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  • Who is living in all of Center City’s new apartment buildings?

    Who is living in all of Center City’s new apartment buildings?

    When Adam Sawyer and his wife, Marissa Tan, moved to Philadelphia in 2024 from Baltimore, they were attracted to Center City by its proximity to work and mass transit.

    The couple figured if they sold their car, they could even afford to rent in one of the thousands of new, high-rise apartments that have been built across Center City over the last 10 years.

    Tan had just gotten a new job with the Cooper University Hospital in Camden, and Adam needed access to 30th Street Station for work. They eventually settled on the PMC Property Group’s Riverwalk North at 23rd and Arch Streets and have been impressed by the city, its transit system, and life without a car.

    Adam Sawyer and his wife, Marissa Tan, moved to Philadelphia in 2024 from Baltimore.

    “One of the things I love about living in a city is that you’ll be walking down the street and there are five different events you didn’t even know about,” Sawyer said. “Festivals, farmers markets, just activity, people doing things. I love that Philadelphia has so much energy.”

    In many ways Sawyer and Tan — who are both 35 — are representative of the people who have taken up residence in the new apartment buildings across Center City. Between Pine and Vine Streets, river to river, 3,500 new apartments have opened since 2023.

    Center City District (CCD) set out to learn more about who is calling these apartments home, with a survey of more than two dozen buildings constructed since 2015.

    Like Sawyer and Tan, the vast majority of respondents to CCD’s survey are under 45 (83%), more than half don’t own a car (55%), and close to half moved from outside the Philadelphia area (44%). Sawyer works remotely like 21% of respondents, and Tan works in healthcare like 32% of them.

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    In a city where a fifth of all residents live in poverty, the respondents aren’t representative of the average Philadelphian in many ways. The buildings surveyed have an average rent of $2,645, well above the median of $1,387.

    But the results show that there is a market for the kind of new buildings that are still being proposed. They also highlight that many people are attracted to the most central parts of Philadelphia because it offers more density, walkability, and other urban characteristics that few other American cities can boast.

    “People actively choose Philadelphia over other cities and metropolitan areas because we outperform them in some ways,” said Clint Randall, vice president of Economic Development with CCD, which is funded by downtown property owners and provides advocacy and services like additional security and cleaning downtown.

    “The city spent so many decades shrinking,” Randall said. “When you see this entire skyline of high-rise apartment buildings emerge, it contradicts what longtime Philadelphians think they know about this place, which is that it does not grow or attract residents.”

    Reversing reverse commuting

    Center City District’s survey confirmed a longtime finding of the organization’s other research reports: People who live downtown are likely to work there or very close by.

    In Philadelphia, reverse commuting is common, a testament to the fact that many private-sector employers have remained outside the city to avoid wage and business taxes. But among survey respondents, only 12% commuted to the suburbs for work compared to almost 40% citywide.

    Over half of respondents work in either Center City or University City, and a similar proportion work in either healthcare (32%) or in the jobs more typically associated with office towers: “business, professional, or financial services” (27%). Twenty-one percent work from home.

    “A lot of people are in medicine, in healthcare. I see a lot of scrubs,” said Kaz Rivera-Gorski, about her building One Cathedral Square at 17th and Race Streets.

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    “I would imagine there’s a good amount of people that work remotely, too,” said Rivera-Gorski, who is a management consultant who works from home. “I see people on their laptops in the shared spaces during the day.”

    Seventy percent of respondents said their jobs are within walking, biking, or transit distance from their homes, while 80% of them said that owning a car was not necessary to enjoy daily life in Philadelphia.

    That’s part of what attracted Sawyer and Tan, even though another part of Philadelphia’s allure was that it was closer to family in central and eastern Pennsylvania (the couple have a Zipcar membership).

    “While I do drive, I really, really dislike driving,” Sawyer said. “I’ve lost people. Everybody has, to either accidents or crashes or DUIs. So we were open to selling our car and became more and more convinced it was a good idea.”

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    Retaining out-of-towners

    Randall said that he was surprised by the proportion of CCD’s respondents who reported having moved to Philadelphia from outside the region. (A recent Realtor.com report showed that Philadelphia switched from having mostly local interest in rental listings before the pandemic to mostly out-of-towners today.)

    The survey also found that the majority of Center City dwellers planned to be living in Philadelphia in three to five years, with 45% planning to continue renting and 16% hoping to buy.

    “You hear about the transience of other places like D.C. or Boston, and it seems like people are here [in Philadelphia] and they intend to stay,” Randall said.

    That is certainly the goal of Annika Verma, a student at Temple University who lives in the Logan Lofts in Callowhill.

    “I am already calculating: Can I get an entry-level job? What salary would work for the rent in this area?” Verma said. “I would love to stay. The area seems ideal for me in terms of commuting or walking. Anything, everything is a 15-20 minute walk or bus ride away.”

    Sawyer and Tan are hoping to stay in Philadelphia, too. They are currently searching Center City for a condo to buy. They may try to stay in their current Logan Square neighborhood for its proximity to the Schuylkill River Trail and 30th Street Station.

    “We love it,” said Sawyer, who notes that they’ve lived in three cities in Texas, Cooperstown in New York, and Baltimore before this. “But our favorite place we’ve ever lived is here in Philadelphia.”

  • CHOP was Southeastern Pa.’s most profitable nonprofit health system in first quarter of fiscal 2026. Four systems lost money.

    CHOP was Southeastern Pa.’s most profitable nonprofit health system in first quarter of fiscal 2026. Four systems lost money.

    Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was the most profitable nonprofit health system in Southeastern Pennsylvania during the three months that ended Sept. 30, according to an Inquirer review of financial filings.

    CHOP reported $70 million in operating income in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, up from $67 million the same period a year ago. The nonprofit’s revenue climbed nearly 9% to $1.3 billion.

    The biggest loss in percentage terms was at Redeemer Health, the region’s smallest health system and the only remaining operator with a single hospital. Redeemer had an $11.7 million operating loss on $103.4 million in quarterly revenue. That was an improvement over an $18.9 million loss last year.

    Jefferson Health had the most patient revenue following its acquisition last year of Lehigh Valley Health Network. The 32-hospital system had $2.9 billion in patient revenue, $100 million more than the $2.8 billion at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which has seven hospitals.

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    Here’s a recap of selected systems’ results for September quarter:

    Jefferson Health

    Jefferson Health reported a $104 million operating loss, as its insurance business continued to drag down results. The loss included $19.4 million in restructuring charges for employee severance related to earlier job cuts and moves designed to make the system more efficient.

    University of Pennsylvania Health System

    University of Pennsylvania Health System had an operating gain of $109.3 million, up from $49.3 million in the same period a year ago. This year’s results include Doylestown Health, which Penn acquired April 1. Total revenue was $3.3 billion, up from $2.8 billion a year ago.

    Temple University Health System

    Temple University Health System’s loss in the quarter was $15 million, an improvement over a $17 million loss last year. Total revenue was $800 million, up 13% from $712.5 million a year ago. Outpatient revenue increased by nearly $62 million, much of it from the health system’s specialty and retail pharmacy business.

  • Hospital-based anti-violence programs get $3 million in state funding

    Hospital-based anti-violence programs get $3 million in state funding

    Several Philadelphia-area violence prevention efforts will benefit from nearly $3 million in newly released state funding to help hospitals address a leading cause of death and injury.

    The new funding for hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIP) was announced by Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis on Wednesday at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. One of the recipients, the Penn Trauma Violence Recovery Program, is based at the Penn Medicine hospital in University City.

    Other local awardees include Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia and the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Urban Affairs Coalition. The coalition received funding on behalf of the Chester Community Coalition to relaunch a program that had been at the now-shuttered Crozer-Chester Medical Center.

    The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center also received funding. The amounts awarded to each program were not announced.

    The Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, which Davis chairs, received 15 applications in total seeking nearly $12 million in funding — four times what was available.

    “Addressing the epidemic of gun violence is a top priority for our administration,” Davis said.

    Lieutenant Governor Austin Davis speaks at a press conference announcing the $3 million in grants for hospital-based violence intervention programs.

    The programs aim to connect patients at risk of repeat violence with resources while they are in a hospital, so they leave with a safety plan. Services can include long-term community-based case management, mentoring, and home visits.

    Since the first HVIP was established in the mid-1990s, dozens have spread around the country and abroad, including in Philadelphia.

    Several local institutions have these programs, including Temple Health, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Penn Medicine, Jefferson Health, and Drexel University. The City of Philadelphia, in conjunction with the area’s Level 1 trauma centers, launched an HVIP Collaborative in 2021.

    Studies have shown these programs reduce rates of repeat violent injuries and recidivism among participants.

    After shootings spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, gun violence is now declining in Philadelphia. As of July, shootings for the year were at their lowest total since at least 2015.

    Davis noted that Philadelphia has seen a 15% decrease in homicides this year, with roughly four in five gunshot victims surviving their injuries.

    The new funding will allow the Penn Trauma Violence Recovery Program to increase its community presence and mental health programming, said its director, trauma surgeon Elinore Kaufman.

    Through her experience treating victims of violence, she has learned that injuries can be deeper than the physical wounds.

    The program was launched to address social factors often involved in violence by providing psychosocial support and connecting patients with services to help with education, job training, and housing.

    “We’ve worked with patients long enough now that we have high school graduation photos, we have baby pictures,” Kaufman said. “We have patients who want to give back and have joined our patient advisory board to help push us forward.”

  • A man and teen were killed during attempted sale of a Rolex in Germantown, police say

    A man and teen were killed during attempted sale of a Rolex in Germantown, police say

    A man and a teenager were killed Tuesday night in Germantown when, investigators believe, a meeting for the sale of a Rolex watch turned into a robbery, and a shootout erupted.

    Tyree Ware, 30, drove to the 500 block of West Queen Lane to sell a Rolex he had listed for sale online, police said. Quaneef Lee, 16, arrived with an acquaintance to purchase it, they said.

    Detectives believe Lee and the other male then attempted to rob Ware of the watch at gunpoint, according to a law enforcement source who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

    Ware also pulled a gun, the source said.

    When officers arrived, they found Ware lying in the street beside the open door of his silver Nissan Maxima. He had been shot multiple times. A 9mm handgun lay beside him.

    Officers found Lee on the ground behind the sedan, shot once in the chest.

    Ware and Lee were rushed to Temple University Hospital, where they died shortly after 5:30 p.m., police said.

    Officers recovered 11 bullet casings from the scene. Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore said three guns were used in the shootout, but only one was recovered.

    The Rolex, Vanore said, was found inside Ware’s vehicle.

    Investigators are still working to identify the man who accompanied Lee and who may have killed Ware.

    A family member of Lee, when reached by phone Wednesday, declined to speak.

    The shooting comes as Philadelphia is on pace to record its lowest number of homicides in 60 years. Still, violence persists. Lee is one of at least 12 children shot and killed in the city this year.

  • Mental health workers in Philadelphia unionize following changes in their workplace and patient care

    Mental health workers in Philadelphia unionize following changes in their workplace and patient care

    Mental health professionals at Rogers Behavioral Health in West Philadelphia have formed a union, citing increased workloads and business changes that diminished patient care.

    The nonprofit mental healthcare provider last year transitioned from individual patient sessions to a group care model, said Tiffany Murphy, a licensed professional counselor and therapist at the facility. Some workers there were also moved from salaried to hourly positions then forced to reduce hours, their union has said.

    Some patients and workers have left amid the changes, says Murphy, estimating that 22 of her colleagues have quit in the past year.

    “A lot of us sort of put our jobs on the line by [unionizing], because we believe in the organization, but more so, we believe in our patients. We wanted to provide the best patient care that we possibly could for them,” said Murphy.

    The 19 West Philadelphia Rogers employees, including therapists and behavioral specialists, filed their petition last month to unionize with the National Union of Healthcare Workers. Rogers voluntarily recognized the union, according to NUHW, marking the union’s first unit in Pennsylvania.

    NUHW represents some 19,000 healthcare workers, primarily in California.

    Sal Rosselli, NUHW president emeritus, said the union is pleased that Rogers accepted the petition. “All too often, employers do the opposite and put together very anti-union campaigns, spending all kinds of patient care dollars to prevent their workers from organizing,” he said.

    The Philadelphia metro area, which also includes Camden and Wilmington, has the fifth-highest number of working therapists among U.S. metros, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This region employs just over 500 therapists, with average salary of $79,510.

    A spokesperson for Rogers declined to comment on employees’ organizing efforts and remarks on workplace changes.

    Rogers provides addiction treatment and mental healthcare with facilities in 10 states. In Philadelphia, the nonprofit offers outpatient treatment and partial hospitalization, treating patients with depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

    In recent years, Rogers workers in California also unionized with NUHW. Their recently forged union contract includes caseload limits and a cap on how many newly admitted patients can be assigned to each therapist or nurse.

    Thousands of healthcare workers in the Philadelphia area have moved to unionize in recent years.

    Within the past few years, residents at Penn Medicine and the Rutgers University health system finalized their first contracts with their health systems, and attending doctors at ChristianaCare became the first group of post-training physicians in the region to unionize. Residents at Temple University Hospital, Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals, ChristianaCare, and Jefferson’s Einstein Healthcare Network also voted to unionize in early 2025. Residents at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia narrowly voted against joining a union.

    The organizing push means that about 81% of the city’s resident physicians are unionized.

    What do workers want?

    When Murphy first started working at the Rogers facility in Philadelphia 4½ years ago, she said there was “a really good work-life balance.”

    At the time, clinicians had four patients per day, provided individualized care, and led group sessions. As the organization moved toward group counseling, she said, caseloads have grown, with up to 12 patients in each group.

    The organization hired behavioral specialists to support therapists, said Murphy, but “it was difficult to provide the patients with the care that they really needed and deserved with the new structure.”

    Some patients and staff left because of the new model, said Murphy.

    This year, some salaried workers were switched to hourly, and Rogers started sending workers home due to low patient demand, leaving the rest with larger workloads, according to the union. That meant some used paid time off to avoid going without pay, said Murphy.

    When Philadelphia Rogers employees heard their colleagues in California were unionizing, “That became a bit enticing to us,” said Murphy, noting the workplace had become challenging and sometimes “unbearable.”

    Now, she says, the union members want more manageable caseloads — or pay increases to account for the larger caseloads — and a return to the old pay model for those who were switched to hourly work.

    “We are unionizing to have a voice at work that will allow us to promote a healthier work-life balance as well as high-quality sustainable patient care,” therapist Sara Deichman said in a union news release.

    Where else have mental health workers unionized?

    The organizing in Philadelphia comes as the U.S. faces a shortage of mental healthcare professionals, and in the wake of a demand surge from the pandemic.

    “The industry is forcing fewer providers to care for more and more patients because the focus is on the bottom line,” said Rosselli.

    Staffing concerns plague the healthcare industry generally, said Rebecca Givan, an associate professor at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations.

    “If the facility wants to hold down costs, it tries to keep staffing levels as low as possible,” said Givan. “In the case of mental health providers, it can be about shortening appointment times or increasing caseloads so that each provider has a very large number of cases or clients.”

    She says there’s not “a huge amount of union representation” in stand-alone behavioral health facilities, but some public hospitals are unionized.

    Private practice mental health workers can’t unionize because they’re self employed, Givan noted, but “one could argue that they might benefit from collectively negotiating, for example, with the insurance companies that determine their reimbursement rates.”

    NUHW is leading efforts to organize independent providers. The goal, Rosselli says, is to “establish an employer for them so that they can have leverage against insurance companies to increase pay and increase access to patient care issues.”

    The union has already done this in the home care industry in California, Rosselli noted.

    Staff reporter Aubrey Whelan contributed to this article.

  • More than 65,000 immigrants are being held in federal detention, a big increase from when Trump took office

    More than 65,000 immigrants are being held in federal detention, a big increase from when Trump took office

    The number of immigrants confined in federal detention facilities has surged past 65,000, perhaps the highest figure ever and a two-thirds increase since President Donald Trump took office in January.

    The 65,135 in custody across the nation represents a shattering of the 60,000 threshold, which was last passed briefly in August before dropping back down. The new figure is up from 39,238 when Trump was inaugurated, as his administration quickly undertook an unprecedented campaign to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants.

    “It’s quite stunning,” said Jonah Eaton, a Philadelphia immigration attorney who teaches about detention at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law. “They are dead serious about moving as many people out of the country as possible, and keeping them detained while they do it.”

    The data, current as of Nov. 16, come from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an information-and-research organization that obtains information from ICE and other federal agencies.

    An ICE spokesperson said the agency could not comment on statistics compiled by third parties.

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    The Trump administration says it is arresting the “worst of the worst,” criminal immigrants who have committed serious and sometimes violent offenses. But the new data show ― as they consistently have ― that 74% of those in detention have no criminal convictions.

    “The question is ‘What’s going to be the ceiling for this?’ as the administration has designs to expand the capacity to detain individuals as arrests increase,” said Cris Ramon, an independent immigration consultant in Washington. “If the goal is to remove as many people as possible, they’re going to be leaning on the detention centers to be, first and foremost, a staging ground.”

    Ramon said he was not surprised by the high detention numbers, given the Trump administration’s determination to carry out large-scale operations in cities like Charlotte, N.C., and Chicago.

    The Moshannon Valley Processing Center outside Philipsburg, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania that is privately operated by the GEO Group under contract with ICE. It is the largest ICE detention center in the Northeast United States.

    The new figures show that more of those in custody are being arrested by ICE, rather than by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that conducts inspections at airports and other ports of entry and includes the Border Patrol.

    Today 81% of people in detention were arrested by ICE, up from 38% when Trump took office. The president has demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement make more arrests more quickly, and won new funding to encourage that.

    The agency generally operates in the interior United States.

    Many of those arrested in Pennsylvania are sent to the largest detention center in the Northeast, the Moshannon Valley Processing Center near Philipsburg, Pa. Moshannon, as it is known, is a private, 1,876-bed immigration prison operated by the Florida-based GEO Group Inc.

    ICE also holds detainees at the Clinton County Correctional Facility and the Pike County Correctional Facility. And this year the agency began confining people at the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center in Center City.

    New Jersey has two detention facilities, in Newark and Elizabeth, and might be getting a third, in South Jersey. The administration plans to hold detainees at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, one of two military sites that have been designated for that purpose. The other is Camp Atterbury in Indiana.

    Many of those in custody are subject to “mandatory detention,” meaning they are not allowed to seek release on bond. In the summer, the administration announced a policy change that prevented immigration judges from granting bond to anyone in detention who had entered the United States without documentation.

    The result, according to the National Immigration Law Center, is that the Trump administration has ensured that migrants have almost no way out of detention “other than death or deportation.”

    ICE is arresting, detaining, and refusing to release far more people than before, the law center said, including many who rarely would have been held in the past.

    In Philadelphia and elsewhere, some immigrants have showed up for routine in-person appointments or check-ins, only to be handcuffed and taken into detention. Green-card applicants, asylum-seekers, and others who have ongoing legal or visa cases have been unexpectedly detained.

    Immigration detention is civil in nature, to hold people as they progress through their court cases or await deportation. It is not supposed to be a punishment.

    When Joe Biden assumed the presidency in 2021, there were 14,195 people in immigration detention. That figure more than doubled during his term and eventually topped 39,000.

    “Trump’s cruel mass detention and deportation agenda has reached a previously unimaginable scope and scale,” Carly Pérez Fernández, communications director at Detention Watch Network in Washington, said in a statement.

    She called the new detention figure “a grim reminder” of a larger plan that is “targeting people based on where they work and what they look like, destabilizing communities, separating families, and putting people’s lives at risk.”

    ICE holds detainees across the country, in ICE facilities, in federal prisons, in privately owned lockups, and in state and local jails. As detentions have surged, so has the need for places to house people.

    As of this summer, ICE detained people in all 50 states as well as in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the Vera Institute of Justice in New York.

    Texas had the most facilities with 69, and Florida was second with 40, the institute said.

  • A man died driving on Northwest Philly’s winding, wet roads. The neighborhood has tried addressing the danger for decades.

    A man died driving on Northwest Philly’s winding, wet roads. The neighborhood has tried addressing the danger for decades.

    A 65-year-old man died Sunday after he lost control of his vehicle on Cresheim Valley Drive in Chestnut Hill, striking a downed guardrail and flipping the car upside down into a creek. Just weeks before, another driver veered off the same road but survived.

    Compounding this latest traffic death is the fact that the guardrail meant to prevent cars from swerving off the road was broken and nearly flattened from previous crashes, leaving a gap in the guardrails for months, said Josephine Winter, a Mount Airy resident and executive director of West Mount Airy Neighbors (WMAN). “The guardrail was down, and it was previously crumbled so it’s a frequent site of crashes,” she said. Images from Google Maps show the guardrail down as far back as July.

    The Philadelphia Streets Department is aware of the recent crash and is conducting an assessment of the guardrail on Cresheim Valley Road. “The streets department’s top priority is public safety,” a spokesperson said.

    A screenshot of a Google Map’s street view captured in July 2025 shows the downed guardrail on Cresheim Valley Drive in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. On Nov. 30, 2025, a 65-year-old man crashed and went over the guardrail, later succumbing to his injuries.

    Neighbors say accidents, sometimes fatal, have plagued the winding roadways in Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy for decades. These traffic safety concerns came to a head with Sunday’s deadly crash.

    “It’s a curvy, tricky road, especially when it’s wet, and people tend to speed on that road,” Winter said of roadways like Lincoln and Cresheim Valley Drives, which are lined with trees, have swooping dips and hills, and are prone to flooding.

    Map of fatal crashes in Northwest Philadelphia since 2019.

    Since 2019, according to city crash data, at least five people have died while driving on the dark, winding sections of Lincoln Drive, which intersects with Cresheim Valley Drive, prompting many neighbors to fear walking down their street or leading them to invest thousands on giant boulders to protect their home and lawn.

    Winter, who leads WMAN’s traffic-calming committee, and other neighborhood organizations have petitioned for city support, urging the streets department to slow the speed of traffic on Cresheim Valley Drive, Lincoln Drive, and Wissahickon Avenue. The group’s efforts are so ingrained in the fabric of the neighborhood that, when digging through Temple University’s Urban Archives, Winter found an advertisement from 1968 stressing the need for cars in Mount Airy to “slow down to keep kids safe.”

    The intersection of Cresheim Valley Drive and Lincoln Drive, in Philadelphia, PA, Dec. 1, 2025.

    The streets department installed “speed slots,” traffic-calming structures similar to speed bumps, earlier this year along Lincoln Drive between Allens Lane and Wayne Avenue. Along the same stretch of road, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation installed rumble strips and speed tables to slow drivers down in 2023, in addition to traffic lane separators to keep drivers from using center lanes to pass other vehicles.

    In addition to the recently completed speed slots and traffic-calming measures on sections of Emlen Street, which becomes Cresheim Valley Road, signal upgrades are planned for Lincoln Drive as well.

    However, the work to improve these streets is not over, Winter said. Additionally, the streets department plans do not include changes to Cresheim Valley Drive, where Sunday’s crash happened.

    “We’ll need a collaborative approach as soon as possible to temporarily address the downed guardrail, and then see what the options are moving forward,” Winter said.

    The intersection of Cresheim Valley Drive and Lincoln Drive, in Philadelphia, PA, Dec. 1, 2025.

    Throughout the last decade, locals have suggested better-timed signals, more speed tables, and reducing the number of driving lanes from two in either direction down to one. They also want to see more roundabouts and curb bump-outs in the neighborhood to keep traffic flowing, but at a reasonable speed.

    A mere 50 to 100 feet from Cresheim Valley Drive is a parallel bike trail, where trail organizers like Brad Maule are accustomed to the crashes on the road nearby. Before Sunday’s fatal crash, he remembers two other cars that drove off the side of the road in recent months, not counting the crashes on the roadway itself. The city recently installed pedestrian crossing signs and repainted the crosswalk on nearby Cresheim Road, but Maule hopes speed bumps will follow.

    Cresheim Valley Drive near where it intersects with Lincoln Drive, in Philadelphia, PA, Dec. 1, 2025.

    While Winter said that engineers from the Philadelphia Streets Department were among the first calls she received Monday morning responding to the crash, and that the community appreciates the response, she, Maule, and other neighbors hope that more safety improvements will be considered to save more lives.

    “I’m just looking forward to the new measures of safety that come here,” Maule said. “Hopefully, people will abide by them.”

    Staff writers Max Marin and Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.

  • Temple Health reported a $15 million operating loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2026

    Temple Health reported a $15 million operating loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2026

    Temple University Health System reported a $15 million operating loss in the three months that ended Sept. 30.

    The result for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 was an improvement from the North Philadelphia nonprofit’s $17 million loss last year.

    “We’re pretty happy where we are,” CEO Mike Young said Wednesday. Revenue was above budget and labor costs were on budget in the first quarter for the first time in several years.

    Here are some details:

    Revenue: Total revenue was $800 million, up 13% from $712.5 million a year ago. Outpatient revenue increased by nearly $62 million, much of it from the health system’s specialty and retail pharmacy business.

    Temple participates in a federal program for safety-net hospitals that allows it to buy certain drugs at a discount and then get full reimbursement from insurance companies.

    Expenses: Temple noted in its report to municipal bond investors Tuesday that salaries, including higher pay rates for nurses, and higher drug spending for outpatient infusions and other pharmacy business were the biggest expense increases.

    Notable: On the labor front, several job categories remain hard to fill, Young said. Those are CT techs, nurse anesthetists, and lab techs. “Other than those three [specialties], it’s not where it was three years ago, where you couldn’t find anybody,” he said.

  • These professors say they’re part of a growing movement banning laptops from the classroom

    These professors say they’re part of a growing movement banning laptops from the classroom

    Biology professor Jody Hey was lecturing on human evolution one recent day at Temple University.

    His students vigorously took notes by hand in paper notebooks.

    There wasn’t a laptop in sight. Nor an iPhone. No student’s face was hidden by a screen.

    Hey said he stopped allowing them about a year and a half ago after seeing research that students are too often distracted when laptops are open in front of them and actually learn better when they have to distill lectures into handwritten notes.

    “The clearest sign that it’s making a difference is that students are paying attention more,” said Hey, who has taught at Temple for more than 12 years. “And they want to participate much more than before.”

    Hey is among a seemingly growing number of professors who have chosen to keep laptop and phone use out of class, with exceptions for students with disabilities who require accommodations. Several said they made the decision after seeing what some students were doing on their laptops during class.

    Temple University biology professor Jody Hey stopped allowing laptops to be used in class about a year and a half ago. He said he’s noticed improvement in student performance.

    Jessa Lingel, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program there, stationed teaching assistants in the back of her room to observe.

    Students “were out there booking flights and Airbnbs,” Lingel said. “Fun fall cocktail recipes. They were online gambling in class. I thought, ‘This is not acceptable.’”

    She originally disallowed laptops in 2017, but decided to go easy in 2021 as students returned after the pandemic, she said. She reinforced the ban after her teaching assistants’ observations.

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    “It’s a movement,” Lingel said. “More and more people are headed in this direction.”

    In Hey’s class, students have warmed up to the laptop ban.

    “At first I didn’t like it,” said Jess Nguyen, 20, a junior genomic medicine major from Broomall, “because I kind of organize all my notes on my laptop. But I feel I’ve been learning better by writing my notes.”

    When she took notes on her iPad, she sometimes got distracted and played computer games, she said. In Hey’s class, that’s not an option.

    Students said it takes more time to write notes and sometimes their hands get tired.

    “After a couple classes, you kind of get used to it,” said Sara Tedla, 22, a senior natural sciences major from Philadelphia.

    She’s on the fence about which way she prefers to take notes.

    “It’s good that for an hour and 20 minutes you can just sit down and, without any technological distractions, focus because that’s a part of your brain you can work on,” said Quinn Johnson, 20, a senior ecology major from Philadelphia. “The more you do it, the easier it becomes to focus on something for a long period of time.”

    ‘Students learn better’

    Professors say laptops are pretty ubiquitous in the classroom when they are permitted.

    Hey conducted research on laptop use and presented it at a Temple department faculty meeting earlier this year.

    “As early as 2003, a study was done contrasting the retention of lecture material by two groups of students, one who had laptops and unrestrained internet access and a second who worked without laptops,” he said. “In that study, students with laptops scored 20% lower on average in the subsequent exam.”

    Four of every five students who used laptops in a general psychology class said they checked email during lectures, another study showed, while 68% used instant messaging, 43% surfed the net, 25% played games, and 35% said they did “other” activities.

    He also cited studies showing students who took notes by hand performed better on tests. Others cited that research, too.

    Penn President emerita Amy Gutmann co-teaches a class at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication with the dean Sarah Banet-Weiser. They don’t allow laptops or phones to be used in the classroom.

    “I read the literature on it and it really showed that students learn better when they’re taking notes rather than trying to type as fast as they can verbatim what you say,” said Amy Gutmann, Penn president emerita, who is co-teaching a class at the Annenberg School for Communication this fall.

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    Gutmann and co-teacher Sarah Banet-Weiser, dean of Annenberg, do not provide students with copies of their lecture slides, either.

    “We give them time to write down what’s on the slides,” Banet-Weiser said.

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    Benefits of technology

    Some professors say laptop use in class can be beneficial.

    Sudhir Kumar, a Temple biology professor, said he asks his class of 150 students to respond to questions on their laptops every 10 minutes. Their answers count toward their grades.

    “It’s constantly keeping them on their toes,” he said.

    He would not want to see everyone give up on laptop use in class.

    “We cannot fight technology,” he said. “Teachers have to embrace technology, whether it is artificial intelligence or computers. That is a standard mode of operation for most people today.”

    (Left to Right) Jess Nguyen, 20, a junior from Broomall, Allan Thomas, 22, a senior from Philly, and Sara Tedla, 22, a senior from Philly, in a class taught by Temple University biology professor Jody Hey last month.

    In Cathy Brant’s social studies methods class of 20 to 25 students at Rowan University, laptops are key. Brant, an associate professor of education, said there are lots of hands-on group projects, and she frequently asks students to check New Jersey standards online as they prepare their lessons. She also teaches them how to use AI appropriately in the classroom.

    One of her students, she said, recently handed in a paper with very detailed notes from Brant’s lecture that she probably got only because she was able to type quickly on her computer.

    “You’re responsible for paying attention in class,” she said. “Maybe it’s a little harsh, but I’m just like, ‘If you want to be on Facebook the entire time during class, that’s on you.’”

    Jordan Shapiro, an associate professor at Temple, more than a decade ago used to make a point of having his students post on Twitter, now X, during class and counted it toward classroom participation.

    Now, he tells students to put their laptops away during class.

    “I tell them I have no problem with tech or laptops,” he said. “I just think that none of us get enough time in our lives to just focus on ideas or to listen in a sustained way to the people around us.”

    He also became concerned about students doing homework during class, he said, and using artificial intelligence to supply them with questions and comments to ask in class. They were “outsourcing class participation to the robots,” he said.

    Mark Boudreau, a biology professor at Penn State Brandywine, disallowed laptops for the first time this semester.

    “I thought I would get real pushback … or people might even drop the class,” he said. “But … a lot of students have had other faculty who have this policy.”

    Exam scores in his three courses are better this year, he said.

    Hey noted student grades have gone up, too. But he can tell some students struggle with note-taking; some just listen and don’t take notes.

    “That’s better than sitting there and going on Facebook,” he said.

  • Inside a Kensington wound care clinic

    Inside a Kensington wound care clinic

    In a small clinic room at Mother of Mercy House on Allegheny Avenue in Kensington, Emma Anderson unwrapped a bandage from a man’s swollen hand.

    “It hurts really bad in the cold,” the man said, wincing at the inflamed wound that covered most of a right-hand finger.

    Cleaning it with saline solution proved so painful that Anderson, an EMT and St. Joseph’s University student, let the patient take the lead, wiping carefully at the yellowish-white tissue at the center of the wound.

    It was his second time attending the wound care clinic at Mother of Mercy, the Catholic nonprofit that twice a week opens its doors to people with addiction dealing with the serious skin lesions, caused by the animal tranquilizer xylazine, that can develop into wounds so severe the only treatment is amputation.

    Called “tranq” on the streets, xylazine was never approved for human use and has wreaked havoc across the city since dealers began adding it to fentanyl to extend the opioid’s short-lived high.

    In the five years since it emerged as a threat, amputations among opioid users have more than doubled. The Philadelphia drug supply is now changing again, and though emergency rooms in the last year have treated fewer xylazine wounds, the crisis is far from over.

    The man who visited Mother of Mercy’s clinic on a recent Tuesday, who gave only his first name, Steven, because of the stigma surrounding drug use, noticed the alarming wound on his hand a few weeks ago.

    Steven had seen people sleeping on the streets with flies hovering around their gaping wounds. He had hoped that he could avoid a wound himself: He smokes fentanyl, instead of injecting it, and knows that injection drug users are generally at a higher risk for skin infections. But, like many people who smoke their drugs, he had developed a wound anyway.

    “Believe it or not,” Steven said, between deep breaths during the painful cleaning, “I actually was an EMT myself at one point.”

    ‘How did we let it get this bad?’

    Mother of Mercy, founded in 2015 in Kensington, partners with St. Joseph’s Institute of Clinical Bioethics to host the clinics. The institute, headed by Father Peter Clark, a Jesuit priest and a bioethicist at several area hospitals, has long held a monthly health clinic at the nonprofit’s Kensington headquarters.

    In the last year, they expanded the program to offer more wound care opportunities to a community increasingly in need of them.

    Father Peter Clark, the director of the Institute of Clinical Bioethics at St. Joseph’s University, and Ean Hudak, a St. Joseph’s student and staffer at the Mother of Mercy House wound care clinic, assist a person who had fallen unconscious on Allegheny Avenue in Kensington.

    “To be physically down here in the heart of it, and seeing it on a weekly, monthly basis, it opens your eyes. How did we let it get this bad?” said Steven Silver, the assistant director of research and development at St. Joseph’s, who was welcoming clients at the door on a recent clinic day.

    The program is staffed by medical students and undergraduates, all trained in wound care. Many say the work they do at the clinic is unlike any medical training they’ve been offered at school.

    Undergraduates like Anderson and Ean Hudak, who takes shifts at the clinic in between applying to nursing schools, say they’re hoping to use their experience as they pursue careers in the medical field.

    On Tuesdays and Thursdays, organizers serve hot meals and wait in the small clinic room for patients to trickle in, usually about 20 a week.

    Once a month, the team takes to the streets with wound care supplies, such as bandages, saline sprays, and antiseptic cleansers. They look for people on the streets who may not be able to reach the clinic.

    Clark said the clinic stepped up its hours in an effort to help patients keep their wounds clean more consistently — and hopefully prevent more amputations. “It’s increasing [patients’] ability to know what to do and how to keep the wounds clean — hopefully to help them out,” he said.

    The trust factor

    This year, medetomidine, another animal tranquilizer that causes severe withdrawal, has supplanted xylazine’s dominance in the Philadelphia area drug supply. Fewer patients addicted to opioids are visiting emergency rooms with soft-tissue damage, according to city data.

    But it’s unknown how medetomidine affects those wounds, and there are still enough people suffering from them in Kensington, the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis, that the clinic felt it necessary to increase its hours.

    Hosting more frequent clinics also deepens relationships with patients. “People are coming back, which is good,” Clark said. “The trust factor is a huge issue.”

    Many of the clinic’s patients avoid hospitals, fearing long waits for care: “At the ERs, they wait eight hours and they sign themselves out, or they’re coming down from a high, and nobody’s taking care of the withdrawal,” Clark said. “It’s a big mess.”

    At the clinic, staff are regularly on the phone with wound care physicians at Temple University Hospital, who can flag patients with xylazine wounds and get them prompt care before they enter withdrawal, he said.

    They also connect patients with housing, inpatient rehabs, and hospital care, for those with wounds too serious for the clinic to handle.

    Several weeks ago, they called an ambulance to get a man with a wound that exposed his bone to the hospital.

    Staff collect data to share with area hospitals so physicians can get a better understanding of the situation on the street — measuring patients’ wounds, collecting demographic data, and asking patients about which drugs they use.

    Each leaves the clinic with a hospital bracelet documenting the care they’ve received so staff can keep track of their care from week to week.

    ‘It’s always an uphill battle’

    Not all patients at the clinic are suffering from xylazine wounds. On a recent weekday, one man asked for help bandaging scrapes on his knuckles. He’d tried to fight someone who was stealing his belongings.

    Another man said he’d been robbed and pepper-sprayed and asked staff to help wash the last traces of Mace out of his eyes.

    As staffers looked for eyedrops among their medical supplies, Clark poked his head into the room. “We need someone with Narcan,” he said, referring to the opioid overdose-reversing spray.

    Across the street, a man was slumped on a stoop, unresponsive.

    Clark and Hudak dodged cars on Allegheny Avenue, knelt down by the man, and managed to gently shake him awake.

    Slowly, he revived enough to speak a bit and showed them a wound on his leg, which they cleaned and wrapped in gauze. “You have some cracked skin — do you want us to put some moisturizer on your hands?” Hudak asked.

    With temperatures dropping, the team is worried that patients’ skin will dry out, making their wounds more painful. (The summer months present a different challenge, with wounds leaking fluids.) And many patients may be too cold to travel to the clinic, making the monthly street rounds even more crucial.

    “It’s always an uphill battle,” Hudak said.