Cranes on the Horizon

[phillyaggie]

you're all over the place. so do business tax cuts not count if they're not connected to the shale boom? did the state's other booms not make Pittsburgh a wealthy place? your analysis probably misses the biggest of them all, the Pennsylvania railroad. as a legacy of the way they built their system, PA is still home to the most short line railroads in the country.

exactly-- it was a game of physical infrastructure. we built it around philly and philly benefited from having active heavy industry employing tens of thousands, and ports employing even more. I don't see much of that going on around Marcellus Shale industry in Philly. The product pipeline to SEPA is the only one example, and considering how crazily the ethylene industry goes from boom to bust, it is anyone's guess as to what will actually get built; as such, a likely place to get a new ethane cracker in PA will be out west at Monaca, not here in Marcus Hook... that may become a transshipment point and will bring back some jobs lost, but it's not a jobs boom, that places like North Dakota and rural PA are witnessing.

US petchems execs do not see overbuild in crackers spurred by shale gas boom - Petrochemicals | Platts News Article & Story

AFAIK, Dow and other ethylene producers on the Gulf Coast are expanding current capacity and some of it is based on receiving Marcellus and Utica shale feedstock via pipeline, and as per the link above, the first one to build new capacity to market will likely win, leaving other plans to be shelved. Not to mention the economies of scale are still likely going to be in the favor of Gulf Coast producers, now especially thanks to the rich liquids content of the Eagle Ford Shale (Marcellus is mostly dry gas with little liquids content except for in the southwestern portion... the portion around Bradford County, for example, is pretty much all methane and can be used as pipeline quality gas without much processing)

It is true, we may be saving a few hundred industry jobs, and creating a few as well, but that's about it:
Braskem America To Purchase Portion Of Sunoco’s Marcus Hook Refinery « CBS Philly

Most of the job creation is elsewhere..Bradford County is run amok with truck traffic, new hotels, new housing, etc. Bross is argument that past energy extraction booms made Philly rich so this one will, too, just doesn't meet the numbers test so far.

[raider.adam]

Right ok. So now if the industry wants to make Philly a major port for exporting shale gas, I wonder if City Council would interfere.

Yeah, you think Council is going to tell the union port workers they are blocking work for them?

[billy ross]

Does Austin benefit from fossil fuel extraction? The whole state of TX does. I see energy helping PA - and thus Philly too - become more tax competitive. That will take us a long way. Add on cheaper inputs and I'm already better off. My electric and gas bills are both off significantly, especially for heating. Industry goes where inputs are cheap. That means more jobs, which benefits my business, too. I'm extremely bullish on Philly.

^ disagree. Nothing much I see about oil and gas in PA has connection to Philly or Philly-based entrepreneurs, industry, or finance. If anyone is benefiting/will benefit from shale gas/oil boom, it may be Pittsburgh and the other, smaller and rural communities out in the western portion of the state. Pittsburgh based companies are quite active in Marcellus, with names like CNX/Consol, EQT, and many other independents such as Cabot Oil & Gas, Chesapeake, Range, and others having presence in Pitt or nearby towns... not much in Philly, because there is hardly any action here. Not to mention law firms providing services to oil and gas are also doing quite well in Pittsburgh... the biggest ones like K&L Gates are expanding even more and poaching lawyers from Philly.

Good for Pittsburgh, no doubt. But doesn't do much for Philly, to be honest. At least I don't see it as far as direct impact on jobs and the local metro economy.

[eldondre]

Yeah, you think Council is going to tell the union port workers they are blocking work for them?

port jobs seem to have a bipartisan ear.
with all due respect phillyaggie, all you are doing is countering billy's optimism with your own pessimism.
so what if the cracker plant is in southwestern pa? in the old days not everything was in philly either and yet the city was able to do quite well.
the gas boom is only one facet of the economy, albeit an important one. there are a number of things playing into Pennsylvania's favor. it's population is getting relatively younger, it's the lowest tax state in the northeast, it has walkable towns in spades, the weather is generally more moderate, it has a plethora of universities, it has water, farms, etc. an increase in the state's tax base will allow the state to further reduce business taxes or invest in infrastructure more easily. the city of philadelphia has been hampered by both it's own policies as well as the state's in the past.
if you look at overall job growth, the pittsburgh region has been suporting the state through economic restructuring (having alrady gone through their own)...which is more than can be said for a lot of states including former golden child georgia. the restructuring going on in philadelphia is necessary to support long term growth in the future.

[phillyaggie]

another benefit for some western PA locales: some of the 40-50 year old coal fired power plants that are coming to an end of their useful life and weren't going to be putting on new air pollution controls to meet federal requirements, could instead be switching to cleaner-burning natural gas, though none in PA as of yet has actually switched:

Coal plant conversion projects - SourceWatch

the promise is there, though.

five ancient coal-fired units in PA are shutting down, however, rather than having to put on environmental controls.

[phillyaggie]

port jobs seem to have a bipartisan ear.
with all due respect phillyaggie, all you are doing is countering billy's optimism with your own pessimism.
so what if the cracker plant is in southwestern pa? in the old days not everything was in philly either and yet the city was able to do quite well.
the gas boom is only one facet of the economy, albeit an important one. there are a number of things playing into Pennsylvania's favor. it's population is getting relatively younger, it's the lowest tax state in the northeast, it has walkable towns in spades, the weather is generally more moderate, it has a plethora of universities, it has water, farms, etc.

i love all those things, which is why i moved here when i got a job that i wanted...took a long time, as you well know.

i have been getting offers to take jobs dealing with the gas industry out in Pitt or even WV, btw... I just don't want to move out of here, for the time being. one of my colleagues did move...to OK City (to work for Chesapeake Energy), and another is on his way out (to work for IHS's oil and gas biz), but his will be a traveling job so he's not sure where he'll be. Not in Philly though.

[eldondre]

i love all those things, which is why i moved here when i got a job that i wanted...took a long time, as you well know.

i have been getting offers to take jobs dealing with the gas industry out in Pitt or even WV, btw... I just don't want to move out of here, for the time being. one of my colleagues did move...to OK City (to work for Chesapeake Energy), and another is on his way out (to work for IHS's oil and gas biz), but his will be a traveling job so he's not sure where he'll be. Not in Philly though.

well, if I had the choice of living in Pittsburgh or OK you can be damn sure it would be Pittsburgh. when my mom worked in the oil industry she had to fly to OK fairly often, hated every minute of it. on a recent trip out there for a wedding I was surprised to see just how much w pa looks like eastern pa (albeit more mountainous instead of rolling hills). since when is the chesapeake in OK? ; ) it's really a crime what was done to sunoco (and for that matter, the pennsylvania but that's ancient history). fwiw, Philadelphia, in its heyday, was not a one industry town and was known as one of the best places for smaller businesses (today they might be called artisans). it's possible that some semblance of that will return...I'm encouraged to see people thinking a little (such as the reuse of canal st) and doing interesting things, that's a start. and, imo, it's about time the western part of the state started chipping in.
eta: this reminds me what a waste of resources the pcc expansion was. $800 million is a lot of rail and bridge improvements.

[Jerry19127]

I think mkt st el has disproven the claim about better regional transit a few times. I do think they have better city transit. Philly is already a larger place than boston and the city does have the potential to be a much bigger player though, as you note, it does have its problems. actually, potential can mean opportunity. even today philly is a more interesting place than boston.

Boston has more density as in people living per square mile than Philly although Philly is a "larger" city. As far as interesting", your bias clearly shines but as someone who has lived in both locales, Boston's vibrancy( economically & socio-economically) is far greater than Philly. There is enough prowess there that the Mayor can make a National scene and try to shun businesses away (Chick-FilA). That would not happen in Philly because the greatest economic development news of the day is a subsidized eds/meds office building getting the greeen light in a KOZ area or a new restaurant opening .

[BarryG]

Boston has more density as in people living per square mile than Philly although Philly is a "larger" city. As far as interesting", your bias clearly shines but as someone who has lived in both locales, Boston's vibrancy( economically & socio-economically) is far greater than Philly. There is enough prowess there that the Mayor can make a National scene and try to shun businesses away (Chick-FilA). That would not happen in Philly because the greatest economic development news of the day is a subsidized eds/meds office building getting the greeen light in a KOZ area or a new restaurant opening .

Boston is also denser than Chicago. What's your point?

[DocAwesome]

Boston is great, transportation aside imo. It's just not my cup of tea. Let's not make it a city vs city assfest over here. Plenty of us have lived in many different cities including Boston.

[raider.adam]

There is enough prowess there that the Mayor can make a National scene and try to shun businesses away (Chick-FilA).

I think it is less about prowess and more about Mumbles Menino being stupid.

[Jerry19127]

And sure thr

Boston may be at 90% of its potential. Philly may be at 40% of its potential. Clearly there's more opportunity here. That's why the big people here are still in their first generation - they haven't died off yet. Steven Starr, Bart Blatstein, Blumenfeld - these guys are still very much vigorous. I spend way more time in Boston than I'd like to. Boston is staid, money-driven, and lacking in imagination. Philly is and has been a city of visionaries. It's what keeps us fun and interesting, and relevant.

Train service in Boston blows, by the way. The only reason they have any electrification is because we jammed it down their throats. It's mostly slow, infrequent diesel service.

PA's economy made Philly wealthy the first time around. Then coal/oil, steel, and rail all collapsed simultaneously. Around that time Philly began declining. Now PA is rising from its slumber - I personally see a second boom happening in PA. I've spent the past week cris-crossing New England, and MA, ME, VT, and NH don't have the ability to change the Boston game in the way that oil and gas combined with political reform have the ability to recast Philly's economy. Boston will see continued incremental change. In Philly and in PA we have the ability and the will to change how the game is played.

Train service blows? You can catch a train at 2AM in Boston on the weekend. Can't do that here. And most of the trains go to where people live...for the travelers...they have park & rides where they can get in & out of the city. The EL criss crosses the ghetto whether it's the Broad St Line or the MFL. It's primary ridership is the transport of people to methadone clinics, social security, welfare agencies, and the typical Gallery shopper. It doesnt function as transit is supposed to do because Center City is no longer a jobs center. Sure it has 200K jobs but I would surmise that most are service oriented low level retail/service jobs. The transformation to a bedroom community is not sustainable in the long term on a # of fronts

[Jerry19127]

Boston is also denser than Chicago. What's your point?

Philly is not larger than Boston. It has a bigger population because it is has more than 3x the land area. If you drew a circle around Boston that covered 140+ sq miles, the City would be more populated than Philly as its "suburbs" are clean, urban, and well put together.

[Jerry19127]

I think it is less about prowess and more about Mumbles Menino being stupid.

He is stupid but the electorate in Boston may just be dumber than the electorate in Philly. but...Far left ideologies and taxation are OK in places like Boston and NYC because there is always someone or some corporation/organization to take the place of some entity that left behind. Philly is not on that level .

[billy ross]

And sure thr Train service blows? You can catch a train at 2AM in Boston on the weekend. Can't do that here. And most of the trains go to where people live...for the travelers...they have park & rides where they can get in & out of the city. The EL criss crosses the ghetto whether it's the Broad St Line or the MFL. It's primary ridership is the transport of people to methadone clinics, social security, welfare agencies, and the typical Gallery shopper. It doesnt function as transit is supposed to do because Center City is no longer a jobs center. Sure it has 200K jobs but I would surmise that most are service oriented low level retail/service jobs. The transformation to a bedroom community is not sustainable in the long term on a # of fronts

I think that you are confusing 'trolleys' with 'trains'. To reduce confusion, you may wish to use 'light rail' or 'heavy rail'. Generally trolleys, or light rail vehicles, or streetcars, are shorter and lighter than trains, or heavy rail vehicles, or subways/els, or intercity trains, even though the last two aren't quite interchangeable, but all of which tend to be longer and clumsier than LRV's. Trains in the USA generally need to be crash-hardened in case they hit a freight train, just like automobiles need(ed? - see Smart car) to be super-crash-hardened, but overseas the safety rules for either aren't nearly so strict, and here in the US the rules for light rail aren't so strict, either. Thus trains are heavy and slow, while trollies are light and nimble, but they can't run on the same tracks in case of collision. When you say trains I respond with commuter/'regional' rail, and in that category SEPTA beats the T hands down - the T's commuter rail is pretty awful. However, you seem to be comparing Boston's light rail to Philly's heavy rail, which isn't fair or reasonable. It sounds like you should compare it to the subway-surface trollies, which are much more like the T, in terms of frequency of service, fare collection methods, vehicles used, and the way that they fan out from a central collection point. However, despite the fact that people love the T and clearly use it very heavily in Boston, every time I use it, stupid things happen like the car overshooting the platform and needing to laboriously reverse, or inexplicably requiring you to switch cars to stay on the same route, and then wait a bizarrely long period of time before the new pulls out from the station, and so on. I can't quite figure out why Bostonians use the T so loyally, and I'd like to understand why. I'm working on a theory that parking Boston is harder than leaving your automobile at home, but I can't say that I understand it 100% at this point; I would think that Bostonians can easily afford cars, and Boston's weather is not particularly public transit conducive. It could also have to do with it being a more compact city, and it could have to do with SEPTA's lower class clientele on its non-heavy rail vehicles. It could, of course, be due to a combination of factors, and it could also be a chicken/egg problem, where the T is busy so it runs better headways and so it gets even busier, with SEPTA having the opposite situation on lines like the Ridge Avenue Subway, for instance.

I would like to see some stats on jobs in Center City versus University City. While CC has been stagnant on the jobs front for 40 years (this is a bad thing, of course), U City has been exploding. Increasingly Center City is becoming a bedroom community for jobs in University City. I view this as being extremely sustainable. For all intents and purposes University City is a submarket of the Center City market, so the line between them is very fine. If I had to make the choice between Center City being a super-mega-jobs center and having it be the same kind of magilla in culture and residential quality of life, I'll take the latter, because Philly needs a better electorate / more empowered group of stakeholders, and fixing Center City will cause / is causing the movers and shakers of the region to live or at least have a place in Center City. Also, even without University City's jobs, Center City is still home to about 42 million square feet of office space, which is three times the size of the next largest office market in the region, which is Malvern/King of Prussia/Great Valley, and which itself is much larger than the next largest office market in the region. To say that Center City is no longer a jobs center is just silly.

[Lakey]

University city isn't and can't be expected to compensate by itself for broader employment issues in center city or the city as a whole. There are a little less than 70k people employed in UCity and half of them work for Penn (the university and the health system combined). There are fewer people employed in center city today than in 1990 and citywide employment is down about 130k since 1990. The city simply has to keep working on addressing the issues that have caused job losses and inhibited employment growth. We all know what they are. The city has made some progress in recent years, but turning things around remains a very large task which is complicated by the current weak global economy.

UCity provides a pretty useful point of comparison between Boston and Philadelphia and their differing economic situations. UCity has Penn and Drexel, Cambridge has Harvard and MIT. The difference in the amount of funded research occurring in Cambridge and UCity and the potential for commercialization of that research is large. MIT alone does about twice the amount of funded research annually as the combined amount of all Philadelphia area universities excluding Penn. It's not a coincidence that when Eli Broad decided to donate $500 million to start a biomed research center that it wound up being located in Cambridge though Broad is not an alumnus of either Harvard or MIT. It's true that Philadelphia is a major research center especially in the life sciences. I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to get a peek at some very impressive work being done in Philly on cancer visualization and the company trying to commercialize the research is located in the city. Nevertheless, Philly just isn't as strong as Boston in life sciences and the gap is larger still in engineering. That fact has a lot to do with relative difference in affluence of the two cities and metros.

[eldondre]

I think that you are confusing 'trolleys' with 'trains'. To reduce confusion, you may wish to use 'light rail' or 'heavy rail'. Generally trolleys, or light rail vehicles, or streetcars, are shorter and lighter than trains, or heavy rail vehicles, or subways/els, or intercity trains, even though the last two aren't quite interchangeable, but all of which tend to be longer and clumsier than LRV's. Trains in the USA generally need to be crash-hardened in case they hit a freight train, just like automobiles need(ed? - see Smart car) to be super-crash-hardened, but overseas the safety rules for either aren't nearly so strict, and here in the US the rules for light rail aren't so strict, either.

it's not really about strict or not. in the US cars are allowed to use energy management rather than mass to meet crash safety standards allowing much lighter weight cars and trucks...for trains, that's not true, requirements are stuck in the past, since they don't recognize energy mgmt.

I would like to see some stats on jobs in Center City versus University City. While CC has been stagnant on the jobs front for 40 years (this is a bad thing, of course), U City has been exploding. Increasingly Center City is becoming a bedroom community for jobs in University City. I view this as being extremely sustainable.

\overall jobs have plummeted in the city so whatever has been happening in ucity, it hasn't compensated for weakness in cc, the implosion of north broad, budd, etc. cc's struggles are representative of the city as a whole, though one could argue it's the other areas that have been worse off. the job numbers of the past 30 years are unsustainable for the city. interestingly, that VC that announced it was moving to U City specifically cited taxation as one reason that had prevented them from doing so before. simply removing barriers to growth can, at the margin, improve the balance. anyway, for all cc's struggles, you are correct, it is silly to say it isn't a jobs center and plenty of peopleuse the el for commuting, it's off hours when things change.

[phillyaggie]

Lakey, there is some really good engineering and manufacturing work done here, but it's out in the suburbs among companies that hardly anyone knows about because they're small to mid-size niche organizations and they're not located in the city. I don't know how that compares to Boston metro, but we have specialty titanium manufacturers such as Carpenter Technology; we have industrial electronics companies like Vishay Intertech and Ametek (Ametek especially does quite well even in this down market); we have top names in packaging such as Silgan and Crown (only better one might be Ball); and then there are all the indie pharma/bio companies; there are still several chemical engineering/industrial related companies here such as FMC, Airgas, CDI, DuPont, Dow (via Rohm&Hass), and there are some IT/telecom companies too like Interdigital and Unisys and Tyco Electronics, and of course Comcast. It's just that these are all spread out over the metro and there isn't a feeling that all this is happening in Philly area per se...because the central city itself is reeling.

[thoth]

And sure thr Train service blows? You can catch a train at 2AM in Boston on the weekend. Can't do that here. And most of the trains go to where people live...for the travelers...they have park & rides where they can get in & out of the city. The EL criss crosses the ghetto whether it's the Broad St Line or the MFL. It's primary ridership is the transport of people to methadone clinics, social security, welfare agencies, and the typical Gallery shopper. It doesnt function as transit is supposed to do because Center City is no longer a jobs center. Sure it has 200K jobs but I would surmise that most are service oriented low level retail/service jobs. The transformation to a bedroom community is not sustainable in the long term on a # of fronts

KOP has 90,000 jobs. Is KOP not a jobs center? How many jobs are in downtown Boston? A few of my friends up there commute west of the city for pharma jobs so I'm curious how dynamic their job market is. Your characterization of SEPTA is moronic and the T has limited late night operations and I think got rid of night owl buses because of their budget crisis unless things have radically changed in the past few months.
Hub bar owners call for late-night T schedule - BostonHerald.com
Mayor urges T to get Night Owl service back on track - BostonHerald.com

Seeing as Boston has the 10th most populous metro and Philadelphia is the 6th, I'm going to say that Philadelphia is still larger.
I don't disagree that Boston is cleaner, wealthier or denser, but I'm pretty sure you're the only person in the universe that's arguing that Boston is the bigger metro.

Boston is in better shape overall, but is kind of a snooze and probably in the realm of 3-4x more expensive to rent/buy than Philly. I don't know that I've ever found it to be 3-4x better/more interesting/nicer etc.

[phillyaggie]

^ to be fair, price curve is not linear with proximity to/area being better/cleaner/safer/more interesting. There may in fact be step changes in price...which is even more reason for Philly to clean up its act... it is cheaper because there is a reason for it. Even within the city you can see this price dynamic. For example, is Rittenhouse or Chestnut Hill really that much better than neighborhoods right next to them with far lesser price points?