Needed a car for a quick errand yesterday, and I spent a few extra minutes driving around a bit farther south into South Philly than I usually go. Some of it has a kind of unpleasant crumbling look to it and it took me awhile to figure out why. Sure there are always the occasional abandoned or decrepit buildings and lots, but you even get that closer to center city (plenty of them right around where I currently live). Some of it's just the lack of street cleaning so you get a bit more stray garbage than you should. But then I realized that a lot of it is simply the crumbling and broken sidewalks. Repairing those would do a lot to improve the character of those areas.
