Scrutinizing Street's neighborhoods legacy

HOW WILL John Street be remembered after he leaves the mayor's office?

Will it be for high rates of violent crime? Or the FBI bug found in his office? Perhaps Philadelphians will simply remember him grabbing a deferred pay-raise on his way out the door.

Here's another possibility: Perhaps John Street will be recalled as the first Philadelphia mayor to apply government's massive resources to fixing neighborhoods that had been in decline for decades.

And if Street becomes the "Neighborhood Mayor" to future generations, it will be because of his Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, a complex vision of how to renew city neighborhoods ravaged by generations of disinvestment with a quick jolt of $296 million in bond money plus other city tax dollars.

Street's vision was this: Knock down thousands of blighted buildings, clean up neighborhoods, condemn abandoned property and then package it for development, attract private developers and encourage homeowners to reinvest in their own properties.

NTI was "at the core of everything that we have been trying to do," Street said.

But did it succeed?

Street sees NTI as a galloping success.

"There are no throw-away neighborhoods any more," Street said. "All property is valuable in this city today and we have practically abandoned the use of the term 'abandoned property.' "

Street likes to tell the story of a homeowner who approached him recently, telling him he will always be her favorite mayor.

"She told me that her house in West Philadelphia used to be worth $5,000 and now people have offered her $150,000. She said it was like I wrote her a big fat check," he chuckled.

Street's goal, when he announced NTI in April 2001, was to see 16,000 new housing units develop in the following five years. He exceeded that goal with at least 24,000 units built, planned or under construction during his two terms in office.

But the administration's accounting includes every home built in the past eight years - whether or not it benefited directly from NTI.

Critics scoff at this generous way of judging the impact of a program that Philadelphians will be making annual $20 million bond payments on until 2031. By then, the city will have paid $552 million for the privilege of spending $296 million during the Street era.