It’s a little hard these days to wrap your head around the news at all levels, no? So much flooding of so many zones. Locally, that fog of war feeling has trickled down. Don’t get me wrong: There are no villains here, no assaults on democratic values. But there is nonetheless a lack of clarity on the issues of the day.

To wit: You can find countless competing takes on the meaning of the City’s recently adopted 2026 budget, a $6.8 billion behemoth that also floats $800 million in bonds for affordable housing — an investment, with interest, likely to ultimately amount to over $1 billion. (For context: Mayor Street’s final budget was $3.8 billion; Mayor Nutter’s, $3.9 billion. Where’s the tax base for all this spending the last decade, not to mention your return of investment?)

       Listen to the audio edition here:

Early on in budget season, there was a headline calling Parker’s proposal one that contained “historic tax cuts”; now comes an Inquirer editorial calling the budget a “sensible compromise” given the prospect of Trump’s withholding of federal funds.

Business leaders are aghast that the Tax Reform Commission’s pro-inclusive growth recommendations — produced in concert with the minority Chambers of Commerce — have been vastly watered down. It will now take 13 years to eliminate the job-killing BIRT tax — alone among major cities, we tax both net profits and gross revenues, a double-taxation disincentive to anyone thinking of starting a business within city limits.

Meantime, progressives, who ridiculously framed the Commission’s plan as akin to Reagan-era trickle-down economics, are still up in arms, with a socialist one-time Council candidate writing in The Inquirer that Parker and Council’s $6.8 billion plan and the aforementioned $1 billion Housing Opportunities Made Easy (H.O.M.E., get it?) investment amounts to a “one-way ticket to austerity” without even mentioning the word “jobs.”

Don’t we have an income problem to go along with our housing supply shortage? Why does a holistic jobs strategy keep losing out?

And that’s really the backstory here. This budget season was characterized by a lot of really well-meaning policy folks hashing out a battle between investing in growth in the form of lowering the wage and oppressive business taxes, recruiting and retaining employers, and beefing up workforce development versus a pricey bold bet on housing.

Housing won. Politically, socialist complaints notwithstanding, it was an easier sell. Even though we’re the highest taxed-city this side of Bridgeport, Connecticut, with virtually no growth, tax cutting of any kind here lends itself to “blame the rich” rhetoric. As I’ve written before, a city can’t grow when nine of its top 10 employers are its own government and nonprofits. The problem isn’t Comcast, my progressive friends; it’s that we don’t have enough Comcasts, employing our neighbors and leading local corporate philanthropy. (Full disclosure: Comcast NBCUniversal is the presenting sponsor of our annual Ideas We Should Steal Festival.)

Our main challenge? Ignored again

This budget season should crystalize the real philosophical debate in Philadelphia today. Two mayoral administrations in a row have now misdiagnosed our central challenge: growing jobs that enable Philadelphians to not just survive, but thrive. Mayor Kenney, before he threw up his hands and essentially said See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya late in his second term, bet big on Rebuild — a worthy cause, even if its execution failed miserably. (Seriously, 17 parks refurbished when we were promised 200? Where do you as taxpayer go to get your money back?)

Now we have another huge investment — this time in affordable housing, a very real need. But don’t we have an income problem to go along with our housing supply shortage? Why does a holistic jobs strategy keep losing out?

“There’s no ribbon-cutting for creating a job here,” one insider observed this week. Nor is there a formidable political constituency, other than all of us political outsiders who have a stake in the city moving forward. Rebuild, like H.O.M.E., rewards politically powerful groups like the Building Trades and developers. I ain’t mad at them; that is growth — but it’s industry-specific, when we should have a plan to also be capturing the jobs of the future beyond those that put cranes in the sky.

What’s the point of that mayoral popularity if you don’t spend it for the common good?

That said, there’s much to like in Parker’s housing plan, including its investment in the city’s Turn The Key program. When it comes to the disposition of Land Bank holdings, councilmanic prerogative will now in certain cases be engaged earlier in the process — so developers are less likely to be held up by the vicissitudes of prerogative after they’ve invested so much time and money.

But make no mistake: Prerogative lives, which means the prospect of a Rebuild-like boondoggle remains. Seriously, are you confident we’ll hit the newly-targeted 16,000 houses built and 13,000 repaired in an efficient way, with no zoning, permitting or councilmanic prerogative shenanigans? And how will that relate to broad-based jobs, outside of the construction sector?

Look, Mayor Parker’s talents are many. She’s a great salesperson — perhaps the best we’ve had in City Hall since Ed Rendell. And she has a compelling personal story: raised by a loving grandmother, whose reliance on food stamps and other government safety net programs laid the groundwork for Parker’s improbable ascent. Government saved her, and she has spent most of her adult life serving in it, returning the favor.

No wonder that, as Mayor, she often heralds her City College for Municipal Employment (CCME) program, a training ground for hiring city workers. But throwing gobs of money at more city programs is not economic development. Still, there Parker was, at a North Philly church last week, selling her budget in a town hall and touting with her staff the fact that her government has grown to 29,200 employees — 1,000 more workers than a year ago and more than we had 65 years ago, when JFK was president and Philadelphia had over 500,000 more residents than it does now.

Stuck in a doom loop

But government growth is not economic growth, which is kind of what the whole abundance progressivism movement is all about. Elsewhere, this is catching on. In Washington, D.C. last week, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Grow DC budget doubled-down on investing in job growth even as her city is facing drastic Trump cuts. “The Growth Agenda is about creating jobs for D.C. residents and generating the economic activity we need to keep D.C. a world-class city,” Bowser said. “This budget acknowledges the challenges we are facing, but also includes bold, forward-thinking solutions to change our economic trajectory.”

Or take Riverside, California, where Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson, as she outlined on our How To Really Run a City podcast, has set a bold north star. Noting that green technology, EVs, and low emission vehicles are the future of transportation, Lock Dawson announced, “I want us to be the next car manufacturing capital of the world.”

In the last year and a half, her government — working with the University of California at Riverside, a research institution — has recruited four global manufacturers to move their headquarters to her town: a New Zealand autonomous car company, a hydrogen truck manufacturer and an electric bus company among them. And there are more to come. Now that is a mayor who is thinking about how to build her city’s future economy and then partnering with stakeholders to turn goal into reality.

Or look at Detroit, where Mayor Mike Duggan and billionaire Dan Gilbert have worked together with other civic leaders to author one of the great urban comeback stories. The city still has its challenges, but job growth is at an astounding 6 percent over the last decade and the once-bankrupt Motor City has now been named the world’s number one startup ecosystem. There are bounceback lessons in Detroit for every city in America, but they don’t include trying to institute a wealth tax on the billionaire who, along with the Ford Motor Company and a quirky mix of artists and urban pioneers, has helped rescue the city.

Throwing gobs of money at more city programs is not economic development.

Here, it feels like we’re still stuck in a doom loop. Parker’s remarkable personal rise would be far unlikelier today, because economic mobility in Philly has become a thing of the past. That’s not an opinion. Last year, famed Harvard researcher Raj Chetty (we featured his partner, John Friedman, in conversation with now-Governor Wes Moore at our 2021 Ideas We Should Steal Festival), released a study that should have served as a call to arms for the mayor and every other civic leader. Chetty tracks economic mobility and Philly vastly underperforms in every cohort studied. Mean child household income for low-income White families? We’re dead last, 50th of 50 counties. Low-income Black families? 31st. High income Black-families? 40th. All families? 36th.

It’s a sobering read. Chetty tracks opportunity block by block. In Philly and, critically, the close-in counties, the idea of the American dream — that kids can rise above the constraints of zip code and circumstance — seems like quaint nostalgia. Don’t be fooled into thinking that, because our poverty rate may be incrementally dropping, we’re on the upswing. Yes, the poverty rate is now close to 20 percent — still worst in the nation among big cities — but down from our high of 26 percent over a decade ago. But much of that decline is attributable to the spillover effect of Biden’s now-defunct child tax credit. Moreover, here’s why we really ought not be high-fiving: If you’re a family of three subsisting on $26,500, you’re in poverty. Raise that family to $27,000 — or even $30,000, which is where a $15 minimum wage winds up — and you’ve indeed taken them out of poverty. But have you created any pathway to the middle class?

Make no mistake: Council President Kenyatta Johnson’s Tax Reform Commission proposed ways, modest though they were, to invest in building a thriving economy: cuts to the wage tax and ultimately eliminating the double-taxation BIRT tax, turbocharging a workforce development program that is desperately needed. Talk to any employer, like the tech company that just hired 100 workers in Vancouver despite being headquartered here — and they’ll tell you they follow the talent.

Alas, this budget season, only Councilmembers Isaiah Thomas and Kathleen Gilmore Richardson seemed to get the imperative for growth. Johnson was sympathetic, but either couldn’t whip the votes or didn’t see the political benefit in taking on a mayor cruising at 63 percent favorability in the Pew poll released this week, the highest for an incumbent mayor since the foundation started polling residents in 2009. (It’s within the margin of error of Michael Nutter’s 60 percent favorability in 2012.) As a result, the City’s budget vastly diluted the most forward-thinking recommendations of the commission and the pro-growth minority didn’t have the votes to impose any new thinking upon Parker’s more atavistic approach. (This is, by the way, something like the third time in the last 30 or so years that a tax reform commission has been formed and then kinda ignored by the political class. Uh, why bother?)

Back to that mayoral popularity. What’s the point of it if you don’t spend it for the common good? Parker spent a lot of political capital in her first year on the ill-fated Sixers’ arena deal, but it obviously hasn’t hurt her. That was an economic development deal, but it was just a deal — not an overall strategy.

Parker recently hired Trish Wellenbach, former Board Chair of Jefferson University and CEO of the Please Touch Museum, to be her Chief Strategy and Partnership Officer, so perhaps we’ll see a comprehensive strategic plan that gets Philadelphia growing again. One that invests in affordable housing, yes, but also engages stakeholders to help recruit and retain employers, to train a workforce for the jobs of a disruptive future, and to upend a sclerotic education system — can you square, after all, just how graduation rates can be rising when only 17 percent of fourth graders read at grade level?

Owing to her skillset, her story, her popularity, and the moment she finds herself in, Mayor Parker has the chance to be a transformative mayor. To do that, she’ll need to be less episodic; she’ll need a plan and — critically — the staff to implement it. If she wants to put her popularity to use, Mayor Parker will govern with a vision to not only make Philadelphia greener and cleaner, but also economically mobile again.

Corrections: The City of Philadelphia 2026 budget is $6.8 billion, plus a loan of $800 million in bonds for affordable housing.

CITY BUDGET COVERAGE FROM THE CITIZEN