Darrell Clarke’s nearly 25 years on City Council shaped how Philly was built

A dustup over tax liens almost 30 years ago foreshadowed Darrell L. Clarke’s governing philosophy as one of the most powerful City Council presidents in Philadelphia history.

“I learned early on that as a legislative body, you are completely dependent on the executive branch,” Clarke said. “You will normally end up with the short end of the stick.”

The lesson came in 1997, when Clarke was a staffer for Council President John F. Street. Then-Mayor Ed Rendell had proposed allowing private firms to collect city property tax delinquencies — a penny-pinching move that would prove disastrous for many low-income neighborhoods and stymie redevelopment.

Clarke foresaw the potential negative outcomes of the policy — driving up vacancy and harming poor homeowners. Street and Clarke took what was then a rare step. To the annoyance of the Rendell administration, and the city’s newspapers, they amended the legislation to exempt all properties from Street’s 5th District in North Philadelphia.

Clarke announced Feb. 23 that he is not seeking reelection, ending a 40-year career in City Hall, which includes almost a quarter-century on City Council, 12 of those years as the Council’s leader. The defining principle of Clarke’s tenure — empowering hyperlocal decision-making, often at the expense of citywide policy — could last long after he is gone.

It can be seen in the ever greater latitude of district Council members to set rules specific to their territory — to the chagrin of those who argue that it creates a patchwork of rules that makes it harder to do everything from making streets safer to opening a new coffee shop. It also tends to privilege the loudest voices, which are usually those most opposed to change.

For Clarke, this governance style ensures that constituents have a clear pipeline to the politicians who know their neighborhoods best. He’s long expressed a belief that district Council members are better positioned to balance the interests of residents with those of developers. Many neighborhood leaders say he is very responsive to the diverse communities in his district, from Rittenhouse Square to Strawberry Mansion.

City Council “represents the people who live and work here now, not some speculative resident or business,” Clarke said. “It’s our primary responsibility to adequately represent the people that are here.”

Clarke’s critics argue that his approach to policy-making harms small business and undermines larger affordability goals. They contend that giving Council members near-complete control over land-use decisions in their districts — a practice that Clarke has encouraged — opens the door to corruption.

They point to the profusion of zoning carve-outs for particular neighborhoods (known as overlays) under Clarke’s guidance, discouraging density on key commercial corridors, and erecting barriers to new shops or the convoluted rules entangling outdoor dining that shut down most streeteries.

“Under [Clarke], Council has even more space to wield power, and over time, that will lead to inequitable outcomes,” said Patrick Christmas, chief policy officer for the Committee of Seventy, an independent, nonpartisan advocate for better government in Philadelphia. “Instead of shaping a city, we’re increasingly starting to resemble 10 cities with 10 different sets of rules for development, 10 different sets of rules for sidewalk activity.”

When Clarke began his rise, City Council staff often had much less technical expertise than they do today. But he nonetheless established himself as an adept fixer who understood policy.

“Long before he became Council president, Clarke has always been a go-to guy,” said Larry Ceisler, a public relations consultant. “I say this with respect, but he’s like the Manchurian councilman. It’s like he’s been programmed to be a Philadelphia City Councilman. His whole life is about budget figures and zoning, what makes the city run.”

During Clarke’s time as a constituent services representative, he learned to take community organizations seriously. Even today, neighborhood leaders from areas ranging from Strawberry Mansion, Northern Liberties, and Yorktown to Center City say Clarke is an open and accessible district councilperson — although community groups that advocate more density have sometimes been frustrated.

As he moved up in Street’s office, Clarke became more involved in policy-making and confronted the yawning lack of resources to address housing needs in the nation’s poorest big city.

Clarke learned about development policy in an era when Philadelphia had been losing population for half a century, and high-rise public housing was widely seen as a failure.

“He was serious about quality housing, how to qualify for federal funding, and getting community buy-in on development projects,” said John Kromer, Rendell’s director of housing.

“On the negative side, he is still a supporter of low-density, suburban-style housing for homeownership that goes against the current thinking about the best way to plan for cities,” Kromer said. “What made a lot of sense in the 1990s isn’t the way to go now, but he is still there.”

Clarke’s early years as a Council member were under his mentor-turned-mayor, John F. Street. His aversion to mayoral priorities blossomed under Street’s successor, Michael A. Nutter, who quickly sought to unravel Street’s policies at agencies such as the Redevelopment Authority, which were key to disposing of vacant city land.

In 2012, Nutter rewrote the city zoning code to try to modernize Philadelphia’s land-use rules and make development less onerous. Clarke quickly soured on the changes, as Council offices were deluged with complaints about multifamily development, parking shortages, and displacement fears.

In his role as Council leader, which he began that year, Clarke quickly expanded the president’s office’s technical capacity. Over the second half of Nutter’s tenure, he hired GIS analysts and policy experts to rival the administration’s.

“It was clear that if we didn’t have a self-sustaining organization, we would always be to a much lesser degree able to establish policy around the city,” Clarke said. “So we added levels of expertise to the point now where I will put our team up against anyone in the state.”

In 2019, it was Clarke’s team, not Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration, that decided the time had come to reconsider the controversial 10-year property tax abatement that had spurred rapid development in some parts of the city. Progressive groups and some Council members sought to eliminate the abatement. The administration, developers, and building trades unions wanted to maintain the status quo.

“There was a significant call to eliminate it,” Clarke said. “As time went on, that could conceivably have happened, given the change in the representation in Council, so we thought it was prudent to come to a compromise.”

Clarke put off the debate for a few sessions, then weighed in with a version that would essentially halve the value of the abatement for new construction while preserving it for building rehabilitation. At the same time, he crafted a 1% tax on new construction to fund priorities of his own, such as home-repair programs.

“He takes his time and comes to what he thinks is right, whether you like it or not,” said Gary Jonas, president of the Building Industry Association, which promotes residential real estate development in Philadelphia. “There’s things that Darrell does that I love, that work well for the city, and things that I hate and are negative for the city. That makes him a pretty balanced Council member.”

Clarke’s office championed ambitious policy proposals with little input from the mayor, such as a $400 million fund to address housing needs financed by the construction tax or the consolidation of the city’s zoning and land-use agencies into the new Department of Planning and Development with a seat in the cabinet.

For some critics, these initiatives showed the limits of running mayoral-style initiatives out of a Council president’s office.

“It was a good strategic move to coordinate all the different agencies that have a say in how properties get developed,” said one former administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “But it didn’t make the planning and development process more coherent. They didn’t ensure it actually worked and was more powerful than the whims of 10 Council people.”

District Council members have long been given deference in decisions over zoning and disposal of vacant public land in their territory, a tradition known as councilmanic prerogative. During Clarke’s tenure, that power has become far stronger.

Prerogative is possible only if all Council members support the preferences of the district Council member who represents the area in question. Clarke has strengthened the practice by privately discouraging members from poking into their colleagues’ neighborhoods and rebuking those who meddle in his own district.

The results can be seen in policy disputes where administration-led efforts were blunted, such as the repaving of Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia, which is divided between two Council districts.

An administration-led proposal to narrow the five-lane speedway and offer more protection for pedestrians and cyclists was frustrated after Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson responded to some constituent complaints in his district. Now only the eastern half, in Mark Squilla’s district, accords with the original plan.

Nutter’s zoning code reform effort, meanwhile, has been undermined by a series of overlays that changed the rules in parts or all of Council members’ districts. The increasing complexity has created a lot of work for land-use lawyers and slowed the Zoning Board of Adjustment to a crawl, frustrating everyone from shopkeepers to big developers.

Critics of this decentralized model of policy-making fear that it will outlast Clarke’s tenure.

“Under [Clarke], Council members are accustomed to a great deal of power within their districts,” said Christmas of the Committee of Seventy. “[Next year] returning members will expect that same deference.”

For Clarke, that’s not a bad thing. The empowerment of Council means neighborhood groups can push back against dramatic change and win concessions, he said, and it forces different factions to the table for dialogue. He sees that as a more balanced approach to governing, both between interest groups and branches of government.

“The only way you get those broad-based initiatives implemented, you got to have conversation, you have to have dialogue,” Clarke said. “All these folks on both sides of the equation lobby for their interests. So you can either not get anything done while you continue to argue and fight, or you can come up with a compromise.”