(Rendering: Women's Community Revitalization Project)

Claudia Vargas's piece on how Councilmembers reserve city-owned land for favored developers and projects is both a great lens into why Philly continues to have more vacant land than any other large city, and a frustrating example of how nobody cares about the city tax base.

(Photo: Philadelphia Inquirer)

As we wrote two weeks ago, City Councilmembers Mark Squilla (D-District 1) and David Oh (Republican At-Large) are pushing a code amendment that would place a moratorium on new curbside electric vehicle charging stations. The moratorium passed the Committee on Streets and Services already, but not the full Council. Yet we are hearing that city agencies and the Philadelphia Parking Authority are already enforcing the moratorium even though Council hasn't actually done anything yet, with 12 electric vehicle owners' applications waiting in limbo.

Once upon a time in West Philly, there was a street vendor who would set up shop every day on the same street corner.

Back in 2014, the City of Philadelphia created a Land Bank to manage the disposition of the City's huge stockpiles of vacant property. Philadelphia owns a lot more land than most other big city governments do, and people on all sides of this issue generally agree it would be a good thing if we owned less. 

As an addendum to this week's Council Report Card, Bobby Henon also introduced a new bill on behalf of Council President Darrell Clarke that would inject still more chaos and unpredictability into the city land sale process.