PLANS ON PLANS

The next mayor will inherit a backlog of half-finished, paused or never-implemented initiatives from the Kenney administration

Philadelphia’s government is replete with plans to make the city more environmentally friendly. From climate change resilience, to reducing traffic fatalities, to urban agriculture, the City, its consultants and community stakeholders have spent enormous amounts of time and brainpower contributing to and drafting plans to make this a more sustainable city. It is intoxicating to imagine what the city would look like if all these plans were implemented.

But drafting a plan is just a starting point, and generally a lot easier than effecting change on the ground. Even well-intentioned leaders could run into unforeseen hurdles when it comes time to turn the plan into action.

Plans don’t carry the force of law, and they don’t necessarily translate into the political will to reach their goals. A cynical observer might interpret planning as something City leaders do to placate pesky advocates rather than actually expending the political and financial capital it takes to implement real change.

The new mayoral administration will need to decide what to do with the tall stack of plans it will inherit: which it will ignore, which will receive only lip service and which it will commit to.

Grid counted at least 20 such plans, as well as a couple of important initiatives worth mentioning. Although there are more plans than Grid can explore in one article, let’s take a look at some of the big ones.

Plan

What’s the Plan?

In November 2022 the City released a long-awaited urban agriculture plan draft It was released on the website of Soil Generation, a Black and Brown led coalition of growers tasked with drafting the plan with consulting firm Interface Studio. The first public meeting for the plan had taken place in December 2019. The pandemic and other delays pushed the planning process back, and ultimately what came out toward the end of 2022 was a draft. More public input followed, including a December 3 Zoom meeting to present the draft plan.

The primary problems that the plan focuses on will come as no surprise to anyone involved with growing produce on vacant land in Philadelphia: food insecurity is concentrated in low-income Black and Brown neighborhoods, and growers there generally lack ownership of the land on which they raise crops. Gardens are particularly vulnerable in neighborhoods where gentrification and demand for more housing drives developers to build on the vacant lots that longtime locals have been caring for, sometimes for decades. Growers also need infrastructure (greenhouses, water, electricity, etc.) and struggle with low wages for agricultural work, among other challenges.

How’s It Going?

The draft plan calls for several ambitious actions. There are 25 alone under the land section, such as reducing the loss of growing space on private land sold in sheriff’s sales and creating a City land code specific to agriculture. None are final, though, since the plan is still a draft. A Parks & Recreation spokesperson told Grid that the final report is due in the spring of 2023.