Allan Domb’s impetus was born from the promise and possibilities of entrepreneurship
Democratic mayoral candidate Allan Domb takes us to the Center City locations that changed his life.
As Allan Domb took a walk through Center City one day in March, people stopped him several times to shake his hand and chat for a minute.
“Now he should be the next mayor,” said a man who loaded lumber into the back of a work truck on Walnut Street.
The millionaire real estate broker-turned City Councilman, who now wants to be Philly’s next mayor, has often talked about growing up poor in Jersey City, where he was born to parents who worked in an embroidery factory.
He began working at age 5, shining shoes with his older brother at a commuter bus stop. His other boyhood jobs: delivering newspapers, janitor, and dishwasher.
One late March day during the filming of the video, Domb walked from the Temple University Center City Campus on Market Street, just west of City Hall, to the school’s former campus at 1616 Walnut Street, where Domb took classes at Temple’s Real Estate Institute, just two years out of college.
In 1976, Phelps Time Lock Service, the security company where Domb worked fulltime in Maryland while attending college at night, transferred him to Philadelphia. For a year or so, Domb lived in Jenkintown. But around 1978, he moved to a one-bedroom apartment in the Academy House at 15th and Locust Streets in Washington Square West.
“I will tell you at that time, things were not great in the city. There was a lot of crime, there was a lot of prostitution back then. It wasn’t safe in the city at all,” he told The Inquirer.
His salary at the security company at the time was about $15,000 a year. One day, while driving in his car, he heard Jay Lamont, the late real estate investor on his radio talk show talking about the classes he was teaching at Temple’s Real Estate Institute. Domb signed up for the classes in 1978.
To this day, he considers Lamont, who died in 2021, one of his most important mentors, after his parents, who taught him the value of hard work.
» READ MORE: Watch all candidate videos from the series here.
Read more about Allan Domb
This story by Julia Terruso is an in-depth overview of the candidate.
Domb weighed in on Philadelphia’s Land Bank, calling its performance “dismal.”
Domb has said that he is against establishing a supervised-injection site in the city.