121 articles
Philadelphia sanitation workers earn the 4th-lowest wages among America's 20 biggest cities — below the MIT living wage for a single adult.
I take the 6am train out of Philadelphia a few times a month. Here's what I've noticed about the station and the ritual of leaving.
After You Call: A Deep Dive on Philly 311 · Part 3
Lower-income Philadelphia neighborhoods wait 16 days longer for 311. Two-thirds of the gap is the work itself — abandoned cars, blight.
After You Call: A Deep Dive on Philly 311 · Part 2
L&I and two other discretionary complaint categories explain most of Philadelphia 311's 2.6-day income gap. Routine departments are nearly equal.
Philadelphia banned indoor casino smoking in 2007, but the 20-foot buffer around entrances clusters smokers at the door. The ban's edge is the loophole.
After You Call: A Deep Dive on Philly 311 · Part 1
Of 1.3M Philadelphia 311 records since 2024, 57% are phone calls, not service tickets. The contact center logs one every 38 seconds.
311 is Philadelphia's equalizer — one number, same service for everyone. So why do poor neighborhoods wait 50%-300% longer?
Why every Philadelphia department should have an FP&A analyst. The arithmetic argument — and why the math almost pays for itself.
In which someone with more institutional experience corrects my framing, and I learn the difference between being right about the destination and wrong about the route.
Philadelphia eviction court lets tenants buy ~2.5 extra months by skipping hearings and claiming never served. No penalty for the false claim.
The Philadelphia Sheriff has a 223-day deed-recording backlog. Buyers paid $1M at auction and are still waiting. The 2003 consent order says 40 days.
Philadelphia's property-return process takes 6 to 10+ months end-to-end. Diversion, court scheduling, and Sheriff backlog stack into a year or more.
Philadelphia's broken eviction process adds ~$50/month to every renter's bill. Lower-income zips pay the most, and small landlords leave the market.
SDP faces a $300M structural deficit and is cutting 340 school-based positions. Central office — up 56% — is largely protected.
I care about diverse schools. I care about results. The mismatch research is contested but I think it points the right way — and what Philadelphia is doing with its selective school admissions won't deliver what it promises.
Philadelphia changed its selective school admissions rules on the same day the application window opened, with no formal public comment period, no warning, and no time to respond.
A federal court said Philadelphia may have discriminated in its 2022 school admissions policy and sent the case back for trial.
The Philadelphia Code still names abolished agencies — Fairmount Park Commission, Recorder of Deeds, Board of Inspectors — in present-tense language.
The back-of-the-envelope calculation that changed how I think about calendars forever.