Philadelphia's Diagnosis

One thing is missing

Like this, but multiplied by maybe 10,000. (Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash)

Over at Pirate Wire, Nick Russo has written up a good description of just what is going wrong with Philadelphia.

Trash Fire: The Collapse of Philadelphia

There is one big thing missing from Russo’s account, however: city government corruption.

Never once was the word corruption used in the article. That might not seem too surprising to outsiders, but to Pennsylvanians failing to cite Philly’s massive corruption problems is like failing to cite “the softball sized cancerous tumor occupying the deceased’s torso” on a death certificate. Sure, it might not be the only reason he died in his sleep, but it seems important.

I don’t mean to pick on Russo here or call him out for being misleading. However, it is important to interrogate, paragraphs like:

One such regulation stipulates that the height of any tire pile be no higher than 10 feet. On November 3 of last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) inspected Delaware Valley Recycling’s yard, a scrapyard along the banks of the Schuykill River. It passed inspection. Six days later, there was a fire there, and it grew out of control because it was fueled by tire piles as high as six stories. 

Piles of tires do not go from 10 feet to 60 feet in 6 days. Why? Because tires pile in a cone, like sand, the slope of the sides being relatively fixed, the radius growing proportionally to the height. Thus, the volume of tires goes up by the cube of the height increase. In other words, for the height to increase by 6 times, the number of tires has to increase by 6^3, or 216 times. There would have to be something like 215 other 10 foot tall piles of tires sitting around and ready to be moved to the Delaware Valley Recycling yard within 6 days for the site to have passed inspection and been so far out of inspection within the week¹.

That strikes me as unlikely.

What seems more likely is that the inspector either didn’t bother to look and see, or saw and then suffered severe amnesia due to the amount of cash being put into his hands. In other words, corruption.

This isn’t a new problem, either. Philly has been struggling with the lawlessness of its law enforcement and other government employees for years. It has been referred to as “Filthy-delphia” from us outsiders for at least the past 40 years, with good reason.

Now, some will say “Yea, sure, but all cities are corrupt to some extent. What about the problems of not being able to hire anyone?” That’s just it, though, the corruption is exactly why the city can’t hire good employees.

Who wants to work in a place where all your co-workers are engaged in corruption? Only people who want to engage in it as well. Anyone with a sense of right and wrong, a sense of civic duty, is going to be seen as a threat by all their coworkers and pushed out. Whether because their work ethic makes all those too lazy to do their jobs look bad or because the corrupt fear their crimes being exposed, the good government worker will be targeted for removal. Why would anyone sign up for that?

Russo is absolutely correct, however, that Philadelphia’s problem stems from the disinterest of its citizens in their city’s governance. Corruption in the bureaucracy persists because of the blind eyes of elected officials, and elected official corruption persists because of the blind eyes of the electorate.

If Philly is to recover and stop being the dysfunctional cesspool it has long been, its citizens need to start holding their officials to account.

1. In theory you could stack tires vertically and so avoid the cubed volume problem, but anyone who has actually stacked tires before will tell you that is almost impossible without heavy posts as tall as the desired stack to loop each tire on. A pile of tires starts to look like a pile of coins or rocks really quickly.