In Philly, graft starts at the top. So naturally everyone feels entitled to work the system a little. And everyone does, because law enforcement and the civil

In Philly, graft starts at the top. So naturally everyone feels entitled to work the system a little. And everyone does, because law enforcement and the civil bureaucracy are a combination of afraid of your neighborhood and lazy (probably a little corrupt too, but I wouldn't attribute to malice what is easily explained by laziness). So you end up with a place where there's a shitload of urban decay, tax dodging galore (ever wonder why there's 3 rowhome "churches" on the same block?), and a lot of people that feel the city owes them without anything in return. I'm a little jaded because in high school/college I used to help maintain some Section 8 rentals, but there's an attitude in Philly that you ought to be doing the most you can to squeeze every penny out of the system. And it's led to middle class erosion and perpetual election of officials who continue to promise what they can't deliver. As a result, money gets taken away from having ridiculous, unnecessary things like a good public school system, reliable transportation, contiguous stretches of pavement and even cleaning up all the fucking trash on the side of the road. Sorry, Philly being the poster child for how not to run a city really gets to me. It was my home for a while, and it sucks that moving to the suburbs was the only real solution we had.