Cool Places in Philadelphia — Some More Places
A massive playground with potato sack slides, the art museum steps since before he could walk, and the Broad Street Line that refuses to let me on.
Looking Closer
Nick Jain — seeing around corners on AI, Philadelphia, and business.
Latest posts
The Sheriff's Operational Response to Two Court Summons About Underperformance Is Underwhelming
Six months after a Common Pleas judge ordered Sheriff Bilal to appear in court twice to explain why a special master should not be appointed, the public record contains an op-ed with no numbers, two appointees whose own homes were foreclosed on by the office they now run, and a search portal framed as innovation for a weekend-project-scale technical problem.
Philadelphia Outlawed Rental Price-Fixing
Philadelphia Code § 9-813 makes rental price coordination a code violation, with $2,000-per-violation civil penalties and a private right of action. Passed in 2024. The second major US city to write an anti-price-fixing ordinance for residential rentals, after San Francisco, and the first on the East Coast.
What Philadelphia Should Do About 311
The eight articles above make the case. This one makes the ask — five policy moves, each anchored in a number the city itself generated.
Blocks and Towers
My son builds towers and knocks them down, builds them and knocks them down. I've been thinking about what that means and why Kipling was right about triumph and disaster.
When 311 Closes a Ticket, 'Closed' Means Different Things in Different Neighborhoods
I categorized what 311's "closed" means across 69,140 service requests. 28% of tickets in lower-income zips end in real action. In higher-income zips, it's 50%.
The $650K Settlement that Settles Nothing at Selective Philadelphia Schools
The School District of Philadelphia settled for $650,000 with the three families who sued over the 2021 selective-school admissions overhaul. The district admitted no wrongdoing, kept its lottery policy in place, and the deeper questions the case was supposed to resolve are still open.
A Second Walk Through Fairmount Finishes the Abandoned Car Project We Started Last Week on a Whim
This Sunday at 830am, we set out to finish up the job we started last week. Today, we visited 16 potential abandoned cars spread over 3.5 miles, and found 14 were already gone!
The Corners of Philadelphia That Have Called 311 Twenty Times
A small number of Philadelphia addresses generate a disproportionate share of 311 complaints — sometimes the same complaint, year after year.
Where Philadelphia homeowners may be leaving Homestead money on the table
A citywide map of single-family properties with no Homestead Exemption on file, with synthetic dots showing where likely owner-occupied outreach targets are concentrated.
Philly's 2027 Property Tax went up a headline 4-7%, but really it's 0-44%
Philadelphia's 2027 citywide reassessment was supposed to spread the property-tax burden evenly. The mean moved +7.0%, the median +4.2%. ZIP-level medians ran -2.7% in Fishtown to +11.5% in Kensington; the worst-hit census tract saw +44.4%. Aggregate modeled increase: $77.7M, before Homestead relief.
June 2026 Philadelphia Performance Index, and Philly Government Performance Index
June 2026 monthly update. Both composites dropped sharply from May — the steepest single-month decline on the government side. Code enforcement collapsed as L&I issuance spiked.
Cool Places in Philadelphia
Some places in Philly — the kind that grow on you over time rather than the tourist spots.
Can One Family Improve Philadelphia's Abandoned Car Problem Through the 311 System? We Tried.
On a spur of the moment decision, my family and I decided to do our part to help identify abandoned cars in the open 311 tickets. A story of 3 miles, 90 minutes a 19 month old, and 15 abandoned cars
Income Explains 19% of Philly's 311 Wait Times. The Other 81% Doesn't Care About Income.
Income tier predicts 19% of 311 wait times. The other 81% is zip-by-zip — Fairhill runs at higher-tier speeds, Elmwood waits 17.9 days for the same 311 service. The within-tier story is bigger than the income-tier story.
From One Guy Who Doesn’t Want to Buy Another Car Window
My car was broken into twice in Fairmount. Both times the window got smashed. Then this summer — nothing. The 9th District weekly report explains why.
How Long Does 311 Take in Your Neighborhood?
An interactive tool to explore Philadelphia 311 service-request wait times by ward or ZIP, filtered by department and issue type. The same data behind the geography-of-waiting analysis — sliced along three axes you control.
Shoveling in 1 Business Day, Broken Traffic Signals in 1 Business Day. Philadelphia 311 Meets Both Promises Less Than Half the Time.
7 of Philadelphia 311's 27 published SLAs are met less than half the time. Two are 1-Business-Day safety promises. The published numbers are fiction.
What $120M Could Have Bought
Philadelphia spent $120 million on the 250th anniversary of American independence. About $15.5 million of it paid for a single concert. Here is what that money could have funded instead — sanitation raises, school air conditioning, more teachers, and the buses that did not run last winter.
A third of Philly's open 311 tickets haven't been touched in a year.
23,229 of 75,929 currently-open 311 requests haven't been updated in 365+ days. 88.1% haven't been touched in 30+ days. The system isn't backed up — it stopped.
Why Philly Pays Its Sanitation Workers $46,000 in 100° and 15° Weather
Philadelphia pays its sanitation workers the 4th-lowest wages among America's 20 biggest cities — below the MIT living wage for a single adult and roughly half what a single-earner family of four needs to live here.
The 30th Street Station at 6am
I take the 6am train out of Philadelphia a few times a month. Here's what I've noticed about the station and the ritual of leaving.
The bigger 311 story isn't the gap. It's the wait.
Lower-income neighborhoods wait 16 days longer for 311 than higher-income ones. Two-thirds of the gap is the work itself — abandoned cars, blight. The rest is the city. The bigger story is everyone waiting months.
May 2026 Philadelphia Performance Index, and Philly Government Performance Index
May 2026 monthly update. The Government index gained 1.1 to 54.3. Services kept climbing on the broader index while housing remained the soft spot.
The 311 Gap Lives in Three Complaints. L&I Owns One of Them.
When I decompose the 2.6-day citywide 311 gap across the nine agencies that handle 98% of service requests, three discretionary complaint categories explain most of it. The routine, scheduled departments are nearly equal.
The Casino Smoking Loophole
Section 10-602(3)(a)(.1)(g) of the Philadelphia Code has banned smoking in licensed gaming facilities since January 8, 2007. Subsection (.7) of the same section prohibits smoking within 20 feet of any entrance to those facilities. The two rules together create a structural incentive for casinos to cluster smokers at the door.
Most of Philadelphia 311 isn't fixing things. It's answering the phone.
Of 1.3 million Philadelphia 311 records since 2024, 57% aren't service tickets. They're phone calls — and the call center is the larger of the two systems.
Poor people wait ~2x longer for service through Philly 311
311 is Philadelphia's equalizer — one number, same service for everyone. So why do poor neighborhoods wait 50%-300% longer?
The Case for FP&A Analysts in City Government
City departments fly blind without real-time financial analysis. Here's the arithmetic argument for why every major department should have an FP&A analyst — and why the math almost pays for itself.
The Developer Who Stopped Me Mid-Sentence
In which someone with more institutional experience corrects my framing, and I learn the difference between being right about the destination and wrong about the route.
April 2026 Philadelphia Performance Index, and Philly Government Performance Index
April 2026 monthly update. Both composites climbed. The Government index got a step-up from the new fiscal-year permitting and fiscal updates.
Appreciating Philadelphia as a Home
Notes from Fairmount on why this city works.
The Eviction Gamers of Philadelphia
Philadelphia eviction court rewards people who know the system. Skip one hearing, claim never served, buy two and a half extra months. JBA? Still appealable. The system was built this way.
The Sheriff's Office Can't Process Deeds
Philadelphia judges ordered the Sheriff to fix deed processing failures — buyers paid $1M at auction and are still waiting for deeds. The backlog averages 223 days.
The Eviction Backlog — Six to Ten Months from Filing to Safe Access
Philadelphia's property-return process takes 6 to 10+ months end-to-end. The diversion program, court scheduling, and Sheriff backlog stack into a year or more — even when every step is followed correctly.
The Broken Machine: How Philadelphia's Eviction System Hurts Everyone
Philadelphia's eviction system was designed to protect tenants. Instead it's destroying housing stock, raising rents on everyone, and punishing the people it claims to help. Here's the math and the mechanism.
The School District's Allocation Crisis
Philadelphia's School District faces a $300M structural deficit and is cutting 340 school-based positions. But central office — which grew 56% in a decade — is largely protected. This isn't a resource crisis. It's an allocation crisis.
The Mismatch
I care about diverse schools. I care about results. The mismatch research is contested but I think it points the right way — and what Philadelphia is doing with its selective school admissions won't deliver what it promises.
The Ambush
Philadelphia changed its selective school admissions rules on the same day the application window opened, with no formal public comment period, no warning, and no time to respond.
March 2026 Philadelphia Performance Index, and Philly Government Performance Index
March 2026 monthly update. Both composites essentially flat as services gains and housing losses offset. The two indices sit 1.1 points apart.
Philadelphia's School Admissions Ruling, Explained
A federal court said Philadelphia may have discriminated in its school admissions and sent the case back for a trial — here is what it found and why it matters.
Ghost Agencies
The Philadelphia Code names offices that have been abolished and absorbed by successor bodies, but still appear in present-tense language. The Fairmount Park Commission, abolished in 2008. The Recorder of Deeds, abolished as a separately elected office by Title 2 of the Philadelphia Code. The Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison, abolished by the same Title. A record of a…
The Cost of Meetings
The back-of-the-envelope calculation that changed how I think about calendars forever.
The Friday 4:47pm News Dump
The Friday 4:47pm news dump is a documented government communications strategy. Officials time bad news for when fewer reporters are watching. Someone calculated exactly how much scrutiny they could avoid by changing the timestamp.
$3.4 Billion in Annual City Contracts — 90% Late
Philadelphia's $3.4B in city money flows annually to contractors. 90% of contracts finalized after start date; more than a quarter faced delays of 5+ months. The nonprofits serving the poor are the ones who can't navigate the delays.
The Regressive Revenue Machine
Philadelphia wants to tax your Uber ride and your Amazon delivery to fix the school budget. But the city is sitting on $214 million in uncollected property taxes. The regressive taxes aren't a solution — they're a symptom.
The Sheriff Bought a $9000 Life-Size Mascot of Herself
Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal spent $9,250 on a mascot costume and $606,000 on a recruiting ad campaign featuring herself. Then she asked City Council for a 54% budget increase. This is a fucking joke.
The Controller's Office
Philadelphia's City Controller can diagnose the city's financial dysfunction down to the dollar. Fixing it is someone else's job.
February 2026 Philadelphia Performance Index, and Philly Government Performance Index
February 2026 monthly update. The Philadelphia Performance Index snapped back 6.3 to 52.0 as services recovered. The Government index slipped 1.2 to 50.7.
The Price of Understanding
This is Part 5 of Intelligence Is Free. The aggregate valuations of the top six foundational AI labs exceed $2 trillion. The mathematics of discounted cash flows suggests this cannot be justified by any plausible future earnings. A reasoned examination of the bubble.