The Pew Charitable Trusts does an annual report called The State of Philadelphia which is actually a nice piece of data journalism. Here are a handful of things that caught my attention.

• Poverty among the Hispanic population was significantly higher than among the black population for most of the last decade, but the data show a sharp drop (in Hispanic poverty) between 2019 and 2021, so that the poverty rate among the two groups was almost equal in 2021. I find this sudden lurch in the data for one group odd, and wonder if it will turn out to be an outlier or if it will continue. Did pandemic aid reach Hispanics more effectively for some reason? Or was there some change in the race questions in the 2020 census, or how they were answered? Poverty among Asian-Americans is significantly higher than among whites in Philadelphia, which I wouldn’t have guessed because this goes against the national trend. Are there maybe more first-generation immigrants in the city limits than in the suburbs, or do more affluent Asian-Americans move out?
• The percentage of residents with a college degree climbed steadily and significantly over the past decade, from about 24% to 35% (residents over 25 years old). This is good because people with college degrees have a median income of about $60,000 per year. Even this is not enough to live a particularly comfortable middle class life style in the city, especially if this person is the sole bread winner for a family, and remember median means have of college graduates make less than this. A 25-year-old college graduate living a studio apartment and without too much student debt could probably make this work pretty well. The median income of people with only a high school diploma is $30,000 – definitely not enough to live a middle class lifestyle. These people are service workers and laborers, and work some medical jobs like home health aid. A 2-year associates degree boosts this to about $40,000, a bit discouraging when considering that vocational training is being pushed as a reasonable alternative to college and a big step up from high school. It appears to be much better to stick it out for the 4-year degree if you can.
• Philadelphia has five “magnet” high schools, and about 80% of students from these schools go to college. Meanwhile, only about 30% of students in all other “neighborhood” public high schools go to college. This is a huge disparity – kids are clearly being segregated (by academic achievement, but this likely correlates to race and family income of course) at an early age. Judge Smayles would approve.

• Somewhat surprisingly, by at least one measure of housing affordability, the percent of income spent on rent, Philadelphia is in the middle of the pack among major cities and ahead (i.e., has lower cost of living) than some sun belt cities like Houston and Phoenix, and just a bit higher than the national average.
• More than 500 homicides per year, more than double the rate of 2013-2014. Almost 70% of homicides are caused by some combination of arguments, retaliation, and drugs. Domestic violence is another 9%. These are all terrible things of course but they do not seem like random street crime that the average citizen is likely to get tangled up in whether they like it or not. Something called “highway robbery” accounts for a surprising 7% of homicides – are these the carjackings we have been hearing about? This is a scary one because it is seemingly more random.
• The Philadelphia jail population has been cut roughly in half over the last decade. Much of this population was in jail awaiting trial. I am concerned about mass incarceration, and I like seeing these numbers go down. It is impossible to not notice that violent crime has been rising at the same time. Hopefully this is correlation without causation. Even if there is some causation, it is a sick society where a large chunk of the population has to be locked up in cages to keep the peace.
• Public transportation ridership collapsed during the pandemic, and although it had picked up a bit in 2022 it had a long way to go. This does not seem like a sustainable situation unless we are willing to sustain even larger subsidies in the future than we have in the past. And from my personal, anecdotal experience riding buses and trains lately, on-time performance is much worse than it was before the pandemic.
• Philadelphia’s largest source of funding is its regressive wage tax. This was always a way of getting the larger metropolitan region to pay some of the cost of concentrated poverty in the city limits, in my view. This is going to work less well going forward, and I am not sure the politicians understand that yet.