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Cleaner parks, lower crime, better libraries and living-wage jobs may be outcomes of the city’s ‘soda tax’ by danielle corcione & grid staff
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f you live in Philadelphia, you’ve heard of the brouhaha over the “soda tax,” and have been paying a little more lately if you have a Coke habit. But unless you’re in the habit of lurking on the Urban PHL Facebook page or getting into the wonky details of city planning, you might not know that those extra pennies are being invested in Philadelphia’s libraries, parks and recreation centers through a program called Rebuilding Community Infrastructure—Rebuild for short. It’s a massive undertaking that will revitalize hundreds of spaces all over Philadelphia, spearheaded through the Mayor’s Office and carried out by many different city departments, including Parks and Recreation and the Free Library of Philadelphia. 22
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The investments will be in neighborhoods outside of Center City that have long been neglected. “We want to be investing in the neighborhoods of Philadelphia that need these investments the most,” explained Nicole Westerman, Rebuild’s executive director. “We want to make investments that have a good chance of catalyzing additional growth and stabilizing neighborhoods in transition.” Investing in public spaces, specifically libraries and parks, has some obvious benefits for communities, including better access to educational opportunities and safe places for recreation. But it can also reduce crime rates, as the city has seen in other projects. As the initiative’s website explains, when “the City [of Philadelphia]
and the Fairmount Park Conservancy invested $5 million in Hunting Park, crime around the park went down 89 percent over the next three years.” Westerman added: “The community engagement work is a key piece of the kind of ownership that results in crime reduction.” Though officials were vague on what the program’s community engagement strategies will be, they insist it will be a big part of the initiative, and emphasized that the program isn’t just new light bulbs and boilers in a cycle of routine capital upgrades. “We don’t just want to replace and plant equipment,” said Mike DiBerardinis, managing director of the city. “We want to transform these facilities into 21st-century facilities that are beautifully designed with ABOVE: Mayor Kenney with kids at a Rebuild site
P HOTOS BY THE CITY O F P HIL ADELPHI A