One year in, how has Mayor Parker done in achieving her goals?

When Mayor Cherelle Parker took office a little more than a year ago, she laid out a series of concrete goals and priorities, and asked residents to hold her accountable for acting on her commitments.

“You deserve to see your tax dollars at work in your neighborhood,” she said in her inauguration address. “Don’t simply listen to what I say. Watch what we do.”

It’s still early days, relatively speaking. The Parker administration has launched some promised programs, in areas like improving trash pickup and addressing Kensington’s challenges, while others — like the plan for building a ton of new housing — have yet to be rolled out.

Here are some of the priorities and projects Parker highlighted in a few key areas, and where they stand so far.

Crime

At her inauguration, Parker promised to address the city’s stubbornly high rates of violent crime by making new investments in public safety, including hiring 400 new officers every year to fill out the understaffed police department. 

She promised a new forensics lab (which has been planned for years), cars, drones, and other tech, as well as continued funding for community groups doing anti-violence work. She also promised to support the Citizens Police Oversight Commission (CPOC), which is supposed to investigate police misconduct and improve community trust in law enforcement.

The city got pretty close to Parker’s hiring goal, bringing on 369 officers as of earlier this month, per NBC10. Philly PD is still far short of full staffing, with about 5,020 officers, while being budgeted for more than 6,000. The drones are apparently coming, while the lab is reportedly still some way off from being completed. CPOC has struggled to function and the police union wants to block its work.

Meanwhile violent crime dropped sharply, with homicides down 37% in 2024 compared to the previous year and shootings falling 36%. Officials attribute the drop in part to the expansion of anti-violence programs run by the city and local organizations, and it may also reflect a broader post-pandemic decrease in violent crime in cities across the U.S. 

Kensington

The mayor tasked Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel with “developing a strategy to permanently shut down open-air drug markets, including in Kensington,” and said she would reverse the Kenney administration’s tolerant approach toward open drug use. 

Last spring the police began conducting periodic sweeps of the neighborhood, arresting people for drug possession and other relatively minor offenses and clearing tent encampments. The department dedicated 75 additional officers to policing the area.

The administration also took steps toward improving treatment and shelter options for homeless drug users, most recently by opening a 336-bed long-term recovery home in Northeast Philly and setting up a “wellness court” that will let some arrestees choose between entering treatment or facing criminal prosecution.

The impact of the effort is mixed so far. Narcotics arrests in the Kensington area doubled compared to the previous year, and shootings in the neighborhood fell sharply. But other types of crimes reportedly increased and tent encampments have sprung up in new locations as the old ones are cleared.  

“The revival of Kensington is not going to happen overnight or within months,” a spokesperson in the Managing Director’s Office said in September.

Trash

Parker constantly cites her goal to make Philly the “cleanest, greenest” big city in the country, and vowed to shake off the “Filthadelphia” tag through a raft of new trash removal efforts.

She promised to expand a program that employs people to clean commercial corridors, and extend it to nearby residential streets. The newly distinct Sanitation Department launched a twice-a-year blitz to clean every block in the city, as well as crews dedicated to each council district that clean four times a year. City workers are also cleaning vacant lots, towing abandoned vehicles, and addressing potholes and graffiti.

The mayor said her first budget would pay for 500 additional BigBelly trash and recycling receptacles on sidewalks, and the staffing needed to make sure they’re emptied regularly. The city piloted twice-a-week trash collection in South Philly and part of Center City, with plans to expand it to other neighborhoods. Street sweeping with trucks and crews continues, but is still reserved to just 14 neighborhoods for half the year.

Are all these programs having an impact? It’s hard to say. The city hasn’t done a Litter Index survey since 2019. The new Philly Stat 360 data hub provides measures of on-time trash collection (100% as of November) and the time it takes to clean up illegal dumping (16 days), but doesn’t try to track trash or litter levels. As of July, there was no dropoff in 311 trash complaints, per the Inquirer.

Anecdotally, some residents have said they noticed and appreciated the blitz crews with leafblowers coming through to collect litter and debris, while others said the effort has been sorely insufficient. The Inquirer’s before-and-after pictures of a few blocks seem to reflect those mixed results. BigBelly cans continue to overflow with waste and it’s unclear if twice-a-week collection is making things better or worse. 

On the prevention side, officials say they’re ticketing dumpers and collecting millions in fines, but there were just four criminal prosecutions in 2024, according to data from the DA’s office, and there’s still an epidemic of illegal dumping in some neighborhoods.

Housing

The mayor said she wants to see 30,000 units of affordable housing “built or preserved” during her first term, whether by private developers, by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, with city or state subsidies, or by existing homes becoming affordable. 

The city was already gaining an average of more than 10,000 affordable units annually, meaning that Parker’s goal should be attainable, experts told WHYY.

Some of that is happening through PHA projects, private construction that was previously planned, and the Turn the Key program that subsidizes home construction on city land for first-time buyers. The city’s data dashboard says 328 affordable units were built or preserved in 2024.

Parker has said her administration will release a housing plan in the coming months and a new tracker of housing creation. It’s also due to launch a “One Front Door” program to make it easier for residents to access city-run home improvement programs.

The mayor has said she’d like to see more federal support for the city’s housing goals, and would be willing to meet with President Donald Trump or members of his administration to lobby for funding. “If you want to help Philadelphia, give us a billion dollars,” she said at a press conference this month.

Schools

When she was running for mayor, Parker’s main education proposal was voluntary, year-round schooling. That evolved into a pilot program of extended-day and extended-year childcare, tutoring, and other offerings at 20 regular public schools and five charter schools.   

The effort is funded by a $24 million increase in the amount of property tax revenue the city passes on to the school district.

As launched last fall, the program “mainly appears to be a new name for work that schools and nonprofit providers have been doing for years,” Chalkbeat reported in October. However, in some places the new funding allowed schools to offer spots to more children. 

The administration also budgeted $10 million for a Community College program to train students for city jobs. It enrolled its first 75 students last fall.

Economic development

Parker proposed a grab bag of efforts to improve economic opportunity, especially for people in disadvantaged communities.

In April she laid out the PHL: Open for Business initiative, which aims to make it easier for business owners to get licenses and permits, and navigate the city’s bureaucracy. The Commerce Department will eventually set up “a centralized digital platform for businesses to access relevant resources,” officials said.

Among other efforts, she started the process of eliminating four-year degree requirements for some city jobs, and she wants to ease the Civil Service job application process with an eye to diversifying the city workforce.

Supporting the 76ers’ proposal to build a new arena on Market Street was not prominent among her early goals, but she ended up becoming a vocal backer of the plan, holding town halls around the city to shore up public support and push back against fierce opposition in Chinatown and other nearby neighborhoods. She defended the arena as a low-cost way to revive Market East and ensure the team stays in Philadelphia. 

City Council’s approval of the arena legislative package in December was arguably the defining moment of Parker’s first year in office. But less than a month later, the Sixers announced they were abandoning the plan in favor of building a new stadium with Comcast in South Philly, a development the mayor described as a “curveball that none of us saw coming.”

After more than two years of heated debate and planning, the canceling of the arena left the city and Parker back at square one with regard to the future of the economically stagnant district.

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