Another day, another misguided attempt at making the city better from Cindy Bass. Fresh off withdrawing her bill to ban daycares from her district, Bass has passed another effort to drown new businesses and developers in red tape. The bill, which purports to aid RCOs, adds time to the zoning process for new businesses and new construction. While the stated aim of the bill is to make the process more responsive to community desires, the effect will be to double down on a broken system.

When the RCO system was first proposed, it was greeted with excitement in nearly all quarters. Today, after years of watching the process, it is clear that for many neighborhoods, it simply doesn’t work. Civic Associations in Philadelphia have a long pedigree of beautifying blocks, organizing neighbors, and most importantly bringing people together. Adding zoning to the responsibility list of these groups has undermined their mission and brought anger and division into our communities.

Take, for example, my own neighborhood of Point Breeze. I am a civically minded Philadelphian, and I would love to be more involved with my community. But as anyone who lives here knows, the presence of zoning issues at Point Breeze RCO meetings creates shouting matches. Neighbors yell at neighbors and long-standing grudges are established. In this type of environment, the most combative and negative neighbors are able to dominate the proceedings, rather than the most constructive ones.

This dynamic, along with the fact that many neighbors do not have the available time to attend RCO meetings where they will be often told that they have no right to vote at anyway. So rather than expressing the clear will of a community, what the RCO often represents is an extreme, minority view from within the community, one that reflects only the neighbors who complain the most. In some RCOs, accusations have even been leveled of vote fixing, gerrymandering, and tampering. Is this really what we want to go through more often, for more and more businesses and housing?

The RCO process has already led to a severe shortage of new construction in Philadelphia. While the recent development boom might be surprising to longtime Philadelphians (like me) who grew up in a declining city, it actually has no been enough to meet the population growth our city has seen. Already homes on my block in South Philly have gone from being listed for $125,000 to $225,000. If we continue to skimp on building new homes, that figure will only climb higher and higher.

What we need is not to make it harder, slower and more expensive to build and open businesses, but easier and cheaper. City Council should be brave enough to tackle the issues caused by new development, like traffic, trash, and congestion, rather than kicking the can over to RCO groups that lack the democratic mandate and professional staff that City Council possesses.