Two Hours With... John Street

A full transcript of City Paper's exit interview with the man who ran the city for the past eight years.

by Wafa R. Musitief

City Paper: If you had to look back before you leave, and think of what you are most proud of, of all the things you did for the city of Philadelphia, what stands out in your mind?

John F. Street: That's really an easy question, and it would be the impact of our programs on neighborhoods in the city and the people who live in them. The thing that I will remember, and the thing that I think people will remember, is the impact that our programs had on the neighborhoods of this city. I think our neighborhoods cleaner, safer, have more housing choices, have more services, and they are worth more.

There is no neighborhood in this city today that is worthless. By that, I mean there is no such thing as abandoned property anymore. When I became the mayor eight years ago, there was a lot of talk about abandoned property. People don't talk about abandoned property anymore, and that's because every property in this city now has value. It's worth something. In fact, there are some neighborhoods where the property value increased so dramatically that people are now worried about not being able to pay their taxes. Some of those very neighborhoods, eight years ago, not only did they not have to worry about paying any taxes, they couldn't sell the properties, couldn't get a mortgage on that property, no one wanted that land, and I think that summarizes the huge and important impact that the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative has had on the neighborhoods of this city. We did a number of different things in neighborhoods, including shut down all of those God awful open-air drug markets, got rid of all the abandoned cars, we created a program to clean up all the vacant lots, to plant trees, and to green and to fence off a lot of those areas and now those areas are highly desirable. Over around Fishtown and just above Northern Liberties, those communities are now very desirable places to live, where just a few years ago nobody wanted to be there.

CP: Why is it that when you stepped in first as mayor, you went straight to reach out straight to people in neighborhoods — of all the problems that you had when you came in as mayor,why were the living conditions of these communities something you were drawn to first?

JS: We knew. Remember that I had been an elected official for almost two decades before I became the mayor, and had worked with several different mayors; I had been a council president for seven years and had done a huge number of budgets, 19 budgets in capital program, and knew that neighborhoods, that my charge more so than anything was to make sure that neighborhoods thrived in this administration. In fact, a developing theme in my whole campaign in 1999 was my commitment to turn our attention to neighborhoods without turning our backs on Center City. Because, in the previous administration, we spent a lot of time straightening out the finances of the city, had a huge number of hotels and infrastructure built in Center City, but there was this huge, huge problem out in neighborhoods. Believe it or not, in 1999 when I ran for mayor, I got challenged to remove the abandoned cars from the neighborhoods more than any other thing. People would say, "Yeah, tax reduction is good, we need lower taxes, we need more housing, but the abandoned cars, you have to do something about that." Because there were 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 abandoned cars. We had abandoned cars out in the neighborhoods and some of them had been on blocks for 10, 15, 20 years. Some of those cars had been there so long that trees were growing out of them, and the drug dealers were using them to stash their drugs, and they were selling drugs out of the cars, and that's because in the criminal law, because you can only convict them of the drugs that they possessed as opposed to the drugs that were in the car. So, they were using them as a holding place for their drugs. I think that as time goes on, people will get an even clearer sense that these communities now are much, much better off than they have been in a long, long time. The cars were a symbol of commitment and concern about the neighborhoods. For the first time, the people in those areas felt somebody really cared.

CP: What about your biggest regrets as mayor? Do you ever think back and say, "I wish I had accomplished this" or "Maybe I should have done that differently"?

JS: You can't go through life second-guessing yourself. And it's very difficult to look back four, five, six years ago and say, "We should have done this or we should have done that." I tell people all the time that it always reminds me of people on Monday morning, talking about Donovan McNabb and how he shouldn't have thrown that pass or he should have thrown that pass, should have run the ball. Well, its easy to say that on Monday morning, but when you're there and you got a 280-pound linebacker bearing down on you, um, maybe you needed to get rid of the ball and maybe there was an interception. On Monday, it's a whole lot easier to say that than it is when you're in the heat of battle. I really have tried my best not second-guessing people who have exercised the best judgment that they could at the time under the circumstances, and we can't even always remember the circumstances that existed at a time when we made certain decisions.

I don't know if it serves a whole lot of purpose for me now to start looking back and say, "If I had done this or that," and there was huge stuff going on down in Harrisburg and Washington, and you really do have to respond on a basis of the existing circumstances.

There are some things that I would have liked to have gotten done, but I didn't get to. The [city] charter could use an overhaul,reworking our zoning code — that's something I knew we had to get to for a long time, I think it would be wrong for me to say it was a mistake not to get to it. You see when you're the mayor of big city like this, what I do is I say these are the conditions that I found, these are the circumstances that existed, this is the progress we made, this is where we were, this is where we are, and then you prepare to hand the ball, hand the baton to someone else. You try to measure the progress that you've made, but it's very difficult to start second guessing yourself. For example, I really did believe that its important that during the course of the last eight years, we've reduced taxes by over $1.2 billion. That's important because we are continuing to lower the economic plague, it is important that Center City and our business district, and the residential district downtown are probably nicer today than they've ever been. There are more restaurants, there is more retail, more people moving in to Center City, and recently I talked to a developer who sold a condominium in his development for $12 million in Center City. We didn't have that kind of housing. All up and down Broad Street, all up and down Market Street, Walnut Street, Chestnut Street, we now have a vibrant 24-hour environment. There has been huge attention paid to this city and the improvements that have been made in the last eight years, it's really very rewarding. It's never going to be perfect, you're never going to do everything that you set out to do but I think we just made enormous progress. I'm very proud of the work that we did, look at the schools. The schools were bankrupt, couldn't make payroll, the schools were flat on their backs, and I had to go to Harrisburg work with two governors, structure a whole new plan for working with the schools, and we have had five consecutive years of improved test scores, but now they have a little bit of a funding problem but that's always going to exist. Our schools are better, our neighborhoods are better, they are stronger, there's more affordable housing.

When I became the mayor, there was no market-rate housing in the city. There were some condominiums and some stuff going on in Center City, but there was no market-rate housing. In fact in some of those neighborhoods, you couldn't even get a mortgage. None of these banks would give a mortgage to a person in some of these neighborhoods, so that's a huge change for us.

We put $350 million to fund the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative in the first term, and then we borrowed $150 million from the second term; that's almost half a billion dollars that we have invested in neighborhoods and the Cultural and Commercial Corridors initiatives, and in arts and cultural organizations. We knew that the private sector really was going to have to get jumping in those areas. And it really it is. Citizens Bank a few years ago had an event which I attended, and announced that it was going to spend about aquarter of a billion dollars on mortgages in neighborhoods, it was probably the first organized way that anybody has put any mortgage money in neighborhoods like that maybe in 30, 40 years because it just wasn't happening before.

CP: By striving to improve the living conditions of these communities where the majority living in these areas are African-American and Latino, in a way you alienated the Caucasian community who couldn't forget the "brothers and sisters" comment. How do you respond to that?

JS: All of the programs we did were all citywide programs. If there was an abandoned car, we didn't care where it was, we got it. If there was an open-air drug market, we didn't care where it was, we got it. I did mention the "brothers and sisters" comment,it was in a speech. In the election of '03, the Republicans tried to politicize everything and said he's only doing it in African-American communities. It's just not true — in my first term, we cleaned every single lot in this city twice, not all of the vacant lots in North Philadelphia or West Philadelphia. Every single lot twice! We removed every abandoned car we could get our hands on all over the city, we shook up the open-air drug markets all over the city. It just so happened that there were more abandoned cars in poor neighborhoods, andAfrican-American communities than in other communities, but we shut down them where we found them. And there are some people who tried to politicize it, but that's OK. That's just part of the rough-and-tough of politics, but it really isn't true. If you look at where the affordable housing is, the market rate housing is, it's everywhere. It's in North Philadelphia, it's in South Philadelphia. If you at look at public housing, it's everywhere.

CP: When you ran for your second term, there were a lot of challenges and it really became clear to the public that there was this widespread effort to get you from winning your second term, to prevent you from gaining control of City Hall again. What was that like for you to experience that?

JS: It was interesting because at the time when the bug was discovered, I had roughly a 7- to 10-point lead in the polls. And a month later, my lead went to 18, 19 points. I feel good about the fact that notwithstanding all the publicity around all of that, the people in the city, they knew what they wanted to do.I feel good that they made a decision that they were going to re-elect me and I think that they looked at my record, looked at the things that we had done. I also think that they decided that we don't believe that John Street is a crook ... and they voted for me and it's now three years later, and there has been one person in this administration that's been convicted in this probe. I can't be responsible for all the private people that are out there; there were two people that were indicted, and one convicted. John Christmas was found not guilty, he was acquitted of all charges. One, Treasurer Corey Kemp, was indicted and convicted, and if any less people had been convicted, it would have been zero.

CP: Did you feel like at the time it was a personal attack?

JS: I try not to allow myself to get all caught up in it, I was going to be the mayor for another four years, and I mean I knew this thing was probably going to drag on full time and I knew that we knew we were going be having a whole government here, and cabinet meetings, and I just told people I don't believe you did anything wrong, I didn't do anything, let's run the government. We'll let these people conduct their investigation and not one person that I picked to serve in these cabinet meetings was indicted and convicted, not one of these people sitting in on my cabinet meetings.

CP: Yet the media made a circus out if it, and over the years, they haven't been very kind to you. And with recent assaults on officers in our community, and the seemingly increasing crime rate in city, the finger often keeps getting pointed to you and your administration. Why?

JS: I don't feel like I've been blamed for the police officers, because that clearly is a national trend, it's this huge national trend. And I do think that there has been an obsession with homicide. Overall, crime has gone down in the city.Really, since I've been the mayor, crime is down 13, 14 percent. Rapes, robberies, all those things are down. In 2002, homicides in this city were at a 17-year low. Nine out of the 11 years before I became mayor, we had [more than] 400 homicides every single year. I became the mayor, we have had [more than] 400 homicides one out of seven years. We got homicides down so low that when they starting coming back up people said, "Oh boy, look at this." And it is bad, it's bad, but I think modern means of communication like the Internet really gives people a whole lot more [information] and they talk about it a lot more.

I tell people all the time that I think history is going to be good to this administration. I really do, because there are going to be people who are going to look back and see that there are thousands fewer white-collar crimes today than there were eight years ago. I think history is going to look back and say, "Look at what happened during that time, look at these neighborhoods, and look at the transformation that took place."

I really do think people out of the heat of the moment are going to look back and say a lot of good stuff happened. I think I'm young enough to live to that time; there are huge numbers of people out there in the neighborhoods who have a mighty appreciation for the improvements in their lives today, but they aren't always spoken for. Most of them aren't bloggers, the people who overwhelmingly voted for me in all of my elections are probably not of the blogging class.

One year, a major city in this country that I will not name had a 20 percent increase in the homicide rate, there was almost no report in their city. They didn't run around blasting the mayor, they just said, "Well, homicides are a national trend" and wrote a couple stories and got off it. I really believe that in this city, as a mentality, we are very hard on ourselves, the people, the media. Not all cities are that way. We had a 6 percent increase in our homicides and it was clearly part of a national trend, and everybody agrees it's part of a national trend, and they were writing about it and writing about it and writing about it and here's this other city where they had a 20 percent increase and they just didn't pay much attention to it. We make our bad press. We are a big hospitality community, we have billions of dollars invested, and we are getting ready to invest another $700 million to expand the [Pennsylvania] Convention Center.

I think our reporting should be fair, we should tell the truth about all of it, but I don't know that we should go so far out on this thing that we make people think that they are not safe in their own communities and that no one should come here especially given the fact that this kind of stuff is happening all other the city, and that there are other cities out there that have worse problems than we have.

CP: You have three weeks to go [at the time of the interview] and Michael Nutter, who is coming in, and who won a large majority of the vote ...

JS: Well, actually he didn't win a large majority. Actually, he had a very small majority. Thirteen percent of the total registered Democratic voters of the city of Philadelphia voted for him in the primary, so if the primary turnout was 27 percent, hypothetically, and he got 34 percent of the vote of the people who voted, that percentthat he got is much smaller of the total number of people who are registered voters in the Democratic primary. See, he didn't get a whole lot of votes, but it goes to show you the perception.

In the general election, the Republicans didn't even campaign. I think Al Taubenberger spent less than $150,000, if that. My general election, the opponents probably spent $10 million. I say all that to say I don't know what you can refer from the voting in general, the primary, the voting in the general election.There was no competitive general election and in the primary, the turnout was very low, and the vote was split up in so many pieces, that the eventual winner of the Mayor's office did it with almost no votes.

CP: How did you feel when he won, were you surprised?

JS: As you know, I didn't any endorse anybody, I didn't get into that mayor's race. There were a lot of qualified candidates.

CP: Do you think he will face a lot of challenges stepping in after you are done?

JS: The people of this city are very generous and they will give him an ample opportunity to fashion, envision and implement programs that they think will work for them. But they are also very tough, and they are judgmental. So, I think he's going to have a year or two where he's going to have to put up.

CP: Do you think you will ever run for office again?

JS: I might, I don't have any plans. I'm 64 years old, I could run for another office I might. ... I don't have a plan to run for public office, but that does not mean I could never run for public office. It means it isn't anything that I am anticipating, it isn't anything I am planning for or looking at.

I was very candid: If one of the congress people had won the mayor's race, I was interested in running for Congress. I did say that. I think I am beyond running for local office, I did that for 28 years. Then the question is: Would I run for a statewide office? I think the only statewide office I would be interested in running for is governor, but that would be the natural office that I would run for. But by the time that election comes, I am three years older and I have four children and four grandchildren and, at some point in time, I got other stuff that I want to do. I don't know there's any John McCain in me, you know?

CP: If not you, then maybe we will see another member of the Street family, like Milton?

JS: I don't know. He might run again, I know my son [Sharif] will. He's going to run again; it's in his blood. That's what I say, good for him. I think there is a lot of work out there from which I could receive a huge amount of personal satisfaction and never have to have another title again.

CP: You don't think you will miss it?

JS: I think I can get used to private life. I've been a public official now for 28 years. I was a councilman, councilpresident and mayor and it's an awful lot of responsibility and a lot of pressure. It's a lot of being in the limelight. I don't judge the meaning of my life based on the number of TV cameras that get in my face.

CP: Twenty years from now, when people say Mayor John Street and think back, how do you want them to think of you?

JS: I want them to think that here's a guy who gave a better part of 30 years to public service in the city and made it a difference for the positive, and the life of the city and the life of the residents, and the conditions and opportunities that are available for the people in this city. 

(editorial@citypaper.net)