Mayor Cherelle Parker’s Search for a United Philadelphia

The line to enter the Pennsylvania Convention Center stretched from the doorway to the corner, up a full block of North 12th Street, and around the back of the building: A quarter-mile queue of people in every state of excitement, amusement, agitation and boredom. There were competing sets of matching t-shirts signaling support for and opposition to the Philadelphia 76ers’ proposed Center City arena, drumming, chants, and an alternate version of the Sixers’ victory song with the line “No arena!” swapped in.

But inside the building, Mayor Cherelle Parker was in control. The purpose of the meeting was to hear community input on a proposal to build the new arena on Market Street at the edge of Chinatown on the site of an existing mall. Parker emceed the meeting herself. She stood at the lectern facing a large conference room filled to capacity and set the ground rules.

“This is intended to be a listening session,” she said. “Let me just say this, because it’s on my spirit: For those of you in this room who have never worked with me or don’t know me, the wrong way to attempt to influence me is to think that you’re going to bully me … . This meeting will be done decently and in order.”

For the moment, the room was silent. Parker then called up groups of witnesses half a dozen at a time. One week later, Parker announced that she would back the project. Shortly afterward she unveiled the terms of a $50 million community benefits agreement that she had apparently negotiated directly with the team.

The Parker administration mantra is “One Philly, a united city.” She repeats it in every public appearance, often directing the crowd and assembled dignitaries to hold up their index fingers as they recite the line. She often says she wants to make Philadelphia “the safest, cleanest, and greenest big city in America, with access to economic opportunity for all.” These repetitions have been enormously successful in signaling her priorities, which, less than a year into her term, even critics and casual observers can recite.

In reality, the vibes in Philadelphia are all over the place. Philadelphians broadly profess relief at being free of former Mayor Jim Kenney, whose final years in office will be remembered for his sluggishness and irritability. Violent crime is down dramatically from the peaks of the pandemic years and Center City has shown more resilience than many other urban downtowns. The major sports teams are competitive; developers are building new apartments; housing is expensive, but less so than in many other big cities on the East Coast.

Yet a sense of disorder and unsafety still pervades the public transit system, which is on the verge of a potentially catastrophic budget shortfall. The University of the Arts, a cornerstone of the downtown cultural mix for over a century and an entry point to the city for thousands of young people every year, announced its abrupt closure earlier this summer. Poverty remains high, and an opioid crisis still ravages neighborhoods like Kensington in North Philadelphia, with rampant public drug use and unsheltered homelessness.

The politics of the city are shifting somewhat too. The progressive Working Families Party has essentially unseated the Republicans as the minority party in Philadelphia’s City Council. But the favored candidate of the progressive left, former City Councilmember Helen Gym, did not come close to winning the Democratic primary for mayor last spring. Parker, a former councilmember and state representative, won a plurality of votes in the primary while running on a moderate platform with the backing of the city’s building trades unions. She has explicitly distanced herself from the city’s most progressive factions, which seem to be losing some momentum.

As mayor, Parker has sought to consolidate decision-making authority in her own office. She has drastically expanded the mayor’s office staff and budget. She made an early effort to centralize communications through the mayor’s office, requiring the administration’s approval for even the most innocuous social media posts from individual library branches. And she has empowered a few top aides with oversight of vast swaths of the municipal government. She’s been so emphatic about consistent messaging, in fact, that advocates for various causes have learned to appeal to her on her own terms.

“We have to make sure that whatever we’re doing fits into ‘Cleaner, greener, safer,’” says Chris Gale, director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.

Bike advocates had some tense moments with the Parker administration over the summer, particularly after a drunk driver killed a bicyclist who was riding in the bike lane on a Center City street. Advocates, who had long sought stronger protections on those bike lanes, and others were on alert after Parker had cut funding for the city’s Vision Zero street-safety program in her first budget. (The administration argued that it had actually moved some funding to a different department but that it would still support street-safety improvements.) After an awkward attempt to deliver petitions to the mayor’s office, during which advocates said they were met with cold stares from the mayor’s staff even though they had an appointment, tensions cooled. Parker went on a bike ride with members of the group, and the administration has begun holding meetings about a proposal to improve the bike lanes with concrete barriers and other infrastructure.

On other issues, Parker has been happy to press ahead on the strength of her own convictions. In May, she implemented a policy requiring all city workers to return to the office full time despite strong opposition from some municipal labor unions. Parker said the policy was a matter of equity, requiring white-collar workers to work under the same rules as other workers who had to work in person even through the pandemic. It “delivers on my promise of an accessible City workforce that is best situated to serve the people of Philadelphia,” she said in a statement in May.

But many city workers felt they were being used as pawns in a scheme to boost foot traffic for downtown businesses. Many office workers weren’t charmed by the mayor’s offer of free french fries on the first day back to work in mid-July, and some reported that the offices themselves weren’t prepared for their return. The policy is uniquely strict for a big-city public workforce, and union leaders say it makes little sense in light of already widespread vacancies in the municipal government. Some people have quit because of it, they say; others are planning to quit as soon as they can find other jobs.

“You have to get buy-in in order for the plan to be successful,” says April Gigetts, the president of American Council of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 47, the union of white-collar city workers. “That’s what I’m waiting to see under this administration.”

DC 47 is still fighting the back-to-the-office policy, with arbitration scheduled in December.

There’s an aspect of Parker’s performance as mayor which is a refreshing change of pace for the city. She is Philadelphia’s 100th mayor and the first woman to hold the job. A former public school teacher, she knows how to marshal the attention of a room. She refers regularly to her upbringing in a middle-class Black neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia and has spent her whole political career working on policies meant to help build wealth and stability in those communities.

“I think she lives every decision that she makes. These are not pure political computations or hypotheticals that will never touch her,” says Ira Goldstein, a senior adviser at the Reinvestment Fund who worked with Parker when she was a City Councilmember on efforts to curb racial disparities in home lending and appraisals. Goldstein also served on her transition committee. “She came to this stage of running for mayor and being mayor at a time when the city was hungry for someone who really wanted to be mayor, and that came through,” he says.

Even people who oppose her policies will acknowledge a certain quality in her personal dynamism and in the force of her approach. Big decisions about public policy and investments in cities like Philadelphia often get bogged down in community engagement and horse-trading. On the issues that she’s identified as top priorities, Parker has outlined her own strategy and worked methodically to implement it. She campaigned on cleaning up trash, for example, and has already sent cleanup crews down virtually every block in Philadelphia — something that hasn’t happened in the city for a long, long time.

“I think her sense of impatience is incredibly healthy,” says Paul Levy, the former longtime director of the Center City District, a downtown business improvement district. “She’s willing to listen to lots of different points of view, but she’s not paralyzed by it.”

But it’s obvious that the “united city” line is more prescriptive than descriptive. Parker’s most ardent critics say she’s focused more on exhibiting action on her campaign priorities than on actually changing outcomes in lasting ways.

Her approach to long-standing public safety and quality-of-life issues in Kensington is a case in point. The neighborhood is a national epicenter of the opioid epidemic. Public drug use and homeless encampments often shock visitors to the area. Scenes of human deprivation are all over YouTube, broadcast around the world. Local residents and political leaders have been clamoring for solutions for years. Early in her tenure, Parker announced a five-phase initiative for reviving Kensington that was designed, in part, “to permanently shut down all pervasive open-air drug markets.” It began with a warning phase to drug users in the area and increased police presence, and progressed to periodic mass arrests and encampment sweeps.

Critics of the policy say so far it’s done little more than move people around the neighborhood: Police will clear one block, and drug users will recongregate a few blocks away. An effort to establish new drug treatment centers is still in the works. Meanwhile, at least one person died in jail after being arrested in a Kensington sweep.

Parker’s eagerness to do something about Kensington has stood in for a comprehensive community vision for the area informed by best practices in public health, some critics say. She has vowed to defund needle exchange programs, which experts say have helped slow the spread of diseases.

“Success to me starts with the co-creation of solutions with the community, and the reason that’s so important is because those most affected by these issues are those with the most knowledge about how to solve them,” says Bill McKinney, executive director of the New Kensington Community Development Corporation. “When the community co-owns something, that’s how something becomes sustainable.”

Still, other leaders praise her efforts in Kensington. There are more police and more sanitation workers on the streets than before, says City Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, whose district includes parts of Kensington. Changing the trajectory of the neighborhood will take a long time, but even if the practical outcome of the early policing efforts is just to shuffle drug users around, that’s OK, Lozada says.

“The goal is to make them uncomfortable,” she says. “We’re going to get to the point where people understand that they just can’t live out in the elements. They just can’t live on the sidewalks. It’s not healthy for them and it’s not healthy for the neighborhood.”

Parker did not grant an interview for this story. Her office asked for written questions but did not respond to them.

The 76ers arena proposal will be a test of Parker’s ability to deliver on a first-year priority. The team has vowed not to ask for any city subsidy, and is promising lots of jobs and economic benefits. The building-trades unions are firmly behind the project. The City Council is set to begin debating a package of bills related to the arena proposal this week, and the team is pushing for a green light by the end of the year. The team’s owners have been publicly flirting with New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who has offered generous tax subsidies if the team decides to relocate to Camden, where it already has a practice facility.

But it’s not clear that the Philadelphia proposal has the backing of the public. A citywide poll conducted in late August showed that 69 percent of respondents were opposed to the project. And most residents of Chinatown are staunchly against the arena, arguing that it will invite gentrification and harm local businesses and institutions. The neighborhood has a long history of fighting large-scale development projects, including a baseball stadium and casino in decades past. Parker has met with Chinatown leaders on several occasions, but some residents say the meetings have been called with little notice, a hand-picked list of invitees, and a sense that Parker was just ticking a box before moving ahead with her plan to support the project.

“What they’re trying to do is make people give up and think they have no power,” says Vivian Chang, executive director of Asian Americans United, which has organized opposition to the project. “Is Chinatown a constituency that she’s valuing? It doesn’t feel like it.”

On a Tuesday afternoon in October, Parker visited an elementary school in South Philadelphia to announce new before- and after-school programs as part of an “Extended Day, Extended Year” school initiative that she’d included in her campaign. The initiative included new funding from the school district but also roped in a number of programs that were already underway. Seated in the back row were three teachers wearing “No Arena” t-shirts, quietly grumbling about not being consulted on the new program. They clammed up when a local education reporter asked them for an interview.

After the announcement, Parker visited a kindergarten classroom. Kids were seated around small tables as the mayor, her staff, the school superintendent, and the press crowded in. She asked if the students had any questions. “Is it hard being the mayor?” asked one.

“Well, it’s a pretty challenging job, but coming here today with our school superintendent and being with your amazing principal and the teachers and all of these people to see you, you all make it all worth it for me,” she said.

Then she transformed back into the school teacher she used to be.

“I want you all to remember this for me,” she said. “There’s this word that I love more than anything, and the word is called unity. Unity is when everyone is together and everyone works together. When we all work together we’re like a team, and teamwork makes us so strong because we’re all together.”

“Everyone put one finger in the air. Let me see you all — who doesn’t have their one finger in the air?” she said. “I want you to repeat after me.”