Highlights from items in the local and national news this past month that you might not have heard about, along with some left wing perspective & analysis.
Philadelphia Landlords Named in Justice Dept. Lawsuit for Pricing Scheme
By Ellis Morten
The United States Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Jan. 7, 2025, naming six of the country’s largest landlords, as well as a property management company, for violations of antitrust law. The property management company, called RealPage, is at the center of the lawsuit for providing an “algorithmic pricing scheme” that harmed millions of Americans.
The main accusation is that RealPage used “anti-competitive” pricing algorithms which tracked data analytics about rents, occupancy, and other sensitive topics. They then shared what would normally be private information among the six landlords through senior management. According to the DOJ, this was done with the intent of reducing competition.
RealPage states on their website that their software can help landlords “level up your resident experience, boost efficiency and discover new revenue streams.” The DOJ also cites an alleged claim from RealPage that their tool “ensures that (landlords) are driving every possible opportunity to increase price even in the most downward trending or unexpected conditions.”
The six landlords accused of knowingly participating in the scheme are: Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC, Camden Property Trust, Cushman & Wakefield Inc, Pinnacle Property Management Services LLC, Willow Bridge Property Company LLC, and Blackstone’s LivCor LLC.
Combined, they own over 1 million properties in the United States.
In Philadelphia, dozens of properties and thousands of residents have likely been impacted by this scheme. Currently there are several properties owned by Greystar Real Estate Partners, Cushman & Wakefield, and Willow Bridge Property Company in the city, West Chester, Delaware county, and the surrounding suburbs.
Along with the DOJ, ten states have filed this lawsuit—Pennsylvania is not one of them.
Is SEPTA Turning a Deaf Ear to the Voice of the People?
By I. Pliskin
This past November, city council and the people of the Philadelphia area came together to urge state governor Josh Shapiro to give funding to SEPTA under very clear conditions. The people of the area wanted SEPTA to maintain existing service and to prevent the price of fares from getting higher. As taxpayers, residents want their taxes to go into investing in public transit instead of being underfunded and affected by austerity-based policy. Public investment into transportation as a public good significantly improves the economy, ecology, and overall quality of life for the metro area and the people who live in it.
Shapiro, along with some governing agencies and bodies, were able to get $153 million together to prevent SEPTA from going all in on the price hikes and service cuts it was moving to put into place in order to help it manage its debts. Despite this, SEPTA still raised its fares from $2.00 to $2.50 in December.
In the new year SEPTA has a cash injection from the state government, and it’s wringing serious coins out of the pockets of its riders. You would think that this might mean servicing some of those debts that lead to them pushing for price increases to begin with, or investing in improving bus service. But recent news is that the board has approved a whopping $211 million, not on paying workers better, not on running buses more frequently, not on expanding service lines—they are putting the large sum of money into installing a new payment system. In an apparent statement from agency spokesperson Andrew Busch, SEPTA leadership felt it was of critical importance they get a system in place that “[recognizes] forms of payment that haven’t been invented yet.” Nothing said directly, but it’s likely this was in reference to the recent big rise in things like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. A big issue here is that this is near the same as if the agency said they were putting in a new system that can take stocks, bonds and lottery tickets as forms of payment. It’s not happening, and at the end of the day it’s a big grift tax payers and riders are being expected to pay into.
Cubic Transportation Systems who have been contracted to build out this new system are going to get a big payday out of this deal. At best, in years there will be new terminals that can take Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies that people won’t be spending at the bus or on the train. Money that should be going into workers, into service, into infrastructure is going to slick talking corporate grifters instead. This all feels deliberate. Decision makers don’t want to boost ridership and increase the quality of public systems. They want to create a system where they charge the people who are reliant on public transportation more money for less service – where the only thing they have to invest in is the part of the transaction where you give them money.
For what it’s worth, SEPTA is a public enterprise that holds public hearings often on these decisions. A big reason why they can make bad investments and then turn around and give the public the bill is because they’re confident we’re not paying attention. It’s more important than ever that we begin to and continue to show up, make our voices heard, and make sure that they know we’re paying attention to the ways they move and the decisions they make.
Philly District Attorney Speaks on Aim to Put Less Children in Adult Prison
By I. Pliskin
Last month the Partisan wrote on how Joe Biden used his presidential power to commute the prison sentence of Micheal Conohan, a Pennsylvania judge who sent as many kids as he could to juvie in exchange for bribes from for-profit detention centers. Keep that in the back of your mind while I share what, on its face, is some good news. Larry Krasner, the District Attorney of Philadelphia, has announced that his office aims to invest in alternative programs for prosecuted youth rather than sending them to jail and sticking them with criminal records. The District Attorney’s office up to this point has already been testing this approach out at first with a small number of prosecuted youth and adults, and they have found that when they try alternative programs rather than throwing people in jail, it reduces the amount of people who end up back in the criminal justice system by 75%.
What are these alternative programs? Instead of throwing young people in jail, in a 5 week program they get access to mentorship, job training, and certifications. When that’s all it takes to keep young people from finding themselves back in court, one should wonder how many of them wound up in that position to begin with. We should consider another position the DA put forward—that he wants to see the end of a legal process called “direct file”. Under PA law, minors over 15 are automatically charged as adults if they are arrested for certain serious crimes. They don’t even have to be convicted before being treated as an adult—merely accused—and they have to go through a completely separate system. When you consider that 98% of criminal cases end in a plea deal, something starts to smell really wrong about this policy.
We also wrote last month on the “Sex for Lies” scandal that had been going on in Philly—where police officers were offering people access to drugs and sexual favors in exchange for false statements to help them get crimes pinned on innocent people. We have a system that loves throwing people in jail and doesn’t care whether they’re innocent or not. When we know how simple it is to prevent someone from ending up back in the criminal justice system, it becomes very strange that we have laws in place that will automatically make a kid who isn’t even 18 yet face the full force of the legal system with little more help than an overworked public defender—a kid who, guilty or not, will likely end up taking a plea deal. Instead of setting them on the pathway to being successful young adults, they will get sent to jail which will likely ruin their chances for having a successful adult life.
While we understand they may be well intentioned, we should be cautious of programs like the one the DA’s office is putting forward. At the end of the day, these alternative programs still put decisions about what happens to our youth into the hands of the police and the criminal justice system. If these interventions are so effective at keeping kids from coming back to juvie and jail, why not push to invest more in our schools, into after school programs—and challenge the forces fighting for austerity (privatization and reductions in budget) in public services. Proactive support is cheaper and more effective than not funding these services and then waiting until a young person already gets in trouble to maybe offer them some help. We also shouldn’t be relying on the correctional system to provide these services when that also puts it into the hands of the correctional system (that we have no good reason to trust) to take these services away at will.
Atlantic City Mayor, Indicted for Child Abuse and Witness Tampering, Seeking Re-Election
By I. Pliskin
Late last year, Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small Senior, along with Superintendent wife La’Quetta Small, were indicted by a grand jury on charges of severe physical and mental abuse on their teenage daughter. Prosecutors have said that in just a two month period, the husband and wife tag team duo pulled out moves ranging from beating their daughter in the head with a broom handle until she passed out to dragging her across the floor by her hair while beating her with a belt. When indicted, Small and his lawyer in a statement bizarrely chose to emphasize the fact that the charges, whether he’s found guilty or not, have no bearing on his official conduct as mayor. Since then, Small has also been charged with witness tampering for telling his daughter to recant a previous statement by saying she hurt her head by tripping and falling instead of being beaten with a broom handle. It’s worth noting that it’s reported the principal at the daughter’s school is also being charged, for failing to report when the daughter came to tell her about the abuse she was facing.
In the wake of this, the Atlantic City Mayor has announced that he will still be running for re-election, and he seems very confident about his chances. What stands out to me is his previous messaging and the messaging he’s continuing to move forward with. In a statement Small said “It’s simple. The focus has been off of court. My attorneys are going to handle that. From the raid on, we showed up each and every day, still accomplishing all of the things that we wanted to accomplish.” Further, he refers to his multiple indictments as being a “family matter” not to be worried about. There is an overall framing that he is trying to set up here, and it’s quite clear: as long as he does a good job as Mayor, people should pay no attention to what goes on in his home, whether there is or isn’t abuse happening.
It would be easy to consider this just a case of uniquely bad individuals using their large amount of political power to cover up misdeeds at home. But this isn’t just about a couple people in power that can’t keep their hands to themselves. The politics around abuse of power and the privacy of home life are a fundamental backbone of conservative (not exclusively Republican) mass politics. Conservative politics are often about preserving existing hierarchies of power, or reestablishing old ones. As is, that doesn’t make for very compelling politics at scale—why would the common person prop up a system that lets a few people live like lords and kings while they have to keep struggling and living paycheck to paycheck? In order to stay popular, conservative politics makes a very specific gambit with its approach to the common person: stay out of government and the government will stay out of your home. That is, conservative politics promises that if the only time people engage in mass action is to maintain existing hierarchies instead of to challenge them, policies will be enacted which allow people (especially cis hetero men) to do whatever they please within the walls of their own homes.
Small is using this case and the upcoming election as a referendum on this type of social political arrangement. He aims to win people over by getting them to think “if this can happen to someone as powerful as him it will happen to me too.” And many won’t consider it a question of abuse, but whether they’ll lose the little control they feel like they have over their day-to-day lives through dominion in their households. Ideology isn’t quite something that can be prosecuted or voted out of office. When we’re thinking of how to challenge violence like this, it’s important that we work to study, reflect on, and work on the way we collectively think and act around, not just the acute violence, but the overall power dynamics that inform our lives and the ways we might buy into reinforcing them.
Philly City Council Calls for Review on Soda Tax
By I. Pliskin
Put in place back in 2017, Philadelphia has a tax on sugary drinks, the “soda tax,” which was supposed to provide valuable funding to community programs while also encouraging residents to consider reaching for healthier options in the grocery aisle. A near decade since coming into effect, it’s coming into question how well the tax has actually managed to do either. Councilmember Jim Harrity argues that well-off residents in the city are just doing their grocery shopping, and continuing to purchase their sodas and juices, out in the suburbs. They’re drinking the same amount of soda, but it’s the suburbs that are now benefiting from that base of sales tax dollars. “This is really just a tax on the poor because the only people that actually are buying the soda in Philadelphia are those that don’t or can’t afford a vehicle,” said Councilmember Harrity. City Council voted in favor of a resolution put forward by Harrity calling to have a hearing on the tax.
We don’t really need nearly 10 years of data and a review to know that the soda tax is just a tax on the poor, because that’s what it always was. Essentially all sales taxes are regressive taxes, which is to say that a poorer person has to pay a higher proportion of what they earn in total than what a wealthier person would have to pay. City lawmakers knew this from the jump—they were just salivating at the thought that they could boost the city budget without having to bother big businesses or their wealthy donors to cough up some tax dollars. That’s just what they got: the poor paying more taxes while the middle class and wealthy have the resources to easily dodge it. As an extra cherry on top, instead of having to take accountability for putting up a tax that poor people have to pay the most into, lawmakers can instead turn it around and blame poor people for having the deplorable vice of wanting a cola every now and then. The tax doesn’t just disproportionately take from the poor—in the same stroke it is also an act of propaganda against the poor. City lawmakers openly declaring that not only will they take from the poor, but that they need to because the poor don’t know how to do good with their own money.
Beyond being an act against the poor, this tax was an act against organized labor. Local 830, the Teamsters union representing beverage workers in the city, had on multiple occasions before the tax was put into place worked hard to prevent it from passing into law. Council members were willing to risk a major amount of jobs in the city in order to push this tax onto poor residents. It’s evident that while City Council has its hearing on the soda tax, working class people in the city need to review the extractive one-sided relationship we have with lawmakers.
Anti-Homeless “Wellness Court” Plan Debuts, To Make Sweeps Every Wednesday
By Marine Tucker
Cherelle Parker’s new wellness court system launched Wednesday, January 22nd, sweeping up three homeless people into the Police-Assisted Diversion office on official charges of blocking the road and “public intoxication or similar misconduct.” Six more were grabbed the following Wednesday, January 29th.
The wellness court works like this: cops will go out and pick up whoever they can find sleeping rough every Wednesday, tagging them with summary charges for wellness-related offenses (blocking public passages, public intoxication, disorderly conduct and failure to disperse). You won’t be able to get a public defender for these charges, because they’re only summaries. Instead you’ll be assessed at the PAD office and shuffled off to a magistrate who presents two options: jail, or a “diversion” such as detainment at a 30-day detox center or the like. Previously, those offenses merely received civil penalties or tickets after a 2016 order by Mayor Kenney, but Mayor Parker upgraded them to summaries in the same executive order (signed January 21st) that created the wellness court program.
Of the three people picked up January 22nd, one was sent to jail on a pre-existing warrant and the other two were diverted to treatment. One checked out of their 30-day program at Kirkbride in the first day, while the other one never showed up to the inpatient program at the Behavioral Wellness Center at 8th and Girard. Warrants were promptly re-issued.
January 23rd was a notable choice of start date in part because it was the same day as the Point-in-Time Count, an annual head-count of homeless folks which informs how much federal aid is granted to Philadelphia’s homeless programs. Because most homeless people had been aware of the wellness court plan for months, they knew to make themselves scarce for the cops that day, which meant they were scarce for the head count as well.
It was also the day after the coldest night in January, with “feels-like” temperatures in the single digits through most of Pennsylvania, leaving cops free to linger by cold shelters and simply wait for them to let out at 9 AM. All three arrests were made by 9:30.
Activists from harm reduction groups like CARP and Sol Collective went around that day passing out coats, scarves, mittens, hand warmers and water and keeping people abreast of the wellness court plan and their rights in the event of a sweep. These groups always need more hands if you’d like to help out the city’s homeless folks in a way that’s actually sane, useful, sustainable, and not hooked up to Parker’s regime of displacement and militarized policing. Sign up to volunteer with CARP, donate to it, or sign your name in protest of Parker’s Wellness Court program here.
The Philadelphia Partisan 