Q&A: Helen Gym on Vision Zero, Council politics, and how the school funding debate ties into planning
Continuing the Agenda 2015 series, PlanPhilly will be publishing Q&A's with potential City Council newcomers talking about their views on a range of city planning and built environment topics. For the first interview, we spoke with Helen Gym about her thoughts on tax reform, the 10-year tax abatement, and the politics of street safety.
PlanPhilly: It was surprising to see how different the Council challengers were who ended up breaking through this year. How was your path to victory different from some of the others?
Helen Gym: For each of the At-Large races, knowing the electorate was going to be the same as it usually is, you could pull out your own path to victory. And so just because Allan Domb got elected, that doesn't have anything to do with my race. For Derek Green and I, I think someone did an analysis of our races and we got completely different voters. Every place that Derek did really well, I did not do that well. Everywhere that I did well, he did very poorly. I think it shows you that you can actually win if you understand your own path. In the at-large races, I think you can do something a little bit different. I find it interesting how this race did and didn't reinforce some of the traditional conceptions of how people win. Derek Green won with the number one ballot position, and I won with number seventeen. Allan Domb won with sick amounts of money, but I ran a grassroots campaign and won my first time at this.
PP: You had some interesting points about Vision Zero during the campaign, particularly the opportunities for political movement-building around that from your position on Council. Why is that issue important to you?.
HG: For me, I relate to Vision Zero because of how I look at issues of immigration, poverty and connecting folks. And I think that the more the Vision Zero concept [a cross-agency education, enforcement, and design effort to cut traffic deaths in half over 4 years] moves off paper and moves into the lived experiences of people who need to have a safe and connected city, the more powerful it's going to be. There’s 33% of Philadelphians who don’t own a car for example. And there are more young people biking, and immigrants who use bikes. Especially in a city in which many undocumented people don’t have driver’s licenses, it matters to have a policy that overlaps and engages with a diverse range of communities and fits within their experiences. That’s how policies come to life, and I try to look at Vision Zero from that perspective.
PP: So the policy change feeds back into the politics. The groups you mentioned--younger voters and immigrants--seem to be on the upswing over time, in terms of their share of the population, but they also tend to vote at lower rates.
HG: Well I know there’s been a concerted effort to change that - to engage and to continue to politically mobilize our communities. And the challenge now that we’re past Election Day is making sure that people aren't just voting. I see opportunities for political engagement of communities that have been long marginalized and silenced within the city going well beyond electoral politics. It’s really got to be about broader political civic engagement, and that’s just a different level than getting people to come out for an election.
I really appreciated Vision Zero because there was the potential to have a solid policy rooted in data and analysis. And the really exciting aspect of it is connecting it with the experiences of communities that can make that effort take off, and take off within diverse communities. So Vision Zero can be an anti-poverty initiative. It can be an immigrant Q&A: Helen Gym on Vision Zero, Council politics, and how the school funding debate ties into planning | Philadelphia Public School Notebook:
