Question 1 — Mt. Airy Business Improvement District: What specific federal policies or programs would you support to help small businesses grow, hire locally, and remain viable in commercial corridors like ours?
There are a number of programs that I would support to help small businesses in our commercial corridors. This is something that I’ve worked on as a member of the state Senate, and making sure that we have resources for our communities is incredibly important.
Small businesses account for 85% of new job creation. One of the challenges is access to capital. So I think we need to focus on making sure that there’s adequate federal enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act that can make sure that small businesses can get resources that are needed.
As a state senator, I was proud to help create a program where we work through the community development financial institutions to deliver $125 million that went to small businesses throughout our communities. Additionally, I think we need to look at the 8(a) program. The 8(a) program is a federal program designed to help small and diverse businesses do business with the federal government.
The federal government procures all kinds of services, and we need to make sure businesses in our community can access those programs. Then, for many people that own bricks and sticks shops, new market tax credits can be incredibly helpful as a tool to stimulate investment in those businesses and again allow them to be able to have the kinds of capital they need to fix their businesses up.
Ultimately, this is one of the most important issues, because growing our commercial corridors helps grow our economy, stabilize our community, make sure people have access to things like fresh fruits and vegetables, and I’ve been a champion as a state legislator of the urban ag program. The urban ag programs help businesses with agriculture. I’m running out of time. I’d love to talk more about this, but there’s so much we can do, and I’m looking forward to working on it as your congressman.
Question 2 — The Chestnut Hill Conservancy: How would you support federal funding and policy that help communities preserve historic buildings, protect open space and watershed resources, and expand access to local history?
Those are all important issues. So first, I would continue to support an expansion of historic tax credits. Historic tax credits can be used to deal with the enhanced costs of preserving historic buildings and making sure that the character of those buildings can be maintained. I’ve supported similar tax credits at the state level, but ultimately, expanding the pool of those credits is something that the federal government can and should do.
We need to have, we need to plant more trees, and we need to make investments in that. I’ve worked with the Department of Commerce and natural resources to make sure that we have resources to tend our trees and our open spaces. Additionally, I sponsored legislation for the urban ag program, which when you think of urban ag, sometimes it’s community gardens and it’s helping maintain our green spaces in an urban setting, something that’s incredibly important. At the state level, we’ve provided resources there, and I will make sure I work with similar departments at the federal level to do the same thing.
Expanded access to our local history. This is an issue that certainly we need to make sure we’re investing in our monuments in our history, but we need to make sure we’re accurately telling our story. I’ve sued Donald Trump quite a few times. Most recently, sued him to make sure that in our Constitution Center, we were able to preserve the monument to the 10 enslaved individuals.
I was a part of an amicus brief. We sued Donald Trump when he wanted to sanitize and erase portions of American history that talked about slavery and inclusion for African Americans. I fought him on this and won as a state senator, and I’ll do it as a member of Congress.
Question 3 — Face to Face Germantown: What laws do you think Congress can pass in the current political environment to increase housing supply for low-income renters?
This is a topic, housing, that used to be one that was easy to get bipartisan support there. Almost everything is now more challenging. This is an area I’m quite familiar with, having spent 18 years of my life as a lawyer who dealt with developing affordable housing and have worked on these issues in over 14 different states, but we’re time limited, so we’ll get to some of the tools.
Low-income housing tax credits is the first tool that comes to mind. The federal government should dramatically expand the access to low-income housing tax credits, and they shouldn’t expire in just 15 years. They should be expanded to last at least 30 years, and maybe even 40 so that housing remains affordable for a longer period of time. And we should have resources where the government can re-up and expand it once those credits expire. That’s been a challenge in many communities.
There are [Annual Contributions Contract] units which are usually funded through the housing authority, and we need to expand the number of units that are available that way. There are the housing choice voucher programs. We need to expand access to housing choice voucher subsidies, which allow people to live in communities across the city.
There are some specific programs for specific communities we also need to focus on. We need to expand access to development of housing for domestic violence victims. There are too often domestic violence victims, when fleeing, one of the reasons they stay is there isn’t adequate access to housing. There can and should be housing choice vouchers and low-income housing tax credits focused on that population.
Finally, we need to expand housing choice vouchers and access to low income housing tax credits for veterans. This issue, I’d love to talk about more. It’s important, and I want to continue to work on it.
Question 4 — Friends of the Wissahickon: As flooding, extreme heat, and biodiversity loss intensify across Pennsylvania, what role should urban forests and watershed parks play in the federal climate strategy, and what concrete steps would you take to increase federal investment in places like the Wissahickon Valley?
One of our greatest treasures in Philadelphia really is Fairmount Park. It stretches from one end to the other end to this district, and it is really the heart and meat of the district. It is a resource for so many. My daughter rowed crew on the Schuylkill. I’ve run the trail, the Forbidden Trail, and it is really important to me.
I think the federal government should make significant investments in supporting the city and the state in it. As a member of the state Senate, I pushed the Department of Commerce and natural resources to expand its programs around protecting and tending trees and making sure that we protect the biodiversity of our trees, both in urban and rural areas.
We need to make investments in clean water and protecting our clean water in our watersheds. We can do that through a number of federal programs that are through the national Departments of Conservation and Natural Resources. We need to make sure that we are investing in things like restoring our trees, making sure when there are floods, that we build up the infrastructure. Matter of fact, planting trees along flood plains will stop flooding, and it creates more habitats for wildlife as well.
Additionally, we need to invest in things like the zip-lining that exists off of Moyamensing Avenue, and some of the things like that that allow people to engage and be involved in it. Look, this is a topic I could talk about a little bit more, but we only have two minutes. Federal investment in these spaces is important. They’re recreational and they’re important for the environment.
Question 5 — West Mt. Airy Neighbors: Can you recall a moment from your career where you wish you did things differently? What did you learn from that experience?
When I first got to the state Senate, I was really concerned about education funding, and I am a little bit of a lawyer, a little bit of a nerd, as people have pointed out in the trail, and I was looking at the effects of AVI [Actual Value Initiative]. Michael Nutter had recently implemented it and so it hadn’t been in place that long, and it increased the value, on paper, of the portfolio of real estate in Philly. But because the millage was reduced, and it wasn’t designed to increase people’s tax rates, there wasn’t additional revenue for the school district.
The way the state poverty index worked it was going to cost the school district $180 million. So I scheduled a press conference to talk about this and expose the terrible things that were happening and demand that my colleagues in the General Assembly from across the Commonwealth, and the legislature which was controlled by Republicans, move forward with correcting this wrong.
My colleagues, Sens. Vincent Hughes and Tony Williams, got a hold of my idea for this press conference before the press release went out, and they told me, “Sharif, if you really want to solve this issue, you got to cancel this press conference. We got to sit by, you got to pull your bill.” And they said, “You can introduce this as an amendment. We can get this as an amendment in the school code. If we do it this way, we’ll save the school district $180 million. Now you’re not going to get a press hit, but the question is, are you really more concerned about helping kids or getting a press hit?”
Ultimately, I took their advice. We did reschedule it. I didn’t have the press conference. We did save the school district, and it taught me something about getting things done. Getting Things Done required me to work with leadership, talk with folks on both sides, listen and build coalition. Because we did that, we were able to save the school district that money. And I learned it’s not always about the press hit. It’s about getting things done. That’s what I’ve done. That’s what I’ll do.
