With no notice or fanfare, the city cut down the trees that stood along the north side of Logan Circle nearest to the Vine Street Expressway. In recent months, the city had already cut down trees on a few other patches of land on a nearby stretch of above-ground Vine Street. Why all the cutting? If asked, Mayor Michael Nutter's office would likely say it was the start of a plan announced last year to redevelop the section of Vine Street that tourists and urban gentrifiers might see if they go walking.
The Vine Street project is a dubious use of public money in a city full of decaying neighborhoods that have gone decades without visible public investment. To the majority of city residents who live in those decaying neighborhoods, the completed project will be another in-your-face reminder that only Center City matters to policymakers.
But the Vine Street project wasn't the real reason why the trees were removed yesterday. They stood near areas targeted by the project, but not on them. And apart from the tree-cutting, the project itself has yet to begin. The real reason the trees had to go immediately is that the city government wants to make homelessness invisible to tourists and people with money to spend.
Homelessness may be the cruelest indignity a person can suffer. Throughout the year, between 500 and 800 homeless people live on the streets of Philadelphia. More homeless people live on the streets during the warmer months of the year. The city government, which is the source of these numbers, believes that more than 300 homeless people live in the Center City area. Those people are the ones city officials want to make disappear, ideally before big upcoming events like the visit of the Pope in September and the Democratic National Convention next year. When the Pope says mass on the Parkway, which crosses Logan Circle, the city government evidently hopes that he will have no opportunity to call attention to the embarrassment of homelessness in the midst of abundance.
As far back as I can remember, homeless people used the trees near Logan for shade during the warmer months of the year. People set up boxes and tarps an lived under those trees. Others congregated under them, waiting to receive a donated meal from a very thoughtful charity group. By cutting all the trees down on the last day of winter, the city government ensured that when homeless people emerge in springtime from shelters and from sleeping spots underground, they will find that there is no place for them to go at Logan.
So, where will they go? Mayor Nutter, City Council, and rich property investors who have their ear want to make Center City homeless-free. Dilworth Plaza, formerly the summer abode of many homeless people, was made into a windswept, paved-over "park" for that purpose last year. Rather than plenty of seating under trees, Dilworth now features little seating, no trees, and two city workers who stand around at night to call the police if anyone is brave enough to lie down on one of the few uninviting patches of grass. Vine Street, and soon Love Park, will also be remade with the same insidious purpose in mind: erase the homeless.
Ultimately, the city's elected officials want to see the homeless move out of Center City and into the neighborhoods. Too bad for the homeless people, who will find few services there. And too bad for neighborhood residents, who desperately need to elect new leaders whose focus is on the places where they live. The current political class has only contempt for the neighborhoods and their residents, a contempt it demonstrated in 2013 by raising residents' taxes to provide tax cuts for owners of business properties, in the so-called Actual Value Initiative, and demonstrated again recently with talk of a further property tax increase.
The Mayor and Council don't care about the plight of either the neighborhoods or the homeless. Neither writes them checks. But politicians care a lot about helping the developers who want to sell overpriced residential and office space downtown. Helping the developers means finding a rug big enough to sweep all the homeless people under. The neglected neighborhoods are the biggest rug of all.
