, the city
lost
400,000 residents. Once the country’s third-largest city, by 1990 it was only the fifth largest, with 1.58 million residents, and the number of inhabitants in the city was the smallest since 1910. Beyond sheer population loss, an analysis of the numbers showed a nearly 30 percent drop in the number of middle-income families. The phenomenon only reinforced a place that had the demographic look of a lopsided sandwich, a thin piece of bread on top and a thick piece of bread at the bottom, but less and less meat in between to provide consistent nourishment and sustenance. Unless the trend somehow reversed, the middle-income would continue to leave a city that held no hope for them, beckoned by the suburbs and the most enduring American dream of all—private lot, private lawn, and private home. The small percentage of wealthy who could afford burdensome taxes and private schools would feast off a city that had wonderful shops and restaurants and privileged oases in which to live. The low income would always live in a city that by any standard of decency and morality had become unimaginable.

By 1990 in Philadelphia, 20 percent of the entire city was at the poverty level. Sixty percent of its children had been born to single mothers. Fifteen percent of them had had little or no prenatal care. Thirty-five percent of them were not adequately immunized. One in eleven had a case open with the city’s Department of Human Services, the agency charged with protecting abused, neglected, and dependent children. In the city’s public school system, 40 percent of those enrolled dropped out in high school.

There were also the compounding effects of the problems that arose during the 1980s that no one could have imagined: the number of AIDS cases in the city had gone from zero to more than 2,200; the number of people in treatment for cocaine abuse had gone from 117 to 10,480; the number of inmates in the city prison system had gone from 2,722 to 5,178. In 1981, there had been no city agency to serve the needs of the homeless. In 1990, with an estimated 5,000 people on the street at any given time, the city was budgeting close to $37 million to care for them. In 1981, the city had budgeted $510,000 for demolishing dilapidated buildings and industrial sites. By 1990, due to abandonment and population loss, that figure had increased more than tenfold, to $5.3 million, but it was still a losing battle. By 1992, there were 27,000 vacant residential buildings in Philadelphia, roughly 6 percent of the city’s residential stock, and 15,800 parcels of vacant land. Another problem in the city that flourished was murder, which reached an all-time high of 500 homicides in 1990.

The number of jobs, instead of reaching the one million mark that the planners had predicted, had plummeted to about 750,000. Nearly 19 percent of those jobs came at taxpayers’ expense, through the federal government, the state government, the local government, and the school district. In 1960, there had been roughly 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the city. By 1990, that figure had dropped to 85,000, and all these employment figures reflected the enormous shift in jobs from city to suburbs that had taken place over the past thirty years.

In 1959, 59 percent of the region’s jobs had been within the city limits. By 1990, only 32 percent of the region’s jobs were in the city. And this wasn’t a trend unique to Philadelphia but was similar in virtually every major city in the country. In 1960, per capita income had been 5 percent greater in metropolitan-area cities than in their suburbs. In 1987, per capita income in central cities was 41 percent less than that of their surrounding suburbs. The revolution had come, the determined American march from city street to cul-de-sac was virtually complete, and by the 1990s people such as Ray Flynn of Boston and David Dinkins of New York and Tom Bradley of Los Angeles and Michael White of Cleveland and Ed Rendell of Philadelphia and Richard Daley of Chicago were left holding the broken pieces of what was left.

These words, uttered in 1959 by a Harvard professor named Raymond Vernon and reprinted in a Senate subcommittee publication, had been left to languish on the shelf of the urban studies section at the college library. Thirty years later they formed the urban motto.

In 1992, the City of Firsts needed an emergency jump start, something to restore credibility, any credibility, in government. Rendell had a narrow window of opportunity, and he needed to seize on something that offered the possibility of real change. However horrifying the Number was, the budget offered that opportunity. He could gain mightily from fixing it, but he had to do it in a way that was real. Creative budgeting, perhaps the most powerful and useful invention of modern politics, would not do philosophically or practically.

In May 1990, his predecessor, Mayor Goode, had introduced a budget so far-fetched and full of holes that the city controller responded to it by stating, “It may only be balanced for about seven hours.” A month later, when Moody’s Investors Service dropped the city below the level recommended for investors because of numerous uncertainties over the budget, Philadelphia became the only major city in the country to achieve junk-bond status. “Wilson will occasionally tell me I don’t know how bad it is,” Rendell had said privately of Mayor Goode several weeks before his own elevation to mayor. “What I think Wilson really means is ‘Eddie doesn’t know how badly I fucked it up.’ It’s like bailing out a boat. When you’re three quarters done, are you going to find out there are two other leaks?”

Shortly after winning, that’s exactly what Rendell did find—leaks, so many of them that it was hard to believe the boat had ever floated. Within weeks of his victory,
City and State
magazine came out with its annual survey on the fiscal soundness of the nation’s fifty largest cities. Smack at the bottom was Philadelphia, and those who made a living studying municipal finance only rattled the death knell even more. The situation facing Rendell, said Rutgers University political scientist Ross Baker, is “one of the most hair-raising municipal horror stories in the country.”