Let Pew Charitable Trust's 2015 'State of the City' report serve as your (albeit slightly smudged) rose-colored glasses this morning. "There's good reason to be optimistic about Philadelphia in 2015," said Larry Eichel, director of Pew's Philadelphia research initiative. However, deep-seated challenges do persist, as starkly rendered by the response to one of the poll's questions: "Thinking about how your own life might unfold over the next 5 to 10 years, how likely are you to be living in Philadelphia?" A paltry 30% of respondents stated they absolutely would.
Here's the skinny:
· Population grew in 2014, because Millennials.
· The number of jobs in Philadelphia grew by 8,800. But the rate is still below the national rate.
· Poverty remained the highest among the nation's 10 largest cities.
· Major crimes declined in 2014, and the number of homicides, which fell to a 45-year low in 2013, rose by one.
· Education in Philly still sucks.
· The percentage of residents who are homeowners continued to drop and could fall below 50 percent in the next few years.
· The municipal workers' pension system is broken.
You can link to the entire report (Warning: PDF!), here.
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