The City of Brotherly Love.

You’re shocked, right?

Philadelphia is a laggard when it comes to businesses and return to work (RTO -return to office) policies refilling office spaces in an urban downtown. It seems not many employees are thrilled with the idea of taking their lives in their hands.

It’s pretty sad when your city is second only to the hellhole of San Francisco.

The City of Brotherly Love has a new reputation as one of the emptiest office districts in America, sparking a debate over what’s keeping Philadelphia workers at home.

According to one weekly measure, the majority of office workers in and around Philly continue to work remotely much of the time. Only Silicon Valley’s tech workers go to their San Jose, Calif., offices less when compared with prepandemic office-use rates, according to Kastle Systems, a security firm that tracks employee badge swipes in and out of buildings. New York City occupancy has consistently been more than 45% this year, while Dallas and Austin, Texas, office use has ranged between 50% and 65%.

Kastle’s Back to Work Barometer shows Philadelphia’s office-occupancy rate hovering around 40% in recent months—and under 40% for some weeks of this summer.

And this depth of vacancies is the worst they have seen in decades.

…Philadelphia, like many U.S. cities, has gone full throttle on efforts to lure people back into downtown areas. But the combination of the office-worker exodus, taxes and crime has resulted in more empty office space on the market today than during the 2008 recession, theorize researchers, Philadelphia employees and real-estate professionals.

Awful hard to get things on track when you don’t have those tax dollars flowing from employees, the spending they do during the day, the business taxes paid on them being there. It can cripple a city.

Then again, sometimes a city is its own worst enemy. If employees and their companies find they can get their work done and make the same money without being penalized for being physically in the office, well, why wouldn’t you stay home?

…Unlike many major U.S. cities, Philadelphia levies a tax on wages earned there, plus it has alluring far-flung suburbs, which helps explain why many people are staying away, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at financial-intelligence firm Moody’s Analytics and a Philadelphia native. More than 317,000 people moved out of Philadelphia’s urban core between March 2020 and June 2023, according to Moody’s.

Philadelphia’s wage tax is 3.75% for employed residents and 3.44% for nonresident workers in the city. Residents who found remote jobs and suburbanites who don’t come into the city to work don’t have to pay.

It’s not rocket science.

Then there’s the real rub with Philly and it’s not a “perception.” Crime. And an over-worked, understaffed, unloved police force with a lenient Soros DA on the side of the criminals who ruthlessly prey on everyday citizens.

…Philadelphia Police Department data shows that citywide crime is still up compared with the pre-Covid era. Violent crime so far this year, including homicides, rape, theft and assault, is up 3% compared with the same period in 2019, and property crime including theft and auto break-ins, has risen more than 65% over the same time frame.

In September, I posted about a litany of horrific, cold-blooded crimes in Philadelphia, and a “youth” culture that was viciously and violently out of control. Not three months later, I had another post about a wrongly convicted man who’d just been released from Death Row after 25 years, who was then executed like a dog on D.A. Larry Krasner’s streets. In it I quoted a Washington Examiner op-ed:

How many Philadelphians must be killed before the city stops voting for Democrats?

…Since Krasner was elected, prosecutions of gun crimes have fallen considerably. Under his watch, there has been a 17% increase in withdrawals or dismissals of gun charges. This has coincided with a nearly 60% drop in guilty pleas in gun crime cases — why plead guilty when you’re not going to be prosecuted?

Philadelphia now has the highest violent crime rate of any U.S. city with a population of greater than 1 million. Of the 10 largest cities in the U.S., Philadelphia has the highest homicide rate per capita. These statistics will only get worse while Democrats such as Krasner are in charge.

As Philly has become more unlivable, families have flocked to the suburbs. In 2019, Pew research found that 60,000 people a year were leaving Philadelphia, citing crime, cost of living, and education as reasons for leaving. https://t.co/N13D9mkw1v pic.twitter.com/6jSUfzXbHc

— Meg Brock (@MegEBrock) August 23, 2023

Has flight from their own voting patterns turned the suburbs of Philly “blue”? That’s awful to contemplate. It means those fleeing are capable of learning nothing – of making no connection between their votes and the results at hand.

I hope the suburbs enjoy the good times.

We are 8 full months into the new year, and guess what?

This is Philly today.*

Joseph Vannauker, 19, from Levittown, Pennsylvania, was arrested for his involvement in the death of an unidentified male pedestrian. The criminal charges against Joseph Vannauker include Homicide by Vehicle,  Murder, and Reckless Driving. https://t.co/L2BJqPeDmj

— PhillyCrimeUpdate (@PhillyCrimeUpd) August 22, 2023

Nothing has changed.

NOTHING.

I’d stay home, too.

*UPDATE: Thanks to the comments noting I had a Philly crime beat who’d retweeted a Pittsburgh incident. Unfortunately, there was plenty of Philly material to choose from, so I updated the post.