Can this task force of local leaders save Philly’s economy post Covid-19?

Jul. 17, 2020

In April, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot—admittedly, my foremost mayoral crush—boldly convened a Covid-19 Recovery Task Force to advise city regime on its economic recovery plans. Terminate and recall about that for an instant: In April, leadership in Chicago was already signing onto the old Leo Durocher adage—"luck is the residue of design"—and plotting their comeback.

Well, their study is out, and it'south a doozy. In 104 pages, Forward Together: Edifice a Stronger Chicago lays out the historic challenges faced by the urban center, yes, but also presents the dire moment, as Lightfoot puts it, as a "in one case in a generation" opportunity to rebuild the local economy and accomplish greater equity.

The Task Force, co-chaired by Lightfoot and former Bush 41 White House Chief of Staff Samuel Skinner, comprises regional heavy hitters in corporate, academic, philanthropic and political circles. Their report makes 17 recommendations, many of them aggressive, with an heart toward reimagining the Windy Metropolis over the next three years.

The elephant in our metropolis

We'll dive a petty deeper into the substance of the Chicago plan but, get-go, allow's accost the elephant in our city. As I wrote in May, when our Mayor huddled with his insular team of white guys (Brian Abernathy, Jim Engler, Rob Dubow, Rich Lazor) to present an ill-fated redo of the city upkeep, nosotros weren't virtually to get such overarching vision from Metropolis Hall.

Fortunately, most eight weeks ago, a group of civic and business leaders were smart enough to realize the wisdom in the old saying: When y'all don't know where you're going, whatever road will take you lot there.

Naturally, Comcast VP David Cohen was the first to run across the gaping demand before us. Cohen was a data nerd long before the term entered the lexicon. I was present at a dinner in 2007 betwixt him and Mayor-elect Michael Nutter, in which Cohen—Mayoral Chief of Staff to Ed Rendell in the '90s—pulled out from his inside jacket pocket a collection of xanthous loose foliage sheets that had his handwritten scrawls all over them, complete with facts, figures and line items, a veritable, intricate, barely-legible P & L.

Pausing only every once in a while to consult his notes, he started citing affiliate and poesy on just what the newly elected mayor could look to exist confronted with, fiscally-speaking.

"What is that?" I finally interjected, nodding toward Cohen's notes.

"The city budget, basically," he said.

"Y'all prepared that for this dinner?" I asked.

"No, I always carry this with me," he said, matter-of-factly.

Then it should come as no surprise that while Mayor Kenney and other civic leaders were reasonably reacting to the Covid-19 disruption before them on a day-to-mean solar day basis, Cohen hunkered down and read studies that chronicled how cities bounced back from the Peachy Recession of 2008.

"I read a lot of articles from 2008 and 2009, and multiple studies," Cohen said when I caught upwardly with him this week. "One found that Philadelphia ranked 48th out of 50 cities. Another report placed us in the last quartile among peer cities. Recovery doesn't happen by blow. If we don't get organized, I realized, we'd once once again be in that bottom quartile. We shouldn't tolerate that. We've got great assets. Information technology's only a matter of marshaling them together and coming upwards with an organized program."

Getting to work

And then, rather than wait for local government to enact a vision, Cohen and a small band of what he describes every bit "total partners" got to piece of work. There was IBX CEO and Chamber of Commerce Board Chair Dan Hilferty; Bedchamber CEO Rob Wondering; and longtime consultant Sue Jacobson.

Cohen emphasized that their mission had to be an atypical Chamber of Commerce undertaking. Every bit Lightfoot had done—"I have read the Lightfoot report, and you lot're right, information technology'south terrific," Cohen says—the working group they put together would have to get across the C-suite and expect like Philadelphia, which meant inviting leaders from divergent realms, everything from small business to nonprofits to clergy to activism, to sit together at the problem-solving table.

"The biggest mistake nosotros can make with this is to not provide partners with ownership of the plan," Cohen says. "Diversity is one of Philadelphia'south nifty strengths. The other mistake that often happens is you hire a consultant like McKinsey to come, do all this research, make recommendations, and it's a study that gets put on a bookshelf somewhere. I don't need another consultant written report on my bookshelf. This has to be a smaller number of brusk-run to medium-run actionable ideas that can be implemented over the next few months."

In short order, The Philadelphia Regional Recharge and Recovery Chore Strength came into existence. Along with the Sleeping room'southward CEO Council for Growth Executive Director Claire Marrazzo Greenwood, the Job Strength is being run by Projection Manager Kate Hagedorn, a contempo Wharton MBA grad who formerly served as the Chamber's betoken person on borough engagement, one of those ambitious young Philadelphians reshaping the city.

The various, 36-member list of regional leaders recruited for the Task Force is an impressive group that includes non-usual suspects similar venture capitalists Osagie Imasogie and Josh Kopelman, likewise as Penn President Amy Gutman and Drexel President John Fry. (When The Denizen brought the presidents of the city's major universities together a few years back for a stimulating public discussion, it was the starting time time all of them had been together, either in public or private.)

The Task Force report, which will be released within the next two to three weeks, volition focus on viii primal verticals: Higher Didactics; Small and Mid-Sized Companies; Hospitality/Tourism/Arts and Culture; Health Care Delivery; Financial Services; Tech, Media, Telecom; Life Sciences; and Talent/Workforce.

As Cohen knows, there are tons of ways these reports can go sideways. Here, and so, worth precisely what the esteemed members of the Job Force are paying for information technology, are some warnings and highfalutin thoughts to perhaps help inform the home stretch of their deliberations:

Can collaboration be the new normal?

This is, and has long been, i very siloed town. Let's have just i recent example: Earlier this year, before the pandemic, Metropolis Council announced a ludicrous "plan" to cut poverty past 25 percent in four years. Go along in mind, there is one city that cutting its poverty rate between 2006 and 2013, and that was New York—and everybody cheered Gotham's 4 percent poverty pass up. Hither, we were to believe, a set of vague bromides (universal bones income, without a nod toward how to pay for it) would reinvent the cycle and put all other cities to shame.

The plan materialized in a thing of months, after some Council hearings. On the morning of the press briefing, a leader of a prominent nonprofit received an invitation to attend from the office of Quango President Darrell Clarke and show back up for the plan—which he'd still not even seen. But he went, considering when the Council President asks…

Fact is, every bit Philadelphia has become more and more of a co-operative-role town, business leaders have outsourced civic leadership to the political realm (how'south that worked out for us?) and the nonprofit sector has often been loath to footstep up, reliant every bit it oftentimes is upon regime largesse.

"The mistake that often happens is yous rent a consultant similar McKinsey to come up, do all this research, make recommendations, and it'southward a report that gets put on a bookshelf somewhere," Cohen says. "This has to be a smaller number of short-run to medium-run actionable ideas that can be implemented over the next few months."

We're a city with institutions long conditioned to stay in their lane. Other cities, like Pittsburgh, have seen institutions step up and drive change. Once a symbol of Rust Belt decay, the Steel City has remade itself into a vibrant tech hub. The transformation has been driven past the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a various consortium of business, nonprofit, university, philanthropy and local authorities leaders. This yr, they've produced "Next Is Now," a 10-year "vision of vitality for the Pittsburgh region."

There is no Philly analog to the "all hands on deck" breadth and ambition of the Allegheny Conference, where yous find diverse entities willingly accepting the mantle of city leadership beyond their own P&Ls.

That volition crave an en-masse revolution in stakeholder thinking and arroyo. Some of u.s. had hoped that the way so many entities came together to shape the metropolis's Amazon pitch would pb to a new normal of collaboration and leadership, simply—as in Pittsburgh—y'all merely might need a key institution to marshall those forces together.

Could the work of the R & R Chore Strength be the first step toward that change? That gets us to our next bullet point:

Implementation i s policy

That was the rallying cry of the late civic genius Jeremy Nowak, the Denizen's founding Chairman. There is no dearth of keen ideas; the problem is, city government is often the wasteland where ideas go to dice. That's why, in Chicago, the policy work on Lightfoot'southward plan was staffed by Chicago's Civic Consulting Alliance, which dispatches nonprofit and business leaders to piece of work with local government, infusing the bureaucracy with visionary planning and policy implementation feel.

Allow'due south assume the R & R study is as good as Chicago's, chock total of stirring ideas. Fact is, the almost innovative part of Chicago'due south plan is not the ideas; it's the pledge that the Chore Force will continue to meet on a quarterly basis and publicly update on its goals and timetables through 2023. And it's that the implementation of its recommendations won't fall squarely on the shoulders of City Hall bureaucrats and political apparatchiks. The role of the Consulting Alliance will continue, in other words.

Hither, there is no Civic Consulting Alliance analog; the Bedroom doesn't fifty-fifty have a vibrant policy arm. Much of the research done by the Task Force was performed by McKinsey and the staffs of those on the Task Force. "I was just in a meeting this morn about this very thing," Cohen says. "The bulk of the discussion now has to exist, 'How practise we execute?' Later nosotros put out the working model, we have to proceed the leadership of the viii pillars involved. Nosotros have to track progress and concord, and be held, accountable."

It's a good sign that Cohen and Hilferty, et al, see the need for a sustained implementation plan, and it's too encouraging that, according to Cohen, Mayor Kenney has been enthusiastic nearly the Chore Force's work backside the scenes. Simply it no doubt would be easier to rethink the city if the Mayor took ownership of a recovery plan, every bit in Chicago.

There are a lot of good ideas to borrow from Chicago's plan, like reimagining workforce development, like incentivizing corporations to do business with local, small and minority-owned vendors, (which Drexel Academy'south Bruce Katz writes about today,) and like establishing a "Chicago Service Corps," creating paid public works opportunities for underemployed people, furloughed workers, and young people.

Simply the easy part will be releasing some good ideas. The hard part volition be turning the tanker that is local regime to prefer them in ways that don't render them unrecognizable once the bureaucracy has its way with them.

Opportunity, opportunity, opportunity

I've been waiting for someone in our political realm to brand him or herself an "Opportunity Democrat," but apparently the polarization of our politics makes that a non-starter. But a metropolis with the worst poverty in the nation that doubles downwardly on opportunity every bit to a style to accost the ever-widening gaps betwixt have and have-non? That would seem to exist a winning strategy.

Lori Lightfoot thinks so. Fifty-fifty before Covid-xix, she'd focused on stakeholder collaboration and investment to steer more than $750 million to distressed neighborhoods, and she'd implemented a Solutions Toward Catastrophe Poverty (STEP) programme that went beyond safety internet measures and instead aimed at growing out of poverty. At present she's doubling down on growth.

The easy part will exist releasing some good ideas. The difficult part will be turning the tanker that is local regime to adopt them in ways that don't render them unrecognizable once the bureaucracy has its way with them.

"You lot're right, everybody is facing revenue challenges, merely that'south the whole indicate," Lightfoot said on CNBC, when, upon releasing her programme, the proposed pregnant investments in workforce development, infrastructure and job growth were questioned. "If yous don't grow the economy, if yous don't lure new businesses, if you lot don't aggrandize existing businesses, then you lot're not going to have the acquirement stream to back up the vital services that the regime provides. We are looking to grow and not merely tax the existing economy. We've got to give our businesses some relief and you do that by growing the economy and focusing on our strengths."

Then what does a pro-growth agenda look similar, across just lowering taxes and becoming more business organisation-friendly? First, information technology requires acknowledging that we take a lot be aback about—like our worst-in-the-nation poverty rate—only that arguably Philadelphia's about stunning statistic is that, in a metropolis that is 45-per centum Black, just 2.five percent of businesses are endemic by African Americans; it'southward half-dozen percent if yous count sole proprietors. If we're putting together a programme to grow, what is the North Star goal for (a) poverty and (b) African-American business organisation ownership?

Venture capitalist, entrepreneur and philanthropist John Promise Bryant, founder of Operation Hope, is out with his "Marshall Plan for Blackness America." It's a "government-framed, public policy-led, private sector co-invested and encouraged, customs-adopted, and American citizen-supported plan that would effectively harness the untapped aspirational potential of tens of millions of African Americans through free enterprise," Bryant says. "I am talking about adding one to 2 percent of almanac GDP through a rational investment programme for a revitalized America."

There'south a lot in Bryant's bold call for unleashing capital in distressed neighborhoods throughout the nation that could be practical in Philadelphia. But encouraging investment in N Philly is easier said than done, as evidenced in this excerpt from Andre Perry'south Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America'south Black Cities, which, in tragic particular, chronicles all of the systemic roadblocks to making sure that investment meets inner-city need.

But I cite Bryant because of his boldness: Information technology'southward great that Cohen is talking near actionable short-run steps, but we also need something to rally around, something similar a Marshall Programme for Philadelphia. Nosotros demand to mind FDR's long ago call for "bold, persistent experimentation."

This week, The New Yorker is out with a compelling look at the promising results of Stockton, California's guaranteed income experiment, under Mayor Michael Tubbs, funded in part by the foundation of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who spoke at our 2022 Ideas We Should Steal Festival.

I don't expect the forthcoming study from the Philadelphia Regional Recharge and Recovery Task Forcefulness to blow us away with out-of-the-box systemic reforms. Information technology volition be plenty, for now, that smart, achieved leaders are engaged, and volition proceed to be.

I've been on the contend well-nigh guaranteed income and universal bones income experiments because of how Michael Bloomberg attacked poverty and grew jobs in New York: by rewarding work. But maybe Andrew Yang was on to something? Possibly the city with the worst poverty and anemic job growth ought to be a testing ground for new ideas?

And perchance we should commit to solving our own bug. Citizen columnist Bruce Katz'south piece of work at Drexel and with Accelerator for America, a consortium of mayors and city leaders developing solutions to economic insecurity, has fabricated him an evangelist for pro-opportunity, inclusive economic growth, particularly at present. He goes across the usual options of seeking bailouts or reflexively taxation and spending, and talks instead nigh the ways cities can assistance themselves.

"In Copenhagen and Hamburg, they have public nugget corporations, public or privately owned and publicly managed institutions that are able to take all the land owned past the government—city, county, land, port potency, airport authority, stadium authorisation, redevelopment say-so—and put it into i corporate vehicle and get the revenue from the disposition of that publicly owned land to invest in infrastructure, innovation, inclusion," Katz says.

Of course, here, we know that the city is—and shouldn't be—in the gas, water and airport business. (In 2015, Council President Darrell Clarke shamefully didn't even hold a unmarried hearing on the Nutter administration plan to sell the Gas Works, which would take been at least a cyberspace $400 million windfall for the urban center). But beyond those assets, there is no principal list of all that the city owns. Katz says that'south no surprise.

"You think at that place'd be a website, merely information technology doesn't work similar that," Katz said. "If yous desire to actually finance big scale infrastructure, you demand to know what the government owns, the value of what it owns, and take a disposition strategy so the public can do good from information technology as opposed to having a burn sale because anybody is desperate. I think with big information and analytics nosotros tin begin to build a platform for this new kind of finance in the U.Due south. We act like nosotros're poor. We're not. These are the wealthiest cities in the world. What we don't have are the mechanisms that are tried and tested primarily in Northern Europe to go beyond tax and regulate."

Equally Katz often reminds us, the United States does non lack capital. Access to capital? That's another affair. Minority entrepreneurs have been systematically shielded from opportunity, as Perry's volume makes articulate. Any recovery plan for Philadelphia needs to reckon with at least addressing, if non dismantling, the forces that have combined to brand the boilerplate internet worth of a white family ten times that of a Black family.

I don't expect the forthcoming report from the Philadelphia Regional Recharge and Recovery Job Strength to blow usa away with out-of-the-box systemic reforms. It will exist plenty, for now, that smart, accomplished leaders—with talented staffs they've deployed to research these matters—are engaged, and volition continue to be.

Simply, too, here's hoping it's a offset footstep. Nearly 3 years ago, I was at a conference nearly innovation in cities, and someone asked Kasim Reed, the then-mayor of Atlanta, simply how he'd managed to post such stellar economic growth numbers in mail service-Neat Recession America. He smiled and confessed that his success in creating jobs had petty to do with him.

He cited all the task creators in his region—Coca-Cola, Home Depot and Turner Broadcasting amongst them—and he credited their CEOs and other all-time and brightest minds in his region for informing his city's economic development policies and for helping his government implement them.

What a novel idea, I idea at the time: a kitchen cabinet of civic leaders that focuses on solving problems and isn't afraid to tell elected leaders what to practise, and offer their expertise in how to do it.

Photo by Elevated Angles / Visit Philadelphia

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/philly-economic-task-force/

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