On Oct. 23, 2015, Pedro A. Ramos, President & CEO of The Philadelphia Foundation, was the closing
speaker for 250 attendees at the 10th annual Greater Philadelphia Leadership Exchange hosted by the
Economy League of Greater Philadelphia. This is a condensed version of his remarks and the slides that
accompanied them.
All of us in this room know that leadership is exhilarating. And it is mostly very hard work.
Making change is always tough and can strain individual and collective stamina. Leadership requires bigpicture vision, a commitment to outcomes, creativity and persistent attention to key details. We have
to mix a sense of urgency with real-world practicalities. Change leaders also have to build, spread, and
sustain positive momentum, particularly when it would be all too easy to become discouraged.
Our City is enjoying a Renaissance. The young and the retired really love Philadelphia. Arts,
culture, healthcare, and higher education are world-class and increasingly accessible to all communities.
Our population is up. But so are poverty and the gap between the very poor and everyone else (not just
in Philadelphia, but increasingly in the inner-ring suburbs). Our governmental institutions (including our
public schools) have been built as silos of authority and isolation from outsiders, rather than as hubs of
collaboration in an interdependent world, and must now figure out how to intelligently pay for the past
and invest in the future.
You should know that Philadelphia actually has a track record of doing some BIG THINGS. And
we do NOT have to look too far back to find a time when Philadelphia has accomplished some BIG
THINGS in the face of big challenges and big opportunities. It is worth reminding ourselves how much
we have achieved and what we can learn from the past that might offer lessons for the future.
I have chosen to start by winding the clock back 50 years, if for no other reason than that’s how
old I am, so this is about how Philadelphia has changed during my lifetime. I want to give thanks and
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credit to Joe McLaughlin, the Director of the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University, for recreating the stories I will share. As a political practitioner turned academic, Joe has a unique and
valuable perspective as a civic historian and teacher.
So imagine it’s 1965: Philadelphia is just recovering from the 1964
Columbia Avenue riot in North Philadelphia west of Broad Street (when
hundreds of citizens were injured and much property destroyed -although, thankfully, no lives were lost).
The City’s skyline is squat.
Abandoned factories are rusting.
Working class neighborhoods are emptying, (accelerated by suburban growth and red-lining),
creating blight in large portions of the City (empty, boarded up, properties abandoned by absentee
owners).
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5th and Spruce, 1965
2500 Block of Grays Ferry Avenue, 1965
100 Fitzwater Street,
1972
Riverfront piers are decaying.
Cramp’s Shipyard, Port Richmond, Closed 1947
Pier 34, 1957
Private railroads and transit companies are teetering toward bankruptcy.
Public school enrollment is shrinking and increasingly poor and racially segregated.
The brief era of political reform is fading.
And our “nightlife” is the butt of old jokes that are still in circulation. Like the one that said that
the first prize in a national contest was a week in Philadelphia and the second prize was two weeks in
Philadelphia.
We had fallen, and far. One could imagine William Penn, 37 feet tall atop a 511-foot City Hall
tower, which upon completion in 1901 was the tallest building in America and 64 years later was then
still the tallest building in Philadelphia, weeping over a city that seemed to accept its fate as one of
irreversible decline.
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Seven years later, in 1972, a billboard on the Schuylkill
Expressway -- placed by a civic group called, amazingly, Action
Philadelphia -- proclaimed to tourists and residents alike that ...
and I quote ... “Philadelphia isn’t as bad as Philadelphians say it
is.” The trouble was, both parts of that slogan were true!
Over the next 40 years, and particularly beginning in the
1980s, Philadelphia would once again begin to reinvent itself.
How did this reinvention happen? What can we learn from how
it happened? Can we make Philadelphia even better than many of us here today say it is?
The story of our rebirth has many chapters, some of them successes and some failures, some
steps forward and some backward. I am going to focus on just three of our civic triumphs:
 The building of the Convention Center in Center City in 1993
 The breaking of the Center City height limit in 1986
 Avoidance of and recovery from the City of Philadelphia’s near financial collapse in the late
1980s.
Each of these accomplishments required diverse groups of stakeholders to hear each other out and
to ultimately come together purposefully. And each spawned positive developments in its wake. I
believe that these events also changed our collective mindset about possibilities for the future. And it is
the future on which I especially want to focus, because our role as leaders demands it.
The Building of the Convention Center
In January 1981, the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors
Bureau published a report calling for the City to build a
convention center in Center City. Philadelphia, the nation’s
fourth-largest city, which in 1948 hosted three national
political party conventions, was by then ranked a lowly 29th in
the country for attracting convention business. There were
only two hotels with a bit over 700 rooms near the outdated
five-building Civic Center complex in West Philadelphia, located between the train tracks, CHOP and
Penn Medicine, so conventioneers had to be shuttled by bus to Center City, where major hotels were
nevertheless closing because they couldn’t fill their rooms. Today there are more than 9,000 rooms
within a 15-minute walk from the Convention Center.
The City chose the Reading Terminal site, and conceived a project that would ultimately cost $585
million, including a $185 million contribution from the state government, then led by Republican
Governor Dick Thornburgh. The project enjoyed strong support from traditionally powerful interests,
but it also engendered strident opposition from a formidable lineup:
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Small business owners on the site who would be displaced;
Key members of City Council;
Leaders of traditionally excluded minority businesses, churches, and civic organizations;
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Statewide taxpayer’s associations;
Influential journalists; and
City and suburban legislators.
The project was actually voted down three times in the State House by an unlikely coalition of
Philadelphia legislators and suburban and upstate colleagues. Interestingly, the third and potentially
fatal defeat was averted only when the chamber’s electronic vote board suffered a quite mysterious
failure so that the losing vote was never recorded.
The Philadelphia Daily News immediately called on the City to give up. In characteristic Daily News
bluntness, editors said: “The Pennsylvania legislature is not going to approve…the convention center bill.
There is no point in whining about how a coalition of rubes and self-centered suburbanites have
sandbagged us…They always do...” That’s not such a far-off sentiment, right?
Well, thankfully, the City’s coalition did not give up. Securing approval was an intensely political
process, but ultimately it succeeded by focusing on intensely human concerns. The convention center’s
supporters proceeded to methodically address the grievances and apprehensions that threatened the
project — issues that probably should have been anticipated and addressed from the start. For
example, they included in the legislation commitments for minority participation. They expanded
benefits for those businesses that would be displaced. And supporters convinced suburban leaders of
the region-wide benefits of a new convention center.
In June of 1986, the Pennsylvania General Assembly created the Pennsylvania Convention Center
Authority and provided it with the largest capital grant in the state’s history. More battles would ensue
before — and since — the center opened in 1993, but in many ways it was this that began the
transformation of the City that most of you know and love. And, importantly, a City that next summer
will host its second national political convention since 2000, after being ignored by both major parties
for 52 years.
The significance of this Convention Center victory is hard to overestimate, not just because it
resulted in one of the finest convention centers in the country, an explosion of Center City hotel rooms,
and thousands of new jobs in a burgeoning hospitality industry, but because it demonstrated to the rest
of Pennsylvania, to private investors, and to our own citizenry that we could get difficult and BIG THINGS
done.
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Breaking the City Hall Height Limit
Willard Rouse, the man who would subsequently be chosen to lead the convention center
authority and to build the center, had his own plans to take Philadelphia to the next level. In March
1984, breaking an unwritten, longstanding so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement” (created and enforced
by legendary City Planning Director Edmund Bacon) that no building would rise higher than William
Penn’s hat, developer Bill Rouse III (audaciously) proposed to build two Center City office towers of 55 to
65 stories, the taller to soar nearly 400 feet above William Penn, rising from a hotel and retail complex
connecting Market and Chestnut streets between 16th and 17th.
The “Liberty Place” proposal immediately drew fierce opposition from Bacon, The Philadelphia
Inquirer, historic preservationists, key City Council members, Center City neighborhood organizations,
and, according to several polls, a majority of City residents.
Rouse dared to challenge Philadelphia’s long tradition of
civic consensus and was undeterred. He rejected the City Planning
Commission’s proposal for a year-long study. The commission then
produced a report estimating that the $600 million project would
generate almost 12,000 new permanent jobs and $15 million
annually in new wage and property taxes for the City.
Rouse had artfully appealed not just to the City’s
pocketbook but to its civic pride. He engaged Helmut Jahn, a worldrenowned architect, to produce drawings of a stunning building that helped sway public opinion. To
critics who said the project was selling out the city’s human scale to profits and would tamper not just
with its skyline but its soul, Rouse replied:
“That same argument says we can’t do any number of things which are basically urban
problems. That says Philadelphia can’t, and I say Philadelphia can.”
I doubt that Willard Rouse intended to paraphrase Cesar Chaves, but there
you have it, “Filadelfia” – “Si se puede.”
On December 12, 1986, amidst fireworks, 1,500 guests looked up at One
Liberty Place from a celebration at the Philadelphia Art Museum. The 61-story
structure of granite, glass, and metal, praised for its elegant architecture, accented by
lights, soared above City Hall, and the Philadelphia skyline would never be the same.
The tall buildings that followed One Liberty made deeper setbacks possible,
thus creating broader Center City sidewalks, increasing the appeal of our City at street
level, and making office tower buildings more energy-efficient. Unlike the convention
center, this was a purely Philadelphia story, financed by a bold and visionary private sector leader, who
rejected limitations Philadelphia long imposed on itself.
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Avoiding Financial Collapse
In the 1980s, we proved we could transform our physical environment, but our City government
was failing at its most basic task, balancing and managing its revenues and expenditures. By the end of
the 1980s, the City’s cash flows dipped so low that meetings were held regularly to decide which vendor
bills to pay or hold over. It appeared that the City would soon have to choose between paying its
employees or paying its bondholders. Failure to pay either would have had catastrophic consequences
that could have sent Philadelphia down the bankruptcy path, with horrible ramifications for residents in
every corner of the City.
Meanwhile, municipal bond rating agencies downgraded the City’s bonds to junk status after
the City was unable to sell short-term notes for cash.
In an editorial typical of many by the City’s two major newspapers, the Daily News said in
disgust,
“If our leaders…can’t solve this mess, maybe it’s time to admit defeat and ask Governor Casey to
shove a state control board down our throats.”
Yet even amidst this apparent turmoil, a solution was germinating: In November 1990, City
Council adopted a little-noticed resolution, sponsored by Councilman John Street, authorizing a new
committee to recommend solutions to the crisis. Citing an obscure provision in the Pennsylvania
Constitution intended to foster cooperation among governmental units on more mundane matters, the
resolution proposed that the City would agree, through a contract, to state oversight in exchange for
access to new resources, tools, and flexibility to eliminate its deficits. Thus, state control was artfully
embedded in the language of cooperation.
In June 1991, the Pennsylvania General Assembly established the Pennsylvania
Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority. PICA had the power to require the City, as a condition of
help, to submit annually balanced five-year financial plans. Still in existence today, PICA was authorized
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to issue deficit reduction bonds backed by City revenues and
withhold the proceeds and other state aid if the City’s financial
plans were disapproved or were violated after approval.
Although Philadelphia, like other cities, has been
battered by recessions and still faces financial challenges, it has
balanced its budgets, met its payrolls, and maintained access to
credit markets. The PICA model has been adopted by other
cities.
I think we can appreciate that accomplishing these
three BIG THINGS were “heavy lifts” for our community —
examples of exhilarating and exhausting leadership — and we owe their champions a large measure of
gratitude. These developments laid the foundation for the kind of Renaissance I mentioned earlier.
The lessons drawn from these histories — the winning combination of monumental leadership,
creativity, courage, collaboration and ongoing vigilance — will stand us in good stead as we face today’s
Philadelphia Challenge of getting more BIG THINGS done.
I want to point out two characteristics from these examples that may help us attack our region’s
current long to-do list.
First, there’s the distinction between “structured” and “unstructured” problems and
opportunities. Building landmarks of steel, glass and stone, and even balancing city budgets, are what
Joe McLaughlin calls “structured” problems — or opportunities — ones that can be clearly defined and
for which solutions are known, with only vision and collective will required. These problems required
coalitions of public, non-profit, and private sector leaders and citizens to resolve.
We have found that we know how to solve structured problems. We have some serious ones
still facing us, including reducing the City’s unfunded pension liability, improving the competitiveness of
our tax structure, and modernizing our infrastructure, and we need to attack them, just as more
recently, working with state and suburban leaders, we solved the structured problem of saving the
refineries and thousands of jobs on our two rivers.
But we also face more complex “unstructured” social problems, like the need to reduce poverty
and to better educate our children and develop our unskilled workforce.
These problems are huge and related, and despite ongoing and occasionally heroic attempts to
resolve them over this same 50-year period, they remain and in some instances have worsened. It is
difficult to build and maintain civic coalitions to solve unstructured problems, partly because the causes
and solutions are multi-pronged, not depending on government action alone. It’s also difficult — but
not impossible — because such efforts may be both under-resourced and multi-resourced, requiring
highly effective coordination. But ultimately, in order to succeed as a City and maintain our momentum,
we must – we must -- do more of these BIG THINGS.
Perhaps one way to go about this daunting task is to redefine the unstructured problems by
breaking them down into better-defined, structured problems. Examples might be creating a quality
universal pre-K system in Philadelphia, insuring that every neighborhood has access to healthy,
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affordable food, or the recently-launched READ by 4th initiative. Our City has experienced some victories
with this approach. Consider the campaign to eliminate lead-based paint, which has had a tremendous
impact on reducing behavioral, learning and health problems in children. Or making a real dent in the
problem of homelessness by adopting a housing-first model for selected populations. These are the
“bright spots” — a favorite concept of the Leadership Exchange — from which we can learn.
The second lesson these stories illustrate is the need to believe in our City’s future and to persist
despite setbacks and obstacles and slower progress than we might want. Our City has reinvented itself
before, and we are in the process of reinventing it again, but we have to carry a can-do attitude and
apply it with courage and care. Despite the obvious dysfunction in Washington and Harrisburg, we need
to keep pressing federal and state government to fulfill their responsibilities, while recognizing that we
will have to figure out solutions largely on our own. We need to act together with city and regional
residents in more effective ways to achieve our civic good.
From my young days in community activism, to my recent
days as leader of our community foundation, I think a lot about what
it means to build community as a pathway to addressing problems. I
feel fortunate that my own life experiences — and surely this is true
for some of you, too — have taken me to and engaged me in many
different environments, which has required me to listen and learn, to
recognize and appreciate differences, and ultimately to build bridges
and take action. We live and work in a very complicated, diverse
region, which adds incomparable richness to the quality of our lives,
while admittedly compounding the complexity of our overall
Philadelphia Challenge. If we want to lead and succeed, we have no
choice but to embrace that diversity of thought, class, race and
experiences on the way to doing BIG THINGS.
Imagine how much progress we might make if we fully imported this cross-connecting into our
day-to-day personal and professional lives ... in ways that are out of our comfort zones ... across classes
and races and neighborhood lines. Doing our best to understand each other, find common ground and
see new options in our pursuit of the challenge to get BIG THINGS done.
Terms like “community engagement” and “civic leadership” may have become buzz phrases, but
I can tell you that The Philadelphia Foundation will take this part of our mission very seriously. As we
prepare for the start of our second century in service to Greater Philadelphia, we are in the very early
stages of forming our strategies, and still have plenty of questions about how we will go about
accomplishing our essential tasks of attracting and growing assets and applying them for maximum
impact on the well-being of our current and future communities. But I already know that playing a
stronger civic leadership role in the life of our city and region will be high on The Philadelphia
Foundation’s agenda. Authentically engaging our broad range of diverse communities — listening,
learning and responding to residents, and advocating for change — will be a critical component of how
we lead and how we serve.
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We will need your help. The
Philadelphia Foundation is your foundation.
It belongs to everyone. As community
leaders, you have a stake in its strength. We
need your thoughts about how to update
and revitalize a 100-year-old model to
ensure its relevance and impact for many
years to come. How can The Philadelphia
Foundation’s actions and leadership support your work and volunteer efforts? Considering the great
work already underway by so many of you, on which problems should The Philadelphia Foundation take
a deep dive? How can we generate civic involvement by new actors? How can we inspire more
philanthropy — through TPF and otherwise? In our view, a community foundation that fails to engage
its community’s leaders simply isn’t doing the job for residents of our city and region.
This is the challenge that I accepted in leading The Philadelphia Foundation: to engage all parts
of our community in shaking up the status quo so that together, we can do BIG THINGS like enhancing
economic mobility and ensuring that there is a strong safety net for those most at risk. I believe it’s
possible for us to succeed in doing new BIG THINGS because Philadelphia has done BIG THINGS before.
With all the changes that have occurred in our city,
good and bad, Billy Penn continues to look over us, still the
largest statue atop a man-made structure in the world, still
visible from our most dramatic vistas, still a symbol of our
commitment to be one city, accepting of all, still reminding
us of where we have been and calling us to what we can
become.
Let us each ask ourselves, “How will I, and how will my organization, act on the Philadelphia
Challenge to be even more authentically engaged, informed, optimistic and connected civic leaders?”
It’s a tall order for all of us, but I believe it’s the path to achieving more BIG THINGS to make
Philadelphia even better than we say it is.
The Philadelphia Foundation staff, board, volunteers, and supporters look forward to walking
that path together with all of you. Thank you.
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