Mark Alan Hughes | SOME OF OUR PROBLEMS ARE JUST UNFIXABLE

IMAY BE THE last publicly pessimistic person in Philadelphia.

It's the fashion, since the primary election victory of Michael Nutter, to stifle one's pessimism and berate any hint of it detected in others.

The chorus is everywhere: We've turned a page, reform is on the rise, and the only thing we have to fear is the fear of success.

It's as if the city were caught in some kind of EST coma, taking the corn-flake cure and chanting about the power of positive thinking. No one dares spoil the moment.

The closest thing to a caution comes from those who worry that our expectations may be too high, setting our triumphant reformers up for a fall.

Pity the poor Philadelphians. After being told for years that their low expectations have killed the city for a generation or two, now they've been whip-lashed by the new conventional wisdom telling them that their high expectations may kill it in the future.

But even this flaccid form of pessimism - the kind that says, gosh, our challenges are large and we better pace our expectations for improvement - is merely a device for helping Mayor Nutter get things done. The expectations argument is made by people who apparently believe that our biggest problems are fixable, if we just proceed in the right way: not too fast, not too slow, with just the right expectations for our next mayor.

But our biggest problems are not fixable.

I almost put a comma at the end of that sentence and added a qualifying phrase like "as we currently define them" or "in terms of what a mayor can do." But I'm sticking with the period because no one is saying this clearly enough.

Our biggest problems ARE NOT FIXABLE.

Please don't take this as cynicism of which I must be cured. I'm not cynical - I'm realistic. A lot hinges on that distinction.

Treating our biggest problems as fixable is the most irresponsible politics I can imagine. It's the ultimate example of whistling past the graveyard, and it's pretty irritating when it's done by people whose own prospects are not really on the line.

Philadelphia is a city in which perhaps half a million people are able to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But there's another million or so Philadelphians whose prospects grow dimmer every year - half of whom are poor or nearly so, while the other half cling precariously to a living earned in a declining economy.

I'm fully aware of how well Philadelphia works for that happy half million. And Michael Nutter (forget the charade of November's general election) could be the best mayor any of them will ever have.

But much of this city operates as a warehouse of America's greatest failings. Chief among which is poverty. Hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians are mired in poverty and the related web of poor health, lousy education, no work and chronic violence. One in four Philadelphians is officially poor, which is very poor indeed: about $20,000 for a family of four.

In this regard, the mayoral campaign of Rep. Chaka Fattah was focused on the right problem but the wrong job. (In fact, he already has the right job, and now we'll see how genuinely concerned he is about poverty in Philadelphia.)

The resources required to fix those failings are so far beyond the capacity of Philadelphia (and the region and the state) that it is lunatic to act as if any mayor matters to our biggest problems.

YES, A MAYOR can help improve the quality of life for all citizens on every block. And Michael Nutter will get up every day and do that because it will soon be his job. That's why I volunteered for him during the primary, making a tiny contribution to the candidate I thought best.

But when quality of life starts out so low, as it does for a million or so Philadelphians, the degree of improvement any mayor can make doesn't really matter. The mayor of New Orleans after Katrina and the mayor of Dresden after the allied bombing never had to state that painfully obvious fact.

Without the kind of lively economy that Philadelphia had 50 years ago, there is simply no way the city can be a place where these problems get fixed. Instead, we will continue to be a place where these problems get stored.

We've used lousy government as an excuse for as long as anyone can remember. If we could just fix our politics, we say, Philadelphia would prosper.

Now that we've elected the best possible mayor for Philadelphia, that excuse is about to vanish. And the unfixable problems will be clearer to everyone. *

Mark Alan Hughes is the Robert A. Fox Leadership Fellow at Penn and a second-year architecture student at PennDesign.

E-mail: mahughes@sas.upenn.edu.