After a historic youth ministry in Philadelphia, a new mayor faces old problems
PHILADELPHIA — The afternoon before Election Day, Jennifer Robinson, 41, was trying to manage her two small children in the quiet corner of a public library in an area of her town that had weathered generations of desolation. She was despondent about the state of Philadelphia, especially about crime, but she talked about the mayoral primary as if it had nothing to do with it.
“No one has answers,” Ms. Robinson said as she moved her restless 11-month-old baby from arm to arm. “It’s a sense of hopelessness.”
This is the city that Cherelle Parker will run as mayor if she wins the November general election, and these are the sentiments she will try to deflect. On Tuesday, Ms. Parker, a former state legislator and member of the City Council, won a surprisingly decisive victory in a Democratic primary that was seen as a tight five-party race until Election Day.
The sheer number of undecided in the latest polls appears to have broken badly for Ms. Parker, 50, the only Black candidate of the top five contenders who hopes to lead a city where Black people make up more than 40 percent of the population and where Black neighborhoods have been particularly hard hit by gun violence and Covid.
If she wins the general election, which she prefers given that registered Democrats in Philadelphia outnumber Republicans by more than seven to one, Ms. Parker will be the first woman in a line of 100 mayors.
That list of men goes back centuries, before the city had established itself as the cradle of American independence, and long before President Biden came to Independence Hall last September to warn the nation of threats to democracy.
For Philadelphia, Ms. Parker’s primary win is a sign of how the city has changed over the past half century. For most of the 1970s, the mayor was Frank Rizzo, a former police commissioner who embraced ruthless police tactics, particularly toward Black Philadelphians. But the city’s challenges remain deep and daunting.
At least half a dozen public schools in Philadelphia are closed due to asbestos contamination, a predictable debacle in a city where the average age of public school buildings is over 70 years old. Housing costs are out of reach for many residents. There is a staff shortage in the city, with thousands of vacancies at the municipality unfilled. Hundreds of Philadelphians have died in recent years of an opioid overdose.
Above all this looms murder. Gun violence rates have risen in cities large and small across the country, but they were particularly severe in Philadelphia, a city of 1.6 million, nearly a quarter of whom live in poverty. In each of the past two years, more than 500 people were killed, the highest annual toll for the city on record, and many hundreds more were injured by gunfire. Shootings and homicides have declined this year, but the city is overrun with guns; Republican lawmakers have tried to remove it the prosecutor on the enforcement of gun laws, while city officials have sued Republican lawmakers for limiting their ability to enact stricter ones.
Philadelphia residents are almost unanimous in their alarm about the violence, but are less united about solutions. Larry Krasner, the progressive district attorney who has insisted the city can’t just fight its way out of the crisis, was reelected overwhelmingly in 2021, with some of his strongest performances in the neighborhoods most marked by violence.
On Tuesday, many of those same neighborhoods voted for Ms. Parker, who promised to hire hundreds more police officers and bring back what she called “constitutional” stop-and-frisk.
“People don’t feel safe, they feel like a sense of lawlessness is taking over,” she said in an interview shortly before launching her mayoral campaign. “We can’t get around that.”
These proposals have faced strong opposition and skepticism about the ability to employ hundreds of officers at a time when police departments across the country are struggling to recruit.
Her Republican opponent in November’s general election is David Oh, also a former city councilman.
In the Democratic primary, Ms. Parker’s pitch to voters was that she understood firsthand what their lives were like, as a resident of Philadelphia, as a black woman who was the daughter of a teenage mother, and as the mother of a black son.
This call has sparked great hope among black voters, said Carl Day, a pastor who directs the Culture Changing Christians Worship Center in one of the city’s poorest and most violent areas. “The expectation is certainly from the black community to know what we are going through and so it will definitely bring about change,” he said.
Still, he said, these hopes seemed to be pinned mostly by older black voters, who were also more likely to embrace Parker’s agenda, including her push for more police.
Younger Black Philadelphia residents, Pastor Day said, were more skeptical of Ms. Parker and even worried about some of her policing plans. Pastor Day said he’s seen younger people online wondering what this means and saying nothing would change.
There is an apparent contradiction here: that is a city deeply unhappy with the turn of events just voted for a candidate endorsed by dozens of sitting legislators, city councilors and ward leaders — even the current mayor, Jim Kenney, a limited-term Democrat who has become deeply unpopular, said he voted for her.
Isaiah Thomas, who won a major city council seat on Tuesday, said even with that support it wasn’t fair to call her the incumbent candidate — most of her opponents had their own network of connections. But he said the breadth of her support, including unions and legislators, showed she knew how to build and maintain coalitions.
“She’s a worker,” said Mr Thomas, who joined the Council in 2020 and has managed the response to the crises of the past three years with Ms Parker. “She understands the government, she understands the budget.”
In state government, any Democratic mayor would find a more willing partner than his or her immediate predecessors. Last November, Democrats won control of the Pennsylvania House for the first time in 12 years, a majority that was reaffirmed Tuesday night after a special election. The current House Speaker, Joanna McClinton, represents part of Philadelphia, as does the chair of the House Appropriations Committee. The new governor, Josh Shapiro, and the majority of the Senate Democratic caucus are from the region.
“There is reason to be more optimistic about Harrisburg’s relationship with Philadelphia than has been the case in many years,” said Sen. Nikil Saval, a Democrat, who supported one of Ms. Parker’s opponents in the race, but some of her achievements on praised the City. Council, like a program she helped create which offered low-interest loans to homeowners.
Still, in interviews in Philadelphia this week, voters and local politicians said the new mayor’s most pressing task would be to give the city a jolt of optimism. For many in the city’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, that could begin with the attention of someone who has seen their daily struggles up close. But, the people claimed, hope would only last if there were tangible results.
“I didn’t see anyone help; it’s only getting worse,” said Ms. Robinson, the mother in the library. “If I want to vote for someone, I have to see a difference.”