Taxes are even more inescapable in Philadelphia than most places. The city regularly makes top 10 lists as one of the highest-taxed municipalities in the nation.

That sounds overwhelmingly negative, but most of the programs run by local government depend on those levies for funding, from schools to parks to housing to safety. So eliminating taxes wholesale isn’t necessarily good policy.

What is good tax policy for Philly residents and businesses? Good question — and one we’d like to pose to candidates in the upcoming May primary.

Along with other newsrooms in the Broke in Philly collaborative, we’re preparing a survey for the mayoral contenders and the dozens of candidates for City Council. Last month we asked readers to submit potential queries, and we got more than 100 responses. Now we’re trying to streamline the list.

The grand majority of questions submitted fall into the categories Jobs, Taxes, Housing and Education. We want to know which tax question you most want to see answered.

Do you want to put candidates on the spot with regard to property taxes and the topic of inaccurate assessments? Find out what they’d do about the wage tax, which many call unfriendly to business but accounts for a huge chunk of Philly’s budget? Learn more about their plans to address tax bracket disparity? Hear their sentiments on the soda tax?

We’ll add the winning query to our Broke in Philly survey — the results of which will be published for all to see.

Place your vote below.

Thousands of college students were vaccinated on Temple’s main campus last week, receiving doses of an immunity potion usually given to infants.

A sudden mumps outbreak has taken over the North Philadelphia campus. More than 100 people are known to be infected, and the number is estimated to grow. City health officials said they expect to be finding new cases at least through May.

You might be wondering how we ended up in this situation.

Strange as it may seem to be fighting off an illness that was eradicated in *checks notes* 1967, college campuses are breeding grounds for infectious diseases like this.

And it doesn’t necessarily matter if people got the vaccine as a baby or not — turns out its immunity wears off right around the age of an average student.

An overseas traveler, then kisses and drinks

The first person who’s infected with an illness that then leads to an outbreak is called the index case. Health Department officials have identified this individual for the Temple mumps outbreak, according to Dr. Caroline Johnson, acting deputy health commissioner for Philadelphia and a former infectious disease physician.

In this situation, the index case student had traveled internationally to a place where mumps was already circulating and brought it back with them. “It was imported,” Johnson said.

One case doesn’t invariably lead to an outbreak, but from that point, the entire student body was at risk.

When the CDC started tracking a resurgence of mumps in 2015, it found the disease most prominent on college campuses and other tight-knit communities. It’s what scientists would call the closed-community phenomenon: Close contact helps spread the airborne disease, and university students aren’t often the most, er, careful population.

“On college campuses, people go to parties, they share drinks, they kiss,” Johnson said. “It’s what college students do.”

If the average Philly resident was infected with the mumps, she said, they’d probably just spread it to their immediate family or household members. But with undegrads, all bets are off.

If someone lives in a dorm, Johnson said, “there’s the potential to expose hundreds and hundreds of people.”

The mumps vaccine only lasts 15 years

Temple’s administration teamed with Philly’s health department to offer two free, full-day clinics that drew lines stretching an entire city block.

Now that a full-fledged mumps outbreak has overtaken Owl Country, some have cast blame on the university. Up until this year, it seems Temple was the only Philadelphia college that did not explicitly require two doses of an MMR vaccine prior to enrollment.

Penn requires it, Drexel requires it, same with CCP, St. Joe’s, Thomas Jefferson, Villanova, La Salle. So Temple — which only implemented the immunization requirement this month — is an outlier.

However, health experts say blame for this current flare-up probably doesn’t land on the anti-vaxxer movement.

Most children get their first MMR vaccine before they’re 15 months old, and their second as a toddler (it’s recommended to be administered before age 6). The vaccine is considered solidly effective for about 10 to 15 years. That timeframe means that when kids are ready to head off to school, many immunizations have naturally worn off or are waning, said Deputy Health Commissioner Johnson.

The intersection of these factors — the perfect age for loss of immunity and the close quarters of college life — can easily breed an outbreak.

‘Can’t wait till summer’

Temple hasn’t yet scheduled any future vaccination clinics — officials are hoping they made enough of a dent with the first two.

In the meantime, isolated cases of the illness have popped up at other universities, like Penn and West Chester. Johnson said not to worry; she doesn’t anticipate it’ll spread on those campuses, or in the rest of Philadelphia.

“Now that it’s in the news quite a bit, everybody is looking,” Johnson said. “When they recognize a single case, they’re acting aggressively to try to prevent that spread.”

But at Temple, the contagion will probably continue, city health officials said. At least until May, when students are set free for summer break.

“It’s almost unheard of when they go home for the summer and reconvene in the fall, it will not start up again,” Johnson said. “The dispersal of students will ultimately interrupt that.”

Until then, public health officials eagerly await the warm weather. Johnson added: “We can’t wait till the summer!”

Made of pan-fried masa dough stuffed with cheese and other ingredients, the Central American street snack also shares similarities with South America’s arepas, but eating one is a totally unique experience — especially if you score it right off the griddle.

Topped with traditional curtido slaw and tangy tomato salsa, and almost always eaten with your hands, a proper pupusa can cause a miniature culinary epiphany. What’s the secret to getting it right?

“Love,” joked Eugenia Solares from behind the stove at an Italian Market storefront on Saturday morning, where she was turning out the flatbreads at a furious pace.

Bite in to one of her spotted rounds and the lightly-crisped edges melt away, dissolving into a mouthful of hot, cheesy deliciousness sparked by cornflour’s grassy edge. Pull a section off, use it to scoop up more sauce and slaw, then close your eyes and enjoy the combinations of flavor and texture. Like a great cheesesteak or BLT, the ingredients in a good pupusa add up to more than the sum of their parts.

The memory of these quick, soul-fortifying meals are what led Solares’ daughter, Stephanie Gonzalez, to launch a semi-regular pupusa pop-up under the name Loroko.

“I grew up with this,” Gonzalez explained, recalling a childhood punctuated by pupusa sales, which her mother hosted regularly from their Central Jersey house or a roving minivan that would feed immigrant workers aching for a taste of their native land.

When Gonzalez, 27, moved to Philly a few years ago, “I realized I had been embarrassed of my heritage,” she said. “Instead I wanted to celebrate it — so I convinced my mom to do this.”

Pupusas are considered El Salvadorean in origin, but over the past decades they’ve spread to neighboring countries, including Guatemala, where Solares was born. In 1987, on her way to the United States, Solares became separated from the group of women being led across the border by a coyote. On her own, she found her way to New Jersey, where she eventually raised a family — and honed her pupusa skill. “Our Salvadorean friends taught us,” she said.

If you’ve never tried a pupusa, no surprise. There aren’t all that many places to get them in Philadelphia. They’re served at a handful of South Philly’s taquerias, and North Philly and Upper Darby have a few Salvadorean spots. El Merkury recently brought them to Rittenhouse.

Catching a Solares-Gonzalez “madre y hija” pop-up is one of the best ways to get the full pupusa experience.

Loroko started more than a year ago, but after half a dozen successful underground events, Gonzalez realized she needed to go legit if she wanted the operation to grow. She put the pop-up on hiatus last fall and enrolled in classes to obtain the required certifications.

The latest edition of Loroko — also spelled loroco, it’s the word for a type of edible Mesoamerian flower bud — was hosted at 1149 Cooperative, the collective storefront in the midst of the busy market on South Ninth Street.

Customers who placed pre-orders online via Facebook and Instagram for the masa cakes ($5 a pair) picked up versions with dairy or vegan cheese, and beans or no beans. Each came with a bag of vinegary curtido — Solares ferments hers in giant jars filled with cabbage, onions and carrots — and a side of housemade tomato sauce.

As each group came in at their set pickup time, Gonzalez met them at the counter and coordinated with Solares, who carefully plucked scoopfuls of masa, made hollows in the center with her thumb, pressed in the required stuffings and began batting the dough around between her palms.

“I don’t know how she makes them all the same size,” Gonzales said, watching her mother work. “It’s not that hard,” Solares said, grinning. “Practice.”

When will you get a chance to try Loroko yourself? Stay tuned to social media for the next pop-up date.

Why?

Trump’s current numbers track closely to former President Barack Obama’s approval rating at around the same time in his presidency, two years into his first term. Pennsylvania went on to re-elect Obama to his second term with 52 percent of the vote.

“I’m not saying [Trump] will win the state,” Madonna told Billy Penn. “I’m merely pointing out we better be careful about saying he can’t win the state.”

That contextual clue is further complicated by the timing of the poll’s release, Madonna says. F&M pollsters conducted interviews before the four-page summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report was released last week. While national polls give no indication yet, Madonna wonders if the 540 Keystone State voters his team surveyed — 254 Democrats, 216 Republicans, and 70 Independents — would have changed their responses.

Still, 61 percent of all voters said Trump’s time is up, while 34 believe he’s doing a “good” or “excellent” job worthy of a second term. Those favorability odds are consistent with F&M’s other recent polls.

Nearly 60 percent favor legal pot

Unemployment, the economy, taxes — these issues continue to rank as most important for the Pennsylvania voter, and there’s no news on that front.

On thing that’s somewhat surprisingly unchanged: Pennsylvania voters’ views on legalizing marijuana.

With a medical program up and running, state lawmakers have begun moving the gears toward recreational marijuana laws. Newly minted Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is leading a multi-county “pot listening tour.” Even Gov. Wolf — whose favorability rating remains solid, per F&M, with just 13 percent of surveyed voters saying he sucks — is coming around to the idea.

But residents’ views haven’t budged much in the last year, despite all the talk. In this poll, a majority 59 percent of state voters support full-scale legalization. That’s a big increase since the 22 percent in favor when F&M first polled the question in 2006, but not much different from recent numbers.

Madonna noted that there’s been “a fair amount of pushback” to the idea over the past year. Even New Jersey, which is more liberal statewide than its eastern neighbor, has stalled on plans to move forward with a recreational program.

Climate change on PA’s mind

On the environment, Pennsylvania’s outlook appears less stagnant.

The number of voters who indicated that climate change is causing problems has gone up to 67 percent — up from 62 percent this time last year.

“I didn’t think quite frankly that it would be that high,” Madonna said.

Two in three voters also support the state prioritizing renewable energy, though the poll notes some partisan difference and ideological differences on what that looks like. More men (69 percent) than women (40) support nuclear energy in the long-term.

Support for moving fast on climate change policy also showed high support in people under 35.

“With this many young people thinking it’s problem,” Madonna said, “you can see what I’m talking about when I say this is going to be a recurring and important theme in American politics.”

Read the full polling results here.

Next time that happens, you should be able to do some of the math yourself.

In a move that’s likely to garner accolades from good government groups, Mayor Jim Kenney has opened up the city’s checkbook, revealing most — though not all — of its inky detail.

On Friday, the administration released more than $4 billion worth of payments made in the city’s ledger for the fiscal year 2017. It’s only a year’s worth of data so far, but the city hopes to have 2018 information available later this year, and it’s set to be updated annually going forward.

Even more important, the data is fully searchable via a new database. Previously, residents and members of the press had to file records requests to see line-item payouts of this kind, a roadblock that also made the big picture hard to come by.

“Payments data were designed in a way that was never meant to be released to the public,” said Mark Wheeler, chief information officer for the city. In other words, the city’s bookkeeping system was initially created for internal accounting — and wouldn’t make sense to most non-accountants.

All told, Philly’s new index is nearly a quarter million lines of spending data from more than 60 agencies. The unprecedentedly large dataset won’t answer all your questions — and it won’t necessarily add up exactly to the budget, per Catherine Lamb, deputy finance director — but it’s a solid start.

The digging also starts now. Find a payment that looks suspicious? Send a tip to max@billypenn.com.

What the data includes

While there are some exceptions, this is essentially a massive line-item report, where each line represents a single payment made from the city.

The gist of what information you’ll see:

• Name of the vendor who received the money
• Rough description of what was purchased
• Date the purchase was made or paid for
• Total transaction amount
• Contract number (where applicable)

That last piece of info is notable, because it makes city contracts much easier to track down. For years, regular and contract payments have been housed in separate databases. Now, you can see exactly how much the city pays every company it does business with — and what work was done.

The searchablility is key. Type in “sandwiches” and you’ll get a few dozen expenses for meals for “prisoners” at Philly’s Family Court. “Alcohol testing” sheds some light on the police department’s annual work with a Horsham-based toxicology lab. You can also enter the name of an office, like “District Attorney,” and scroll through its ledger.

Similar to previous open data releases, there are some pre-made visualizations that allow you to filter by department or other criteria.

The data also includes American Express travel vouchers, petty cash withdrawals and reimbursements to city employees or agencies — which should cover work-related travel costs.

What it doesn’t include

City officials said the dataset presented a unique challenge. Some payments the city makes need to remain confidential. When they began sorting the data last year, the Law Department identified sensitive information that couldn’t be disclosed.

About 8,000 line-item records have been kept out of the database so far, a number that equates to about 3 percent of the total. In the city’s language, records withheld include:

• Payments to individuals for social services. This largely involves payments paid to foster parents, officials say.
• Payments which would harm public safety activities if made public. This is a catch-all provision used by many law enforcement agencies to avoid disclosing details of their budget. Officials clarified that these deal mostly with “witness fees,” where the name of the recipient could jeopardize their safety. It also includes certain payments related criminal investigations and “secure locations” for emergency planning projects.
• Payments which would harm the City’s legal interests if released. Notably, it seems the city has redacted some legal settlements made by the Law Department. However, the dollar amount of any taxpayer-funded payouts is still obtainable under Pennsylvania’s Right-To-Know Law.
• Payments otherwise made confidential by law.

Sensitive or not, officials say the financial figures will still viewable. Search “foster treatment care” in the new database, for example, and you’ll find dozens of bottom-line payments to various agencies — albeit with fewer details than some of the other items.

Officials say the Office of Innovation and Technology will attempt to automate the data to upload annually. Fiscal year 2018 payment data should be up by the end of the year.

Weird codes? There’s a legend for that

If you’re combing through the data, you’ll see 14 acronyms that explain some of various payment types, and they have oddly specific criteria:

PCXX – petty cash
PVAT – court appointed attorneys
PVFA – funeral applicants
PVFD – funeral directors
PVFG – foster grandparents
PVFL – library books
PVFM – auto parts
PVFP – foster parents
PVMD – professional services
PVOS – monthly rent and quarterly MH/MR
PVTR – American Express travel vouchers
PVXX – payment voucher
RPXX – reimbursable expense vouchers for City employees
VCXX – procurement

Vincent Velez Jr. could feel Philadelphia’s opioid epidemic worsening last year from his Girard Avenue storefront. It manifested in his day-to-day sales.

More and more customers swung through his Northern Liberties door, placing orders for products to memorialize loved ones — many lost to fatal overdoses.

“Last year was huge,” Velez said. At one point, he got four different grieving commissions in a single week.

The 51-year-old artist has owned Airbrush Allstars since 1994.  The rowhouse shop at Fifth and Girard employs four artists, each of them taking custom orders for beanies, t-shirts, canvases and even murals.

When he first opened, Velez expected to be kept busy airbrushing the likeness of fancy cars and sports icons. But in Philadelphia, a city battling simultaneous crises of gun violence and addiction, half of the shop’s business comes from personalized “In Memory” products.

“People want to remember,” Velez said. “One way of doing that is with art.”

A reminder worth wearing

In the quarter-century since it opened, the airbrush shop has become something of an institution. Velez has more repeat customers than he can count. Some hail from as far away as Michigan and Australia — though most of them come directly from Philly neighborhoods.

Carmen Garcia is among the most loyal. She first found the shop in 2009, grieving the loss of her 34-year-old husband Jose, who died unexpectedly in a car accident. She returned two years ago, when her son-in-law suffered a fatal gunshot wound.

And she found herself inside the store again this week, ordering custom sweatshirts for the tenth anniversary of the day she became a widow.

For Garcia, the shop is an accessible way to memorialize her loved ones. It puts her grief to productive use. Pouring herself into the colorful designs of custom-made buttons, t-shirts and sweatshirts — the act helps Garcia mourn the loss.

“It makes you feel like that person might not be here, but you can always remember him,” she said. “It’s a reminder. It hurts you, but it also makes you feel good because you have something of him.”

“We’re showing ourselves and people around us that we still care,” Garcia added.

How Philadelphians navigate despair

Running the shop every day has become an unexpectedly personal experience, a social experiment into how Philadelphians navigate despair.

Adam Carrasquillo has worked on-and-off at Airbrush Allstars since it first opened. He often finds himself front and center facing a customer’s heartache. When folks have unreasonably high standards, or they’re extra critical of his designs, he tries not to take it personally.

“That’s the only way they can express how it’s impacted them to lose that person,” he said.

The business has connected 47-year-old Carrasquillo to Philadelphia’s bigger problems — its gang violence and high homicide rates.

“The times we live in, it’s such a shame,” he said. “It’s never the people that die of natural causes or cancer. A lot of it has to do with violence, and people who get caught up with gangs.”

He’s not proud to admit that, by now, he’s beginning to get desensitized.

“I’m like the guy who chiseles out the headstones,” Carrasquillo added. “After a while, you become numb to it.”

Like most of his employees, Velez never thought he’d get into this field. And the business model has been criticized by his fellow Philly artists — some suggest Velez is wrong for turning a profit on tragedy.

But by now, he sees it differently. In the wake of each death, Velez thinks he provides a necessary service — not unlike a funeral parlor or a florist.

“It gives them some kind of comfort,” Velez said. “They’re remembering their loved ones, and they want to share that experience.”

Alan Butkovitz Website | Mayoral Candidate | Learn more‎

But the link associated with that headline doesn’t connect you with an instructive campaign site for the Democratic ward leader. Rather, it links to a Billy Penn article from early March *about* Butkovitz’s campaign website, which had gone live in a disheveled state.

The real “Alan for Mayor” website looks better these days — but good luck finding it via Google search, where results pages are topped by this dinger:

For the record: Neither Billy Penn nor its parent company had any involvement with the ad.

To political junkies who’ve noticed the e-parlor trick, it seems perfectly clear who would benefit from promoting the flubbed launch of Butkovitz’s website.

Just do a search for state Sen. Anthony Williams, Mayor Jim Kenney’s other Democratic opponent in the upcoming May primary. The first Google ad also portends to be a mayoral campaign website, with language identical to the Butkovitz plug. The link, however, takes you to this 2015 PhillyVoice article that probed Williams’ charter school ties.

Ring, ring. Mr. Mayor? Hast thou been trolling?

That’s a firm “no comment” from the Kenney campaign.

As with the original website snafu, Butkovitz wasn’t aware of the Google ad until a reporter brought it to his attention. But he called it “petty insider baseball politics.”

“Kenney ends up hurting himself with this kind of stuff anyway,” Butkovitz said in a phone interview. “People are interested in the homicide crisis, the poverty crisis and the tax crisis.”

Williams’ campaign spokesperson Barbara Grant called the move a “a shameful act that seems kind of desperate” and called on the Kenney crew to disavow the stunt, as it distracts from the real issues.

Ah, the issues. In a way, this Google ad game is a fitting metaphor for the state of the mayor’s race in the sixth largest city in America. That is to say, it has seemed almost ornamental. In one corner is a self-assured incumbent. In the other are two candidates who seem to be having…internet issues.

(Pro-tip: The way to knock the troll off the bridge is to place a higher bid with Google for your own ad.)

Less than two months from E-Day, no Democrat been particularly visible on the campaign trail. Four years ago around this time, the mayor’s race was wide open with a robust field of candidates. It was a stamina test to see who could keep up with the endless nights of debates and forums and meet-and-greets.

This year, history suggests we’re looking at less of an election than a coronation. No incumbent Philadelphia mayor has lost a bid for a second term since the two-term limit was implemented via the city’s Home Rule Charter back in 1951.

Also, the field is a trio of already familiar faces. Williams, who finished second to Kenney in the 2015 Democratic mayoral primary, didn’t even formally announce his bid until last month. (His website is now up and running, by the way.) Butkovitz is a longtime Democratic ward leader who ran the City Controller’s office for over a decade, until his ouster in 2017 by a newcomer. Both are running against signature policies set during Kenney’s first term, from the soda tax to supervised drug consumption sites.

‘30,000 feet’ vs. ‘a city to run’

Butkovitz says Kenney is treating the race like a cakewalk. He accuses the mayor of shirking campaign events, citing a recent gathering at Liberty City LGBT Democratic Club in which the Kenney campaign sent a surrogate on his behalf.

“He wants to do a Rose Garden strategy,” Butkovitz said. “He’s flying at 30,000 feet.”

Kenney campaign spokesperson Harrison Morgan rejected that claim, while acknowledging the mayor does occasionally send surrogates.

“Alan has nothing else to do after being soundly rejected by voters two years ago for not doing his job well,” Morgan said. “Jim quite literally has a city to run. His primary focus is on his official events, but we schedule campaign events as time allows.”

Morgan said the mayor attended a number of political events in the last week: a smattering of ward meetings, a Democratic City Committee scrum, and a fundraiser for Councilwoman Cherelle Parker. But so far, the campaign has not agreed to any debates or forum, though Morgan said there will be news on that front soon.

Thirty thousand feet might be underestimating. Kenney’s campaign flashed more than half a million bucks as of its most recent filing, plus he has a cavalcade of outside political spenders who would jump to his aid if need be. Butkovitz said his campaign has raised over $100,000 as of Thursday. Williams’ mayoral war chest? Less than $15,000 as of January. Big money flooding the mayor’s race this year there is not.

‘These are all veteran candidates’

Polling data is scarce. One early poll, paid for by a pro-Kenney political action committee, showed the mayor dominating this three-way re-election bid with 58 percent of the vote, Williams 18, and Butkovitz 8.

Some argue that at least there are challengers — plural. When former Mayor Michael Nutter ran for his second term, he faced only one candidate, the perennial T. Milton Street, whom he trounced with nearly 76 percent of the vote.

Committee of Seventy director David Thornburgh said the rule of thumb is that a quiet race means people are basically content with current leadership — or at least not pissed off enough to rally the troops. And, he asked, are the challengers inspiring enough to galvanize voters against the incumbent?

“These are all veteran candidates who’ve run many times before,” Thornburgh said. “Fresh faces bring a natural excitement to the process.”

But good government groups take it as an article of faith that competitive elections are good for democracy. They push candidates, they stoke voter turnout.

At least in the last weeks, Thornburgh said, “I would love to see a robust, old-fashioned, energetic three-way campaign.”

Updated 12:25 p.m.

Lifelong Philadelphian Mary Hutchins hasn’t spent much time outside the city. Her longest departure was when she visited her daughter last year in Houston, Texas.

Just shy of a half-year, her trip was long enough to get some perspective on Philly’s rapidly rising housing costs. When she returned and began to look for a new apartment, she realized she couldn’t afford any of the available options.

“Apartments are starting at like $1,100,” said Hutchins, a 67-year-old retired administrative assistant. “A lot of rents are just astronomical.”

The high costs got Hutchins thinking, and she submitted this question via Broke is Listening: Why doesn’t Philly have a form of rent control?

As part of the Broke in Philly collaborative, Billy Penn has been reporting on issues around economic mobility in the city. In a new series, we’re going deeper by asking the community what they want us to investigate. For this installment, we’ll explain Philly’s position on rent control.

Even if Philadelphia had rent control, it wouldn’t have helped someone in Hutchins’ position. Rent control is a cap on how much a landlord can charge current tenants. It does not apply to people moving into a new place.

Under a rent control system, government gives landlords some kind of defined ceiling, a percentage increase or number they can’t go above when determining the cost of rent. At its best, the policy can prevent displacement and help longterm, low-income residents stay in their homes. The downside, some say, is that it has the potential to disrupt an entire housing market.

Nationally, there’s an ongoing debate about rent control. It’s been around in some U.S. cities for decades — and there’s a local campaign to bring it here, too.

Did Philadelphia ever have rent control?

Though legislators haven’t made rent control a priority in recent years, it’s existed in Philadelphia before. Back in the 1950s, it was a popular federal policy.

In the World War II era, there were federally mandated rent control laws that applied to Philly. When that policy waned, local officials brought it back — until it was struck down by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1955.

“This disinvestment was starting to happen,” said David Thompson, organizer with the Philly Tenants Union. “The state and federal government were actively pulling out funds from cities.”

Since then, Philly hasn’t fought to bring back rent control. But the policy’s been retained in cities like New York and San Francisco. Just a month ago Oregon passed its own rent control law, and now Massachusetts is considering it too.

Will Philadelphia follow suit? Short answer: Probably not.

Is rent control likely to return to Philly? 

Philadelphia’s recently released Housing Action Plan did not recommend rent control as a solution to rising housing costs.

Instead, it landed on a shallow rent subsidy, per city spokesperson Paul Chrystie, which provides residents with some help on their rent, rather than capping what an independent landlord can charge. That initiative scored funding in Kenney’s budget for fiscal year 2019.

That doesn’t mean the push is over. Having won the battle for Good Cause eviction legislation, the Philly Tenants Union is now refocusing its efforts on winning rent control for the city. In the runup to the primary election, reps plan to survey Council candidates and get their stance.

“We’ve been trying to go to basically confront candidates running for office and put them on the spot,” Thompson said. “Are they on the side of big developers and landlords, or renters, who make up half of Philadelphians now?”

So far, many of the Democrats running for an at-large Council seat have reportedly expressed approval for the policy.

The Tenants Union plans to announce its official campaign for rent control with an event in the next few weeks, per Thompson. From the activist group’s perspective, the policy’s effectiveness isn’t up for debate.

“There’s no excuse to not get behind real, tough rent control for people,” Thompson said.

The pros and cons

Housing policy experts, on the other hand, say the research on its effectiveness is mixed. Studies say rent control is good for some things — keeping longterm city residents in their homes, for example — but it can be problematic in other ways.

There’s strong evidence out of New York City and California that rent control reliably lengthens the time that tenants stay in rental units. It protects low-income renters from market rate increases — a benefit that shouldn’t be understated.

But drawbacks can ripple throughout the rest of the city. If you lock in an artificial rent for decades at a time, the landlord might not make enough money to cover their operating costs, or to reinvest in repairing the building.

It also puts pressure on housing costs in the rest of the city — rent control usually depresses new construction, and unregulated housing costs tend to go up.

“It’s likely to be harder for aspiring residents of the city, whether they’re immigrants or domestic migrants, to find affordable housing,” said Charles McNally, communications director for the NYU Furman Center. “It sort of subsidizes existing residents, potentially at the expense of future residents.”

In the midst of a national conversation about rent control, McNally encouraged cities to implement not just one policy — but a robust plan that protects residents from displacement, establishes new affordable housing options and encourages market-rate development.

“There’s no silver bullet, there’s no one policy that can do it,” he said. “You really need a comprehensive, balanced housing plan.”