One of the challenges elected officials face is explaining why it continues to get harder for working people to live a middle-class life. In many neighborhoods, middle-class homeowners are seeing their real estate taxes skyrocket through the back door of “assessments,” an issue Hall Monitor will continue to cover.
There should be clarity that the real estate tax increases are not a legal requirement. In every other county in the State, new assessments must, by law, be revenue-neutral. If the assessments go up, the tax rate must go down. There is no such requirement in Philadelphia, but it is not prohibited. Council can lower the tax rate to compensate for the increase in assessments. But if the City did that, then there would not be a surplus in the City budget that the business community is demanding to be used to reduce business taxes.
It’s not just real estate taxes that pressure the middle class. Gasoline prices at the pump remain high despite a barrel of oil falling below $80. Insurance companies, often taking advantage of “automatic payments” and automatic renewals, have dramatically increased rates. The City of Philadelphia has chosen not to appoint an insurance advocate as required by its home rule charter.
The City-owned Water Department, with the “public advocate” supporting the water department’s proposed increase, is raising rates by 12% on September 1st.
The State declined to fund SEPTA at the levels needed to avoid service cuts and rate hikes. And the promise of eliminating medical debt, as promised in Govenor Shaprio’s press releases, seems to have disappeared.
The Pennsylvania Parking Authority (PPA) is adding to the pressure on working people by raising parking permits from $ 35 to $75, despite the experts saying it will not solve parking congestion problems.
The bill authorizing the increase and the limits to how many permits a household can obtain, putting pressure on households where adult children live until they can find affordable housing, passed out of the Committee on Street and Services on May 5th of this year. The bill authorizing the increase was one of 17 bills considered at the hearing. According to the records, the PPA spokesperson did not mention the size of the increase. On page 80, “Ordinance 240335, amending temporary parking permits. This amendment will increase the number of days residents can apply and will increase the fee. The Philadelphia Parking Authority has no objection to the ordinances previously read.”
The experts from the Delaware Regional Planning Commission attended the hearing. In testimony that appears to conflict with what we are being told about Philadelphia, “At the time of our research, the City was experiencing its 13th consecutive year of population growth while average household size, rates of vehicle ownership, and development activity, as measured by building permits, also ticked upward. Between 2010 and 2018, 0-car households declined by almost 13,000, despite overall households increasing by nearly 33,000. Furthermore, we estimated that the number of cars in Philadelphia increased faster than the number of people.”
The Commission warns Council, “Pricing reforms are popular. However, setting effective and fair prices can be complex… To conclude, no single parking management strategy can solve Philadelphia’s challenge of too many cars competing for too few curbside spaces. Parking issues are multifaceted and require a comprehensive approach in combination with land use and transportation planning. And instituting any reforms will require trade-offs between efficacy, convenience, ease of administration and enforcement, and importantly, equity.”
University of Pennsylvania Associate Professor Michael Fichman blamed congestion and parking scarcity on people, not the structure of public policy.
“My sense is the core issue that we’re talking about here is not that the curb is too congested, Fichman said. “It’s that too many people own cars, and there’s not enough place to put them. And so, the question we should be asking is, what, what are our goals?· We should be trying to get cars out of the City.”
The professor goes on to say that for many people, car ownership is needed to get to work. He adds, “Addressing this [the problem of parking and car ownership] requires SEPTA services, rideshare, bike infrastructure, car infrastructure, things that give you a good ·alternative to buying a car or bringing a car to a neighborhood that you want to move to because you have someplace of, you know, employment that it requires you to drive. So we need to consider where jobs are going.· They should be in transit, accessible places.· So this is a broader question, maybe, than, than just pricing.”
Others who testified suggested different fees in different neighborhoods. None blamed the lack of available parking on developers who build without adequate off street parking for the new residents.
The increase in parking fees does nothing to address what the experts say are the real problems. It places an additional burden on those struggling to keep their heads above the economic waters. It is another example of the government looking the other way as the burden on working people grows.
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