It's hard to undersell how much 'gentrification' and 'things Philadelphia policymakers have long wanted to happen' overlap. Growing up the complaint was about the brain drain and low college education among residents. I remember seeing graphs showing how white Philadelphians... https://twitter.com/EconomyLeague/status/1346092911558062081

Were less educated than pretty much any non rural white community in America. So now we have young people and educated people coming and staying in the city and they hate that too. I almost think that they didn't expect the effort to retain local grads to have any success.

So it was more a pipe dream, and when it happened they didn't really know how to adapt. Nutter tried but then City Council blocked his entire agenda. So a lot of the biggest side effects of young college grads staying could have been ameliorated, if they had tried to be proactive

Not only did they not expect to succeed, even when they began succeeding, the new narrative became that all of these folks would move to the suburbs. Some do, of course, but a lot of people don't even have kids, and more who have kids stay than expected. https://twitter.com/SicTransitPHL/status/1346095161814736897?s=19

The ruling class of Philadelphia just has this utterly negative and declinist view of the city. They couldn't comprehend that their hail mary attempt would work, refused to acknowledge when it did, and now spend most of their time complaining about the fact that it did.