Power: The Dwight Stuff?

Evans’s family moved twice when he was in his teens. The moves suggest something about his mother, who was the guardian of Evans and his four siblings after his parents separated. With each move, she was taking the family, as best she could within her means, to black neighborhoods of safety and middle-class stability. When North Philadelphia began falling apart, she took the family to East Tulpehocken Street in Germantown. When that area took a turn for the worse, the family settled in West Oak Lane. The Evanses were a part of the little-known history of intra-migration in Philadelphia — black flight, you might call it — and you can see how the values behind those choices made an impression on Evans. His career has been guided by the idea that government should bring stabilizing institutions — schools, supermarkets, community development organizations — to neighborhoods that without them would begin the descent from North 17th Street circa 1957 to North 17th Street circa 2007.

Evans put this philosophy into action in 1983, not long after being elected to the State Senate, when he helped create the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corporation (OARC). With the help of state, federal and foundation funding, OARC had its first success in rebuilding the abandoned Ogontz mall. OARC now has an operating budget of $12 million, and one of its latest projects is rehabbing abandoned houses near Martin Luther King High School. OARC manages subsidized housing, fixes up old commercial properties, and has even developed a popular charter school.

But if keeping West Oak Lane flush has kept Evans in office for two and a half decades, it was a fight with Ed Rendell that showed he is a very different kind of Democrat, one who should, in theory, be positioned to win this election.


IN 1996, EVANS and four other Philadelphia state legislators — including three white Republicans from the Northeast — started publicly questioning Mayor Ed Rendell and police commissioner Richard Neal about why Philadelphia wasn’t adopting New York’s pro-active, “broken windows” style of policing. Crime was dropping in New York, while in 1995, Philadelphia had 432 murders. Philly’s state representatives tended not to meddle in the nuts and bolts of the city’s affairs, but Evans felt the lack of progress in reducing crime merited a change in strategy. For the three white Republicans, there wasn’t much to lose, but it’s hard to see what Evans had to gain unless he actually believed in what he was doing.

“I took heat from [NAACP head] Jerry Mondesire, because [Neal was] an African-American police commissioner,” Evans says. “But the department wasn’t working.”

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