The City Planning Commission has gone on a hiring binge over the last year, filling long-vacant posts with street-pounding professionals whose job it is to visit, study and help the neighborhoods that have long felt ignored by City Hall.
The commission has hired six community planners and intends to hire two more to provide experts to staff all 12 planning districts that make up the city, executive director Maxine Griffith said.
The new staffers have already begun detailed studies of housing, open space, economic development and transportation. They have been assigned neighborhoods such as Strawberry Mansion and Northeast Philadelphia, large sections that had gone without the attention of full-time planners for a decade or more.
"Someone from the city is actually paying attention to us," said Kate Clarke, a longtime Frankford community activist who has met several times with new Northeast planner Shari Cooper. "She's willing to come out and talk to people to find out what they want."
The hiring is part of a citywide policy shift putting new emphasis on neighborhood development. Under Mayor Ed Rendell, the Planning Commission staff dwindled during the 1990s while his office sought to bolster commerce and housing downtown.
Under Mayor Street's $300 million Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, the commission has a new executive director and a clear mandate from City Hall: Dust off old planning studies, develop new ones, analyze the latest census data, meet with community leaders and businesspeople, and knock on people's doors to find out how to keep residents and attract new ones to a city whose population has continued to drop, with 60,000 residents leaving in the last decade.
"The mayor's goal is an ambitious one and a sweeping one, and there's no way the Planning Commission could perform towards that goal without staffing up," said Richard Redding, the city's longtime West Philadelphia planner, who is also acting director of the burgeoning community-planning division.
"This division has existed on paper for 30 or 40 years, but it's still pertinent. It still works," Redding said.
The mayor's blight initiative, approved earlier this year by City Council, has two main elements: demolition and planning.
The Planning Commission has an advisory role in helping determine which properties are to be demolished, but most of those decisions are being made by the Licenses and Inspections Department, City Council, and members of the administration's anti-blight team.
The core of the Planning Commission's work involves examining neighborhoods to determine their assets and liabilities.
"We're the ones who say, 'You want to put a housing project here? What about rerouting the bus? Have you done a demographic analysis? What about the environmental issues?' " Griffith said.
The planners also examine broader issues of what makes the city livable or not, or what sort of zoning changes could encourage redevelopment.
For instance, Cooper is looking at the workforce in the business and industrial complexes in the Far Northeast, where those people live, and what sort of housing could entice those from the suburbs to stay in the city where they generate their paychecks.
She also is helping community groups in Frankford assess the potential of development along Frankford Creek - an industrial area with some open space and warehouses that could become loft housing.
"I got down there in the weeds and all the bushes and trampled through to explore that creek," Cooper said.
"I also talk to people who sit on their front porch, who are sweeping their sidewalk, the business owners, the community leaders. I take notes. I take photographs."
In neighborhoods for which the city has never put together a comprehensive plan and where there are few, if any, active community groups, commission head Griffith is summoning all of her community planners to fact-finding meetings.
One such meeting with residents took place just last week in Strawberry Mansion. Griffith showed up with her new planner for that neighborhood, along with the department's entire community-planning staff and officials from city housing and development agencies.
"We've been going in and doing a lot of Planning 101," Griffith said.
For years, large sections of Philadelphia weathered the exodus of jobs and population without a fraction of such attention.
Northwest Philadelphia is divided into three of the department's 12 planning-analysis sections. But for 15 years, only one planner worked all three, Redding said. Now, a planner is assigned to each.
For at least eight years, the three sections of North Philadelphia were covered by one planner. Those, too, have been filled over the last year, Redding said.
Northeast Philadelphia, a 46-square-mile area divided into two planning sections, went without a planner for about eight years. Cooper is covering both, the Far Northeast and near Northeast, until another planner is hired to join her, Redding said.
Center City, which represents one planning district, went without a planner for two years until about six months ago, when one was hired.
Redding is to supervise the community-planning division until all positions are filled and a permanent supervisor is named.
In addition to Redding's West Philadelphia turf, two other key planning zones - covering South and Southwest Philadelphia - have had planners for some time.
With all of the new hiring and all the new work, the commission earlier this month began tearing down walls to expand into the former site of the Historical Commission, across the hall on the 13th floor at 1515 Arch St.
Griffith said the department was able to avoid the hiring freeze imposed earlier this year upon city agencies.