BY MOST ANYONE' standards, $250 million is a big wad of money.
That's the figure used by John Street in last year's mayoral campaign when he suggested a massive bond issue to fight blight in city neighborhoods.
First he has to get the money. That means borrowing the money by issuing bonds, which taxpayers will have to pay off far into the future.
But by itself, experts say, even $250 million is barely a beginning in the fight against abandoned housing, vacant lots and rusting car hulks across vast stretches of Philadelphia.
Do the math yourself.
A survey last year by the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections counted 24,083 vacant, abandoned buildings throughout Philadelphia.
Assume the city has no interest in fixing up any of the buildings. It just wants to tear them down.
The Department of Licenses and Inspections has a price tag for that - $8,853 per demolition job under the department's most recent budget proposal.
There goes $213 million.
Assume that for just a small number of vacant houses - say, one out of 10 - it makes sense to do a modest $25,000 rehab. That saves you $21 million in demolition - but sets you back $60 million for construction.
Then you've got your vacant lots - some 30,173 citywide, according to L&I's survey last year, plus 22,000 created by your demolition work. How much to clear the lots and plant grass seed?
Another $75 million, according to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which took bids for such work last year.
So far, we're up to $327 million, way beyond budget. And we still haven't put anything aside to deal with abandoned cars or graffiti, environmental problems or even fencing, to stop people from dumping debris back on these lots that we've spent a small fortune to clean.
One other discomforting piece of reality: Odds are all these estimates are low. Based simply on the city's huge population losses through the 1990s - 168,000 people who've moved out - some experts think the city has more like 50,000 vacant houses, roughly double the number used in this back-of-the-envelope analysis.
Even more important, the experts say, tearing down all these abandoned houses and clearing the vacant lots won't by itself solve the underlying problem that produced this urban decay - the collapse of the private market for real estate in many Philadelphia neighborhoods.
