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Jeff Jones and the Equity Across Communities Campaign: Why I'm Knocking on Doors This September

I'm backing Jeff Jones and his Equity Across Communities campaign because Philadelphia's zip code inequality demands more than a post.

By Harry Hayman 8 min read
Jeff Jones and the Equity Across Communities Campaign: Why I'm Knocking on Doors This September

September mornings in Philadelphia have a quality you only notice when you are outside early enough. The light hits the row houses at an angle that shows you everything at once: the fresh paint on one door, the broken step on the one next door, the garden somebody squeezed between two chain link fences, the security camera someone installed last spring on a block where you would not have needed one ten years ago. I have been thinking about that light lately, and about what it would feel like to walk toward someone’s front door, knock, and wait to hear what they have to say about where they live.

My friend Jeff Jones has built a campaign around exactly that encounter. The campaign is called Equity Across Communities. The central conviction behind it is one I have returned to many times in my own work: the zip code you live in should not determine the Philadelphia you get to live in. That proposition is what I want to write about today, because the evidence for it is overwhelming, and because Jeff and his team are going out to test it in the most direct way available. They are going door to door. I told him I am going with them.

What Philadelphia’s Own Numbers Show

I work on food economy and policy as a Senior Fellow at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia. That work puts me in regular contact with data on where poverty sits in this city and how durable it is. But even after years of reading this material, there are numbers that stop you.

The research that Virginia Commonwealth University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation conducted on life expectancy across American cities is among them. Strawberry Mansion and Society Hill are roughly five miles apart. A child born in Strawberry Mansion can expect to live to age 68. A child born in Society Hill can expect to live to 88. That is a twenty year gap, in the same city, a drive that takes less than twenty five minutes on a clear afternoon. The researchers found Philadelphia’s gap was the largest of any city they studied, wider than Chicago’s sixteen year gap and wider than New York City’s nine year gap. Twenty years is a generation of life. It is the difference between watching your grandchildren grow up and not. And it is determined largely by where you started.

The city’s own Department of Public Health has found similar disparities at the neighborhood level. Nicetown-Tioga, in North Philadelphia, shows a male life expectancy of 64 years. West Mount Airy, a few miles to the northwest, shows 77.3 years. The department’s research links those numbers to higher rates of diabetes, cancer, and asthma, to thinner access to primary care, to aging housing stock, and to sustained exposure to violence. These are not separate problems that happen to land in the same neighborhood. They feed into each other through a loop that begins before a child is born and ends earlier than it should.

On housing, research from the Pew Charitable Trusts on renter cost burden in Philadelphia found that 88 percent of renters earning below $30,000 per year are housing cost burdened, spending more than a third of their income on rent. In East Germantown, where median rents run below the city average, the share of renters in that position still runs above 52 percent, higher than the citywide figure of 48.5 percent. The reason is not rent. It is income. The neighborhoods where housing is cheapest are often the ones where people have the least to spend, which means the math stays hard regardless of which direction rents are moving.

Then there is education. Research from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition on how redlining has shaped school funding in Philadelphia places Philadelphia at roughly $13,000 per student per year, while neighboring Montgomery County spends around $23,000. That $10,000 annual gap per child, compounded across twelve years of schooling, is not an abstraction. It is the reading specialist who is there in second grade when a child starts to fall behind, or who is not. It is the counselor who works full time and has the caseload that allows her to sit with a student going through something difficult, rather than the one who does not.

None of these gaps are accidental or new. Research from the Economy League on the changing distribution of poverty in Philadelphia documents how the geography of poverty has been durable and self reinforcing over decades, concentrated in specific neighborhoods through successive rounds of investment decisions, housing policy, and patterns of deliberate disinvestment that left some parts of this city with less of everything that holds a neighborhood together across time.

A Campaign That Asks Instead of Tells

The Equity Across Communities campaign goes into neighborhoods with three questions. What is the biggest issue affecting your neighborhood? What is actually working that needs to be protected? And what one change would make the biggest difference for your family and your community?

The third question is the one I keep returning to. Not a general consultation. Not an invitation to rank a menu of options assembled somewhere else. One change. The most important one to the people who actually live there. On this block. In this household. Right now.

This is harder than it sounds to design into a campaign. The more common mode of political engagement tends to arrive with the diagnosis already written and the solution already packaged, looking for a neighborhood to validate work done somewhere else first. Jeff’s approach runs in the other direction: show up, listen, then figure out what to do with what you heard. The information flows from the neighborhood outward, rather than arriving from outside already complete.

I find that harder to execute and more likely to produce something worth executing. The difficulty is part of what I respect about it.

The Five Fronts and Why They Connect

The five themes the Equity Across Communities campaign organizes around are safer neighborhoods, affordable housing, quality education, economic opportunity, and community empowerment. They are not separate items on a policy list. They form a system, and anyone who has spent time in the neighborhoods where these gaps are largest knows how thoroughly each one feeds into the others.

A family managing housing instability has less capacity to keep school attendance consistent. Chronic violence on a block puts chronic stress on every household there, stress that research connects to long term health outcomes and to the economic decisions families can and cannot make. A small business owner who watched the neighborhood around them change without having any voice in how it changed understands what it means to be part of a place without being part of its future.

Community empowerment, the fifth theme, is what makes the other four something people are building rather than something being decided for them. It is the proposition that the people who have lived in a neighborhood for ten or twenty or forty years have earned the standing to speak first about what changes and what stays. That is not a radical idea. It just requires someone willing to show up and ask.

Why I’m Trading the Post for the Porch

I have spent years doing the work I believe in. Through my collaboration with the Feed Philly Coalition, I have watched how food insecurity maps onto the same neighborhoods that appear in every other measure of inequity in this city. Through the Economy League, I have worked on the policy questions that sit behind those maps. I post about what is wrong with Philadelphia and what is right with it. I talk constantly about unrealized potential and the gap between the city that exists and the city that could.

At some point, that has to become walking.

Jeff and his team are going door to door across three Saturdays in September. September 12. September 19. September 26. They are asking those three questions. They are waiting for real answers. I am joining them, and I am asking you to consider doing the same.

You do not need to know every policy position. You do not need to be a campaign veteran or know how to read a precinct map. You need a pair of shoes comfortable enough to walk a neighborhood in and the willingness to knock on a door and hear what the person on the other side has to say. That is the whole job.

If you want to join us, sign up through the Equity Across Communities canvass registration. Come for one Saturday or all three.

Same City. Same Standard.

I do not know what the person on the other side of the door is going to say on September 12. I do not know which block I will be on, or whether the street will be in Logan or Olney or West Philly or somewhere I have been driving past for years without stopping. What I know is that Jeff’s campaign is built on the same thing I keep writing about from different angles: the people who live in a neighborhood are the ones who know what it needs. And the city they live in owes them the same basic expectation whether their zip code is 19140 or 19103.

Knocking on a door is not the whole answer. Neither is a campaign. But it is something you can do on a Saturday morning in September while the light is still good.

Sources and references

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