New Census figures released Thursday revealed that Philadelphia county's population grew for the twelfth straight year since 2006, increasing by 3,917 residents between 2017 and 2018. Philadelphia's growth outpaced most of the southeastern suburban counties, powered mostly by immigration and births. Continue reading

(Image: Philadelphia City Council) It's budget season in City Council, and that means it's time for one of City Council to exercise one of their most important functions, which is holding accountable all the various departments and entities that receive public funding. Some Council members are better at this job than others, and some just use it to score political points and special favors. At the Free Library's hearing yesterday, we saw a particularly flagrant example of the latter from 3rd District Councilmember Jannie Blackwell. Continue reading

A new report and mapping project from William Stancil at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute of Metropolitan Opportunity presents a novel way of visualizing different types of neighborhood change over two decades in regions across the United States, adding an important new layer of context to the debates over gentrification and displacement. In Philadelphia, the report's findings highlight the extent to which displacement through disinvestment is by far the biggest neighborhood change problem that most neighborhoods are struggling with.  Continue reading

Property taxes are always a hot-button issue, especially in a city with such an unusually high number of homeowners, and few issues tend to kick the bees' nest quite like reassessments.  Continue reading

(Photo: David Swanson, Philadelphia Inquirer) In one of the more ridiculous comments we'll probably hear this primary season, 2nd District Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson blamed the entirety of Graduate Hospital gentrification on the South of South Neighbors Association, a mostly powerless community organization run by unpaid volunteers. Continue reading

(Image: NYC.gov) The Kenney administration, 1st District Councilmember Mark Squilla, and preservation advocates released the final recommendations of Mayor Kenney's 33-member Historic Preservation Task Force this week, and their top actionable priorities point to an appealing vision for how we can have both more preservation and more housing that's very much in keeping with the new politics of zoning remapping that we'd written about previously.  Continue reading

An Inquirer op-ed this week making the case for eliminating Register of Wills elections closes with a pretty good general principle for evaluating whether a position should be elected or appointed: if nobody can tell what the political content of the election is, then it's a poor candidate for an election.  Continue reading

(Jewell Williams posing with Bill Keller, Darrell Clarke, and Anthony Williams) In a surprise move, Philadelphia Democratic City Committee has revoked their two-day-old endorsement of Sheriff Jewell Williams's reelection after the endorsement sparked public outcry from activists and the media. Continue reading

(Photo: Timothy Rezendes via Creative Commons) This election season, most of the attention is on the City Council primaries, and to a lesser extent, our snoozer of a Mayoral primary, but there are also important row offices on the ballot like the City Commissioners who run our elections, Sheriff, and Register of Wills. Unlike with the City Council race though, where most voters have at least some idea of what the job entails and what issues Councillors are in charge of, the issues at stake in a City Commissioner or Sheriff race are less well understood.  Continue reading

(State Rep. Chris Rabb | Photo: Kentucky Educational Television) Special elections are one of the areas of Philadelphia politics most ripe for undemocratic shenanigans since city Democratic Party ward leaders are empowered to choose a nominee through a closed-door process.  Continue reading