Nutter got it almost right. But Nutter is on the prowl for campaign funds, which is why I suspect his green theme is still darkly muted. Because the full story offers some inconvenient truths to real estate developers and building trades unions.

Fact is, the environment and the economy are more than just "mutually exclusive," they're interdependent. Where our environment goes, so goes our economy.

Having a mayor with a passion for environmentalism has worked wonders in Chicago. But that's Chicago, you say. Who says greenification will work in Philly?

Smart people, unencumbered by political cement shoes, say green thinking will produce lots of long green — and already has.

So if candidate Nutter needs a mountain of facts to mount an environmental agenda, consider what the region's best economic planners have concluded. The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) recently documented that locally brewed green thinking is already paying handsome dividends (www.dvrpc.org/data/databull.htm. Bulletin #12). This region, says DVRPC, successfully exports its environmental expertise worldwide. So DVRPC concludes that growing green here offers our best chance of full employment.

But when it comes to using environmental tenets to reclaim this city, the shoemaker's kids have no shoes.

Our current zoning laws are awesomely antiquated. Development is parceled out piecemeal by hacks beholden to developers. This city has literally had to fight to get a green pot to piss in, thanks to developmentally retarded unions worried about waterless urinals.

Sustainable development should top the next mayor's agenda. Sadly, though, green issues are being given short shrift by the ad-hoc group behind "The Next Mayor" (TheNextMayor.com).

A project of the Comm-ittee of Seventy, WHYY and the Daily News, "crime" now tops their popularity poll — not surprising given the play that violence gets in the media. So, "The Next Mayor" has buried "sustainability" and the "environment" under the "neighborhood" heading, as if these were hinterland issues. Zack and crew, shame on you: You know better.

As Nutter remarked to the South Street crowd, the city's first developer cared deeply about the environment. That was Billy Penn. Would that progressive builders came forward today, and let Nutter — and others — unleash a green revolution that's way overdue.

Nor does the DN editorial disclose the deal that their own newspaper execs cut with Green, which keeps both ad prices and the sheriff's visibility artificially elevated.

Last year, the sheriff personally approached the newspapers for relief from their hefty classified fees. But instead of lowering their prices, instead the papers offered Green additional pages of display advertising. Free, illustrated advertising, over and above the classified advertising required by state statute — which the sheriff could use as he pleased.

Green used the free space to run big, colorful ads, which he says educated at-risk homeowners. But homeless advocates disagree, countering that the extra ads mostly boosted the sheriff's own political profile.

So while it's commendable that the Daily News is finally joining the chorus to help poor people keep their homes, the People's Paper's credibility is seriously undercut by the editors' willful ignorance of their own company's shenanigans that keep prices high, and a spendthrift sheriff in power. It's an absence of reporting that borders on the malicious.

(bruce@schimmel.com)