Poverty still the enemy

"It is a time . . . when want is keenly felt, and abundance rejoices.

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- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Despite biblical assurances on the awful staying power of poverty, Mayor Nutter deserves credit for launching a high-profile effort to whittle away at the number of poor living in Philadelphia.

With poverty clouding the future prospects for one in four Philadelphians - many of them children - parts of the city might offer reminders of Dickensian London, but for the fact of a robust social safety net (not to mention modern sanitation methods).

Nutter is taking a fresher approach than ideas fashioned when President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964. Midway through his second term, he created the Mayor's Office of Community Empowerment & Opportunity, putting City Hall veteran Eva Gladstein to work crafting the strategic plan that became Shared Prosperity Philadelphia.

More than year into the effort, they have documented the efforts of a range of social-service providers, philanthropists, researchers, and others who are partnering with the city. The first report (sharedprosperityphila.org) was unveiled last week at a Uniting to Fight Poverty Summit at Community College of Philadelphia.

Gladstein noted that monthly roundtables are regularly attended by up to 100 stakeholders, who have gotten behind such initiatives as setting up one-stop information centers, where individuals can get referrals for assistance. Similarly, financial counseling and education are offered at other sites.

The city also has won designation of a portion of West Philadelphia as one of the first five Promise Zones, which offers these neighborhoods, where half the residents live in poverty, preferential treatment for federal programs.

As the long struggle to reduce poverty shows, this is the work of decades, not months. Nutter's push, though, has received at least a psychic boost with news that the city's poverty rate dropped slightly for the second year running, from 26.9 percent to 26.3 percent. That means 9,000 more residents left the ranks of the neediest between 2012 and 2013.

At that rate, of course, the city's poverty problem won't be solved during the lifetimes of even the youngest of its 123,000 children living poor. Which means that the biggest challenge to continuing the attack on poverty will fall to mayoral administrations that follow.

It's critical, then, that the city's antipoverty initiative gets prominent billing on the agenda for the coming mayoral battle among, so far, four Democratic contenders seeking to replace Nutter. Gladstein's stakeholder partners should make it clear to the candidates that their enthusiasm for defeating poverty will be a key factor in selecting the next city leader.

In fact, the constituency for this effort should be citywide. As the mayor remarked in his first-year antipoverty report, "Poverty has an impact beyond the individual, it taints our entire city - the economy, development, education, health and wellness, the housing market, and opportunity. It prevents Philadelphia, as a whole, from moving forward and being a prosperous place for every citizen."