Richardson Dilworth, Drexel University

Campus protests. Homeless encampment clearings. Significant decreases in shootings, homicides and overdose deaths. Protests to “Save Chinatown.” A mass shooting at a SEPTA bus stop. Illegal car meetups. City workers called back to the office. A SEPTA strike averted.

These were just some of the headlines that dominated Philadelphia politics in 2024.

So, what does 2025 hold for the city?

I’m a politics professor at Drexel University and in 2023 I published a short book, “Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022,” that traced the city’s political development with an eye toward the future of its policy and politics.

Here are six key storylines that will shape Philly’s political landscape in 2025.

1. Partisan shifts

Philadelphia enters 2025 notably more politically diverse than five years ago.

Partisanship in Philadelphia is not so much captured by a Democratic-Republican split as it is by what local journalist Larry Platt once called “reformer vs. progressive,” referring to the division between more conservative Democrats on the one hand and more liberal Democrats and progressive third parties on the other.

Advertisement

Progressive candidates have had minor surges in recent years. Seven of the 17 members of the Philadelphia City Council are elected at large, but no party is allowed to nominate more than five members to run for these seats in the general election. This has meant that, as long as anyone can remember, there have been five Democratic and two Republican at-large council members.

Then, in 2019, Working Families Party candidate Kendra Brooks won one of the two at-large seats previously held by Republicans. One year later, two Democratic Socialists who ran as Democrats, Nikil Saval and Rick Krajewski, were elected to the state Senate and state House, respectively. And in 2023 another Working Families Party member, Nicolas O’Rourke, won the second at-large City Council seat reserved for minor parties, thereby completely replacing Republicans in those positions.

At the same time, the mayor elected in 2023, Cherelle Parker, is a reasonably conservative Democrat – at least in the sense that her focus has not been on social justice issues but rather the classic municipal issues of cleanliness and public safety.

And the 2024 elections saw the GOP vote go up in Philadelphia, as it did almost everywhere in the country. Republicans captured a state Senate seat in the city for the first time in two decades.

The most recent surge favoring Republicans would ostensibly threaten the two at-large Working Families Party members of the City Council, who are most vulnerable to electoral challenges that would bring back at-large Republicans. However, they’re safe until 2027, by which time another Democratic surge in Philadelphia is likely, as many voters will have most likely soured on the Trump administration by that time.

2. Will Krasner stay or go?

In 2025, the most high-profile city election will be for district attorney, and that does seem potentially ripe for change.

The incumbent is Larry Krasner, first elected in 2017 as part of the post-Trump progressive wave. He won again decisively in 2021, against a challenger in the Democratic primary whose main support was from the Fraternal Order of Police.

Yet as Parker’s election as mayor – and Trump’s as president – suggests, Krasner may face an electorate ready for a more law-and-order message in May 2025. The DA’s office in Philadelphia has historically been a bastion for conservative Democrats and even Republicans. Krasner may face more significant challengers this time around, especially in the primary.

Advertisement

3. Kensington at a crossroads

Parker has benefited from the sharp decline in crime and violence after its pandemic-driven spike. But she has also increased the police budget to provide for hiring 400 new officers; hired a police commissioner from within, Kevin Bethel, who previously received praise for his work on diversion and juvenile justice; and focused on quality-of-life issues such as cracking down on ATV gangs.

Parker has also focused in particular on the Kensington neighborhood and its notorious open-air drug markets. This is important, not least because Kensington has been a large contributor to the city’s unfortunate status of being a leader in drug overdose deaths.

The drug trade was also holding down development and property values – and therefore property tax revenues – in a neighborhood on the path of gentrification. From my perspective, cleaning up Kensington promises to be some of the best return on investment in the city.

4. Parker vs. Trump administration

Of course, another new thing that the city will have to grapple with in 2025 is the incoming Trump administration.

The previous Trump administration got into a fight with then-Mayor Jim Kenney in 2016 over the city’s sanctuary policy with respect to federal immigration enforcement. Basically, the Kenney administration won and got back federal grant money that had been withheld.

Parker may be in a tough spot if she plans to maintain some sort of sanctuary status for the city. The Trump administration – no friend of Philadelphia under the best of circumstances – will likely face less resistance and some acquiescence, as we’re seeing in Chicago, where some aldermen have suggested getting rid of that city’s sanctuary status.

The incoming president has also signaled repeatedly his willingness to use the military for mass deportations, thereby sidestepping necessary cooperation from local law enforcement. This is a critical issue because immigration is a key economic asset for Philadelphia. As the Pew Charitable Trusts have found, immigrants in Philadelphia tend to be younger, more likely to participate in the workforce, and more likely to start a business than native Philadelphians.

5. Market East in limbo

And then there was the proposed downtown 76ers arena, approved by the City Council in a 12-5 vote in December 2024 and then entirely scrapped in early January 2025. Was this entire project simply some sort of bargaining chip used by Sixers owners and management to get a better deal in South Philadelphia from Comcast Spectacor, the owner of the teams’ current home at the Wells Fargo Center?

Whatever the case, the entire project no doubt leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the Chinatown businesses and other interest groups who opposed the new stadium and felt sold out by the mayor and City Council. But with the next City Council and mayoral elections not happening until 2027, it seems likely that the entire thing will be forgotten by the time any elected official might be punished at the polls.

The fall of the downtown stadium deal throws open the future of the Market Street East corridor. The proposed arena was part of a reimagining of the Fashion District, a redevelopment project by the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust that opened in 2019. The pandemic and higher interest rates led to store closures and financial problems, and PREIT has since filed twice for bankruptcy. Add to that the fact that Macy’s, an anchor tenant on the corridor, announced it is closing its store in the historic Wanamaker Building next to City Hall.

Advertisement

Market East – essentially the front door of the city – doesn’t look so good for the 2026 celebrations planned as part of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country. Indeed, the Constitution was drafted at Independence Hall, which is part of the Market East corridor. The chances that things will look much better in 2025 seem pretty dim, although there are plans to convert the space to apartments and smaller stores.

Other major infrastructure projects will likely work in the mayor’s favor, most notably a new park covering part of I-95 that will reconnect the Delaware riverfront to the Society Hill and Old City neighborhoods. This is set to be completed during Parker’s first term.

6. Inflation and housing

And finally, one of the bigger issues in the last presidential election was the housing affordability crisis. This crisis is slightly muted in Philadelphia compared with some other major cities, but it is real nonetheless.

Yet the city has to a certain extent inadvertently lucked out. As 2021 was the last year that developers could take full advantage of the city’s 10-year tax abatement for new construction, a record number of building permits were granted that year.

In 2022, the number of building permits plummeted to 2013 levels. Nevertheless, the permits from 2021 have led to a building boom, especially in residential construction, which may be keeping housing prices lower than they would otherwise be. We can expect this trend to continue into 2025, even if the volume of new permits drops even more.

Richardson Dilworth, Professor of Politics, Drexel University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Advertisement

BREMEN, Germany, Jan. 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Starlab Space LLC today announced the opening of its first overseas subsidiary, Starlab Space GmbH. Located in Bremen, Germany, it will extend the company’s capabilities and demonstrates its commitment to its international partners, maintaining global cooperation and permanent human presence, and expanding microgravity research opportunities in a commercial LEO economy.

“Successful and sustainable operation of a commercial space station requires international partners, and therefore, a presence beyond America’s borders,” said Tim Kopra, Starlab CEO. “We’re thrilled to launch Starlab Space Europe, a regional hub that will facilitate industrial efficiencies and expanded partnerships with allied space agencies, including the European Space Agency and its member countries. More importantly, joining American and European presence sets the stage for life beyond the ISS, one that has a global, permanent crew thriving in low-Earth orbit and leading research that can transform all of humanity.”

Starlab Space is a US-led joint venture that is recreating the global partnership network that enabled the success of the International Space Station, but now through leading international industrial partners. Starlab’s joint venture partners currently include Voyager Space, Airbus, Mitsubishi Corporation, and MDA Space. Strategic partners also include Palantir Technologies, Hilton, Northrop Grumman, and The Ohio State University.

Starlab’s European subsidiary in Bremen is jointly owned by Starlab Space and Airbus Defence and Space. Starlab Space Europe is strongly positioned to leverage Airbus’ advanced space infrastructure facilities and experienced team that support both the ISS Columbus Module and the European Service Module for NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Co-locating with Airbus in Bremen places Starlab in vicinity to a premier aerospace workforce.

Airbus nominated Manfred Jaumann to serve as managing director of Starlab Space Europe. Jaumann has spent 33 years at Airbus Defence and Space in numerous leadership roles, serving currently as head of low-Earth orbit & suborbital programs and head of ISS services, payloads and missions.

About Starlab
Starlab Space is a U.S.-led, global joint venture among Voyager Space, Airbus, Mitsubishi Corporation and MDA Space, with strategic partners including Palantir Technologies, The Ohio State University, Hilton and more. Starlab is developing a next-generation, AI-enabled commercial space station, aiming to ensure continued human presence in low-Earth orbit and a seamless transition of microgravity science and research alongside the retirement of the International Space Station. For more information on Starlab, visit www.starlab-space.com.

SOURCE Starlab

Advertisement

Shoumita Dasgupta, Boston University

Threats of mass deportations loom on the post-2024 election horizon. Some supporters claim these will protect the country from immigrants who bring “bad genes” into America. But this is a misguided use of the language of science to give a sheen of legitimacy to unscientific claims.

Politicians invoke genetics to confirm false stereotypes that immigrants are more violent than native-born citizens as a result of biological differences. This is despite the fact that immigrants living in the country with or without legal authorization have significantly lower crime and violent crime rates than U.S. citizens. Moreover, there is no strong genetic evidence to support a biological predisposition for committing violent acts.

As a geneticist and a child of immigrants, I study the intersection of biology and bias. I am also author of the book “Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins: Lessons on Belonging from Our DNA.” What is clear from my professional work is that this line of thinking – attempting to use science to explain human difference in ways that reinforce social hierarchies – isn’t new. It takes the playbooks of genetic essentialism and scientific racism and applies them to public policy.

The fallacy of genetic essentialism

Genetic essentialism is the concept that genes alone are the reason why someone develops a specific trait or behaves a certain way. For instance, a genetic essentialist would say that a person’s athleticism, intelligence, personality and a range of other traits are encoded entirely in their DNA. They ignore the influence that sports training, material resources and learned behaviors have on these traits.

When used to explain differences between populations, genetic essentialism discounts the role that structural biases – inequities deeply ingrained in how systems operate – play in individual differences. Structural biases create a playing field that advantages one group over another from the start.

For instance, studies seeking to identify a gene for violent behavior may use measurements that are themselves biased. If arrest or incarceration rates were used as evidence of violence, study findings would be affected by discriminatory practices in the policing and criminal justice systems that more harshly penalize people of color.

Studies trying to disentangle the relative effects of genetic and structural factors on specific traits also face similar biases. For example, mental health outcomes are influenced by the identity-related stress that racial or sex and gender minorities experience. Similarly, socioeconomic outcomes are affected by the effects of redlining and segregation on generational wealth.

Advertisement

Genetics of educational attainment

As another example of behavioral genetics, consider a 2018 study on the genetics of educational attainment – in other words, whether certain genes were associated with years of schooling completed. The researchers were careful to communicate their results as pertaining specifically to educational attainment. They highlighted that genetic scores explained only about 11% to 13% of the variance – meaning, 87% to 89% of differences in educational attainment were due to influences other than genetics.

However, some popular press coverage oversimplified their findings as identifying genes for intelligence, even though the scientists did not directly measure intelligence – nor is it possible to.

Educational attainment can reflect everything from generational wealth to racial biases in education. A student with access to tutors their parents paid for has fewer educational obstacles than a student who has to work after school to make ends meet. Likewise, school punishment practices that are biased against students from certain backgrounds can set them on a harmful trajectory known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Genetic studies are not conducted in a vacuum, and social influences can confound analyses seeking to focus on biological effects. In fact, some scientists think of genes as potential controls to allow more careful study of the nongenetic factors accounting for the remaining 87% to 89% of differences in educational attainment.

Intentional misinterpretation of these observations on educational attainment have led some to conclude that Black students are simply not as intelligent as their white counterparts. They argue that these differences are genetically encoded and immutable. However, when the effects of wealth gaps and school segregation are accounted for, test score gaps substantially narrow. Importantly, educational attainment gaps actually invert, predicting that Black students complete more years of school than white students.

Slipping to scientific racism

This brings us to scientific racism: the way in which science is contorted to support preexisting views about the superiority of the white race over all others.

American physician Samuel Morton was one of the original forebears of scientific racism. He was interested in providing “evidence” to support his belief that Caucasians were the most intelligent of all races. To do this, he collected skulls and categorized them into five racial groupings he believed were derived from separate creation events. He measured skull volume as an indicator of intelligence.

When comparing the averages from each group, his results supported his original theory. However, if he had instead focused on the array of skull volumes in his collection, he would have seen substantial overlap in each of the groupings. That is, each group had a range of small to large skulls. Morton’s singular focus on proving his beliefs from the outset likely influenced his favored analytical approach. Nor is there a meaningful correlation between brain volume and intelligence.

Similar beliefs are at play when white supremacists manipulate data to create a scientific basis for their claims that white people are more intelligent than Black people. These tampered results appear in dark corners of the internet where they are shared in fringe journals, far-right social media memes and racist manifestos.

Advertisement

To be clear, there is no evidence that genetic differences related to intelligence or cognitive performance exist between racial groups. Instead, this is another argument growing out of replacement theory, the conspiracy theory that Jews and Western elites are deliberately replacing white populations with populations of color. Adherents believe that people of color are genetically inferior but are reproducing and immigrating at greater rates, and so threatening white power.

Human genetic variation

Scientists have systematically studied human genetic variation for decades, looking at differences in the DNA of people around the world. These studies definitively demonstrate that we are far more alike than different. The vast majority of common genetic variation is found across populations, and very few rare variants are specific to an individual group.

This may seem unexpected. Looking at the world around you, you’ll observe some differences between racially defined groups, such as skin tone and hair texture. However, there is no place in the world where you’ll be able to draw a line that cleanly separates people with dark skin tone from those with light skin tone. Skin color varies continuously across the globe, and a range of skin tones are present within any individual group.

Importantly, variation in one genetic trait is not predictive of other genetic traits. That is, you can’t extrapolate conclusions about traits such as disease predisposition from the genes that influence skin color. Even if the fallacy of genetic essentialism were true and cognitive ability was primarily a biological trait – which it is not – it would not be possible to connect an observed skin tone to predicted intelligence. https://www.youtube.com/embed/wK94PWbCmsk?wmode=transparent&start=0 President-elect Donald Trump pledged to use the military to carry out mass deportations.

Misappropriating genetics

While science does not support genetic essentialism or other underpinnings of replacement theory, this exact rationale has made its way into national immigration policy.

These policies grew directly out of the American eugenics movement, which sought to build a supposedly better human race through social engineering based on “race science.” Zoologist Charles Davenport created the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office in 1910 to pursue his interests in evolution, breeding and human heredity. There, he and his colleagues collected records of American families, documenting their traits and ascribing genetic bases to them.

Harry Laughlin, a high school teacher Davenport recruited to serve as superintendent of the office, was later appointed as the expert eugenics agent for the U.S. congressional Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He commissioned studies to document race-based trends in so-called biological traits such as intelligence, inventiveness and feeble-mindedness, erroneously concluding that observed patterns were due to genetic differences between populations. His findings were used to inform U.S. immigration quotas, which were set higher for populations deemed to have good genes and lower for those with undesirable traits.

Advertisement

These policies were codified in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. In signing the act, President Calvin Coolidge declared, “America must remain American,” paraphrasing a popular Ku Klux Klan slogan. This law severely restricted immigration from Asia and implemented strict quotas for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. It also established elements of immigration that remain in 2025, including the visa system and the Border Patrol. With the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act, anti-Semitism and xenophobia became law of the land.

Coming full circle, genetic essentialism and racism continue to drive present-day rhetoric using “bad genes” to justify mass deportations of people deemed harmful to American society. Politicians and tech moguls are employing a combination of racism, willful misunderstanding of genetic science and political power to promote their own social agendas.

Politicians and hate groups have often weaponized genetics, leading to violent events carried out in the name of white supremacy. These include the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, the 2019 Christchurch shootings of Muslims at two mosques, and the 2022 Buffalo massacre of Black customers at a neighborhood grocery store.

A better understanding of science and history can empower scientists, policymakers and others to reject unscientific claims and protect vulnerable members of society targeted by racism.

Shoumita Dasgupta, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean of Diversity & Inclusion, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Advertisement