Inga Saffron, the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tries to use the cell phone to tie together trends in Philadelphia in the 2010s. I don’t know if I buy her argument 100%, and I don’t know how serious she is about it, but the list of trends is interesting, and it’s interesting to compare her assessment to my own experience living and working in the city for most of the decade.

• young adults moving back to the city – this was a huge trend and hard to miss. Apps made it easier to get food and stuff to their homes without driving, and ride sharing made it easier to get around. Inga argues a lot of people “ditched their cars” – this may be true, I haven’t seen the data, but one thing I observed is that a lot of new homes featured garages, and larger developments featured big garages and even surface parking in some cases. This changed the walking experience in some neighborhoods quite a bit, and not for the better. Overall though, it is great for the city to have the people.
• Tech jobs are one reason the young professionals came back. Tax policy and zoning code changes also had an effect. Inga doesn’t mention “councilmanic prerogative”, but in my neighborhood this means that the 2011 zoning code, considered a national model, still has not gone into effect at the end of the decade. The council person and developers he favors benefit from this by being able to negotiate every new development in their favor. This means that what should be the main street in a densely populated neighborhood underserved by shops and restaurants is mostly still a bunch of building supply warehouses. This also plays to anti-gentrification voters, which has an ugly racial element to it that is hard to talk about. In my view, Inga correctly diagnoses the problem of lower-income residents being pushed to more affordable housing farther from jobs in the city center, without corresponding improvements in public transportation.
• People are giving up their cars, according to Inga, but traffic is worse and buses can’t run on time due to all the ride sharing and deliveries. Parking garages are disappearing because they are under-subscribed. I would like to examine the numbers on all these issues. Traffic does seem worse, but my instinct is that it is due to poor street design and maintenance, traffic and parking management/pricing, and an almost complete lack of law enforcement effort. Solutions to these problems exist, and all these things in the public realm need to be brought into the 21st century in concert with the new technologies coming from the private sector.