The initial results, as recently reported in The Philadelphia Inquirer, of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s plan to clean every block in Philadelphia were as expected: While the labor-intensive effort spruced things up in the short term, many blocks across the city quickly returned to how they were before the cleanup — dishearteningly dirty. As one resident bluntly put it, the improvements only lasted “for a couple days.”
This result was unsurprising even to people in the administration. As Carlton Williams, Philadelphia’s director of the newly-created Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, explained, the Parker administration “knew that one single cleanup wasn’t going to address years and years of blight and neglect.”
While Mayor Parker’s commitment to cleaning the entire city twice a year is commendable, it will likely prove challenging, expensive and ultimately unsustainable. Rather, she should leverage the City’s wealth of public data to strategically prioritize the areas most in need of support…