RESEARCH ESSAY · PHILADELPHIA
Philadelphia, the Body, and the Architecture of Freedom
CONTENTS
The Public Face · The House Behind the Republic · Rooms of Recognition · The Right to Stop · The Freedom to Remain · The Grid and the Key
The Price of Arrival
Freedom looked inexpensive when we booked it. The base fare from Chicago to Philadelphia was sixteen dollars, a price low enough to feel less like a purchase than a loophole. By the time Colten and I reached the city on August 8, 2026, the discount had already begun to disclose its accounting. A fare can be cheap because somebody else bears the expense, or because the traveler absorbs what the ticket omits: the inconvenient hour, the cramped interval, the distance between terminal and destination, the uncertainty that accumulates whenever one connection depends upon another. Distance becomes affordable by making the body absorb the discount.
Mine was not an innocent measuring instrument. Recent imaging had given clinical names to weaknesses I could previously treat as mood or endurance. That knowledge sharpened every calculation: how far to walk, where to sit, whether a staircase was worth its view, how much of tomorrow I might spend by insisting on one more room today. It did not make me representative of disabled travelers, still less of anyone whose movement through the city was compelled rather than chosen. I was a housed visitor with money, a return ticket, a husband beside me, and the right to stop. Those protections matter. They are the difference between an inconvenience and an enclosure.
Yet a protected body can still reveal a fact that civic myth prefers to edit out. Movement is never the act of an autonomous will alone. It depends on vehicles, curb cuts, toilets, benches, elevators, signs, schedules, wages, maintenance crews, and the prospect of repair. Disability theorist Aimi Hamraie asks who is contained in the promise of design for “everyone”; accessibility scholars Giovanni Vecchio and Karel Martens similarly treat transport as one means by which people gain real opportunities, not as motion for its own sake.1 Their question changed the scale of mine. I had come to Philadelphia to see the architecture of American freedom. My body kept asking whether freedom could be used. That is a different inquiry from deciding whether a place is beautiful, symbolic, or officially open. To use an institution is to be able to enter it, remain long enough to act, move through it, be recognized by it, refuse what it asks, appeal an adverse decision, and return tomorrow to find that its promises still hold. Each operation has a price. The price may be exertion, money, waiting, paperwork, exposure, surveillance, uncertainty, or dependence on someone else’s repair. A polity can announce equal liberty while sending those costs downward.
Freedom is load-bearing when a right survives its own conditions of use: entry, duration, movement, recognition, refusal, appeal, and time remain practicable because the institution, rather than the least protected user, absorbs the predictable costs of making the right real.
I will call those routed costs a load, using the word narrowly. Load is not a measure of pain and cannot make unlike histories commensurable. It names what a system requires someone to absorb before a declared freedom becomes practicable. To bear the load is to distribute predictable costs through durable provision so that need does not become an occasion for mastery. To shift it is to celebrate access while making the person with the smallest reserve pay in exhaustion, risk, delay, exposure, or exclusion.
The claim has close relatives but a distinct institutional object. Capability theory asks whether people possess real opportunities rather than nominal resources; republican freedom asks whether those opportunities remain at the mercy of uncontrolled power; relational autonomy and care ethics show that agency is socially sustained rather than self-manufactured. Load-bearing freedom examines the conversion point among them: whether a public right becomes a usable option without submission to another’s unreviewable will.2 A service may enlarge capability yet dominate when access is discretionary, invasive, or unappealable. Noninterference may coexist with an unusable right when its conversion costs are left to a body least able to pay them. The term is therefore not a rival account of the human person. It is a diagnostic for public institutions.
The standard is demanding but finite. Public institutions do not owe zero friction or the satisfaction of every preference. Responsibility attaches when a cost is foreseeable, relevant to a right or essential service, produced within the institution’s scope, severe enough to threaten basic agency, and not realistically avoidable through an equal alternative. Scarcity can justify rationing; it cannot justify secret criteria, irrelevant distinctions, unreviewable discretion, or abandonment below a usable floor. Fair limits require public reasons, relevant evidence, a route for revision and appeal, and oversight that makes those conditions effective.3
This is a comparison of mechanisms, not injuries. Tourist fatigue, disability, homelessness, queer exclusion, and enslavement are not points on a common scale. My soreness could establish only that formal access rests on material support. What enslavement did, what marriage exclusion withheld, and what homelessness forecloses must be learned from the people, laws, archives, and scholarship proper to each history. No afternoon of walking confers authority over another person’s suffering. It can, however, make it harder to believe that independence is the natural condition from which public provision represents a concession.
The trip therefore began with a suspicion: perhaps freedom is not release from structure. Perhaps it is the capacity to live within structures that do not turn dependence into subordination. Philadelphia sharpened that suspicion because it had made political principle visible on a monumental scale. It had also spent more than two centuries deciding who would pay to make the principle operative.
The Public Face
Philadelphia’s grid is older than the republic. Thomas Holme’s 1683 plan arranged the city between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, crossing long east–west streets with north–south ones and reserving five squares within the pattern.4 The plan did not produce equality. A grid distributes parcels and routes; it does not distribute land, security, health, or standing. But it offers a powerful civic image: space made intelligible, movement made possible, a city that can be entered without first possessing its secret.
City Hall intensifies that promise until it nearly becomes theater. Begun in 1872 and occupied before its completion in 1901, the building sits at the crossing of the city’s principal axes, a masonry mass organized around an interior courtyard and crowned by William Penn.5 Approaching it on foot, I felt the peculiar force of a public building that refuses to recede. It interrupts the grid and gathers it. Streets that elsewhere extend the eye toward a vanishing point are compelled to negotiate the monument.
Scale did much of the rhetorical work. The exterior’s arches and sculptural program made municipal government seem dense with memory; the open passages at ground level allowed ordinary movement to continue through the mass. This was not a fortress on a withdrawn hill. The building afforded passage, encounter, spectacle, shade. Its courtyard could be reached without an appointment or a theory of government. In that limited sense, architecture supplied a public verb: enter.
But entry is the least demanding test of freedom. Howard Gillette’s history of City Hall shows how construction, patronage, contracting, and the emerging political machine became entangled. The monument’s public grandeur and its administrative economy were not separate stories.6 A façade may figure government as common property while operations allocate influence through relationships most residents cannot see. The building does not cause that distribution; it gives public form to an institution whose procedures must be judged elsewhere.
That distinction matters because monumental openness is seductive. A plaza receives nearly everyone on roughly similar visual terms. The eye can take possession without a permit. Yet the body’s admission to a square says little about whether a petition will be heard, whether a record can be corrected, or whether a benefit will survive the next budget. The open arch is evidence of an affordance, not a verdict on the institution behind it.
From City Hall the Benjamin Franklin Parkway extends a more curated order toward the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Its diagonal cuts across the older grid, joining civic administration to a hilltop temple of culture. David Brownlee has shown that the Parkway emerged through a long City Beautiful project in which circulation, institutional prestige, real estate, and aesthetic discipline were inseparable.7 On the ground, the axis feels generous: trees, flags, fountains, museums, long views. It also teaches the body what monumental perspective costs. Distances that appear composed from above become exertion at street level. The map’s clean line is paid in steps.
City Hall corrected the first impression. Public space is not free because it is visible, and a right is not usable because its threshold is open. The hard question begins after admission: who can remain, whose account enters the record, and what happens when official principle reaches the machinery of ordinary life? A few blocks east, beside the Liberty Bell, the President’s House preserved an answer severe enough to reorganize the entire day.
The House Behind the Republic
The house itself is absent. What remains is an outdoor memorial of low brick walls, portals, foundations, text, images, and screens marking the Philadelphia residence where George Washington and John Adams conducted the presidency during the 1790s. Its position is mercilessly precise. The Liberty Bell Center stands beside it. Independence Hall is close enough to keep the founding declaration within the same field of vision. The site denies the comfort of separating national principle from domestic administration.
Pennsylvania’s 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery is the first document necessary to understand the ground. The statute was an important antislavery measure, but its title can mislead a hurried reader. It did not emancipate every enslaved person in the Commonwealth. It prohibited future importation, required registration, and placed children born into slavery after the act under service until age twenty-eight. It also exempted, among others, enslaved domestic workers accompanying members of Congress, foreign ministers, and people temporarily residing in Pennsylvania, while limiting some sojourns to six months.8 Freedom entered the law through categories, clocks, registrations, exceptions, and enforcement.
Eight years later, the General Assembly amended the statute against evasions that experience had made visible. The 1788 act withheld the sojourner exception from people residing in Pennsylvania or intending to become residents. It also prohibited removing an enslaved person from the state in order to alter residence or evade the act, and it addressed reintroduction after six months unless the person consented under private judicial examination.9 The amendment matters because the legislature had already identified removal and return as a means by which the promise of gradual abolition could be defeated.
In 1791, Washington wrote from Mount Vernon to his secretary Tobias Lear about the enslaved people in the presidential household. He worried that continuous residence in Pennsylvania might allow them to claim freedom under state law. His instruction was operational: move them out of the state before the relevant period elapsed, do so under a plausible pretext, and prevent the arrangement from becoming known. The letter calls the “idea of freedom” a possible “temptation” and insists upon discretion.10 Washington was not confronting an unimagined loophole. He was directing the kind of jurisdictional movement the 1788 amendment had attempted to stop.
The contradiction between liberty and slavery therefore becomes more exact than hypocrisy, though hypocrisy is present. The mechanism is scheduling. Geography is converted into a clock; household movement defeats the emancipatory possibility created by residence. Knowledge is managed so that the people whose status is at stake cannot use the rule designed to affect it. The executive household retains the power to move bodies while shifting every risk of emancipation—uncertainty, surveillance, possible capture, separation, and flight—onto the enslaved.
Ona Judge makes abstraction impossible. A young woman enslaved by Martha Washington, she was brought into the presidential household and escaped from Philadelphia in 1796 after learning that Martha intended to transfer her to a granddaughter. Erica Armstrong Dunbar reconstructs Judge’s flight, the Washingtons’ pursuit, and Judge’s refusal to return despite the precarity of life as a fugitive.11 The surviving record does not authorize me to invent her sensations while standing at the memorial. It does establish that she acted under conditions the household had organized and that freedom required her to undertake the danger the institution refused to bear.
The founding promise was not insincere in every mouth or empty in every consequence. Pennsylvania’s statutes changed law; free Black organizing and antislavery action widened possibilities; Judge escaped and remained free. The more severe conclusion is that declarations do not execute themselves. They enter a world of clerks, deadlines, household orders, jurisdictions, patrols, wages, transport, and information. If those operations remain controlled by the party threatened by freedom, principle can be honored in public and neutralized in practice. A principle that cannot survive operations is decoration.
The memorial prevents that judgment from remaining safely in the eighteenth century because the site is itself an administered object. The ground I entered on August 8 contained two layers that should not be conflated. The architectural memorial—exposed foundations, partial walls, portals, archaeological remains, and spaces organized around the nine people enslaved in Washington’s household—opened in 2010 after years of conflict and negotiation among the city, the National Park Service, historians, designers, community advocates, and the public.12 That material framework remained. On July 15, 2026, the Park Service installed a new interpretive panel set within it.13
I did not know, while reading the panels, that their interpretive field was only twenty-four days old. The chronology limits what I can claim. I did not recognize a replacement in real time. I encountered the replacement, photographed and read it, and later compared its complete text with the exhibition plan it displaced.
The administrative route to that change is part of its meaning. Executive Order 14253, issued in March 2025, directed the Department of the Interior to review monuments and interpretive materials and remove treatment judged to disparage Americans or diminish the achievement of historical figures.14 Philadelphia sued. In June 2026, the Third Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction and directed dismissal of several claims for lack of jurisdiction; the opinion parsed agreements, federal control of the site, and the reviewability of agency action. It did not determine which account of Washington, slavery, or the presidency was historically true.15 A procedural judgment cleared the route for an interpretive change without converting a court into a historical tribunal.
Conflict over the site long preceded that order. Roger Aden, Seth Bruggeman, and Gary Nash describe arguments over whether presidential biography would subordinate slavery, whether Black experience would be isolated in a separate story, and whether both could be integrated within one national account. The resulting 2010 installation did not speak through a single panel. Its argument accumulated across the full corpus: “History Lost & Found” made recovery and contest part of the story; “The House and the People” named “Washington’s Deceit”; “Systems and Methods of Slavery” placed the 1788 amendment and the 1791 rotation within a legal timeline; “Life Under Slavery” foregrounded coercion, family vulnerability, labor, resistance, and paths to freedom; and the memorial sequence named the nine people whose work sustained the executive household.16 The architecture and the panels together made slavery constitutive of the presidency’s operation, not background to it.
The replacement corpus is not a simple erasure. It still names the nine; gives Ona Judge, Hercules, and others individual accounts; discusses the slave trade and fugitive rendition; and states that slavery violated the nation’s ideals. A critique that denied those facts would reproduce the selectivity it condemns.17
The change lies in causal sequence and allocation. The new set devotes a freestanding panel to annual celebrations of independence and more space to the executive mansion and the development of the presidency. Its panel on Washington and Adams frames Washington between private doubt and public responsibility, describes periodic removal from Pennsylvania as undertaken in acknowledgment of state law, and places theater attendance and limited movement beside escape and pursuit. Its constitutional account condemns slavery while organizing the national story around a promise eventually fulfilled. The earlier corpus placed the legal apparatus of evasion before the visitor and named deceit as an executive-household practice. The new corpus relocates that mechanism within a more consoling arc of personal ambivalence and national completion.
No isolated sentence contains the politics of an exhibit. Titles, sequence, relative space, the relation between biography and law, and the sources a visitor can inspect do the deeper work. Fulfillment belongs in the national story. It becomes evasive when it absorbs the conflict required to produce it or when an institutional strategy appears chiefly as a founder’s moral tension.
The two histories joined here are not morally equivalent. Rotating enslaved people across state lines to preserve ownership is not comparable in magnitude or kind to revising public-history panels. The comparison is confined to mechanism: a public principle reaches people through controlled operations, and the party controlling those operations can redirect its force. In 1791, timing, jurisdiction, and secrecy shaped who could use a freedom rule. In 2026, titles, legal authority, replacement schedules, and the allocation of attention shaped which explanation of that rule reached the public.
Responsible public history cannot produce a final panel immune from politics. It can disclose evidence, distinguish fact from interpretation, preserve prior versions, identify the authority that made a change, and offer a route by which citizens and scholars can challenge it. Appeal here means more than disagreement. It means access to the sources and to the history of the institution’s own revisions.
The exposed foundations give that standard a material form. They do not reconstruct the house into wholeness. They leave thresholds without rooms and domestic spaces open to weather and public passage. The design sustains a double sight: the executive residence as an organized household and the household as a site of coerced labor. Architecture can keep both within view. Only durable, answerable practice can keep one from being made subordinate to the other.
Rooms of Recognition
Congress Hall sits nearby with a calmer authority. The House of Representatives met on its first floor and the Senate above; a public gallery admitted observers to part of the legislative process. John Adams, writing in December 1790, praised the chambers while noting the arrangement of the lower gallery and upper Senate room.18 The building staged hierarchy without hiding it. Representatives occupied one chamber, senators another, spectators a defined edge. Admission did not abolish rank, but the rank was given a public plan.
The room also held events that later acquire the polish of inevitability: Washington’s second inauguration in 1793 and John Adams’s inauguration in 1797. The latter marked the first transfer of the presidency from one elected administration to a successor; the election of 1800 would supply the distinct and more difficult precedent of transfer between rival parties.19 Congress Hall did not cause either achievement. It provided a setting in which authority could change hands through a repeated constitutional form.
Standing there as a married gay man, I was tempted to force the room into prophecy. The temptation should be resisted. Nothing in its floor plan foretold my marriage, and it would be sentimental to conscript eighteenth-century spectators into recognition they did not offer. The relevant connection is institutional rather than ancestral. A republic announces equality in general terms; people excluded from its ordinary forms must still win recognition through statutes, offices, lawsuits, licenses, and judgments.
Pennsylvania’s marriage law once defined marriage as a civil contract between one man and one woman and refused recognition to same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. In Whitewood v. Wolf, a federal district court held those exclusions unconstitutional in 2014, joining due process and equal protection to the immediate work of issuing licenses and recognizing families.20 A year later, Obergefell v. Hodges held that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license and recognize marriages between two people of the same sex. The Court’s reasoning linked liberty and equality: exclusion from a fundamental institution imposed a continuing injury and subordinate status.21
The judgments mattered because they traveled from constitutional language into administrative commands. County offices had to accept applications, alter forms, issue licenses, and recognize existing marriages. Recognition became real through documents and routines. The law did not eliminate prejudice or make every family safe. It changed the terms on which the state could receive us.
Philadelphia’s queer history long predates those holdings and cannot be reduced to a triumphal line toward marriage. Marc Stein’s account of lesbian and gay life in the city shows communities making institutions, contesting public space, and negotiating visibility decades before nationwide legal recognition.22 That history checks the vanity of treating a court judgment as the origin of a people. It also checks the opposite error of treating doctrine as symbolic only. For Colten and me, marriage is affection, kinship, and private promise; it is also hospital standing, inheritance, taxation, insurance, and a status legible across jurisdictions. Recognition is emotional because it is operational.
Congress Hall thus clarified one function of public form. A chamber can make authority visible, but visibility does not decide whom authority will recognize. That decision arrives through conflict and administration. The gallery lets a person witness government. Equal citizenship requires that government also know how to see the person—not as a tolerated exception or private arrangement, but as someone whose claim changes the form.
The city changed scale as we moved. Elfreth’s Alley compressed public history into a narrow residential passage; Race Street Pier opened the Delaware’s edge; Reading Terminal Market converted circulation into appetite, transaction, and crowd. A roast-pork sandwich performed its single, honorable function without becoming a theory of democracy. A national city is lived in thresholds, errands, meals, and pauses as much as in rooms where officials swear oaths. By the time we reached the Parkway’s western end, the issue was no longer recognition but refusal: what a public institution owes a person who has been admitted in principle and cannot continue.
The Right to Stop
The Philadelphia Museum of Art terminates the Parkway as an invitation and a demand. Its hill, terraces, and broad staircase turn arrival into performance. The building is famous enough that the ascent can seem like the point even before the galleries begin. When we reached it, I did not have another monumental effort to spend. I stopped.
Refusal is easy to romanticize when one can afford it. I could decline the steps because nothing essential depended on reaching the top. I had shelter, food, a companion, and a route away. The choice did not threaten my benefits, wages, custody, legal status, or place to sleep. It was still instructive. Freedom is not proved by maximizing endurance. Sometimes it consists in the right to preserve tomorrow from today’s demand.
That right depended on transit. SEPTA did not appear in the day as an abstract public good. It was the system that converted “I am done” into a practicable decision. A station entrance, a payment method, a service interval, a seat, a vehicle, and a maintained line together enlarged what my body could choose. Vecchio and Martens’s capability account is useful here: mobility has public value because of the opportunities it makes reachable, including the opportunity to stop moving.23
The system’s current budget reveals how fragile that capacity can be. SEPTA’s fiscal year 2027 plan preserved service levels and fares, but it also used the second and final year of a $394 million transfer from capital funds to support operations. The authority reported a $192 million structural operating deficit and a state-of-good-repair backlog of $10.2 billion, doubled over a decade.24 Those figures do not prove that my particular ride was delayed, inaccessible, or unsafe. They establish a distribution problem. Keeping service operating now by drawing on money intended for long-term assets can protect present riders while increasing future dependence on debt, replacement funding, and repair.
Susan Leigh Star observed that infrastructure tends to become visible at breakdown; Steven Jackson asks us to begin instead from a “broken world” in which maintenance and repair are ordinary, creative work rather than deviations from finished order.25 Taken together, they correct the romance of the monument. A civic building may celebrate a completed founding. A transit system must found mobility again each morning. Operators, cleaners, mechanics, dispatchers, electricians, budget officers, elevators, rails, and signals bear the load continuously. When maintenance is deferred, the cost does not disappear. It returns as waiting, risk, missed wages, physical strain, and narrowed opportunity, distributed most heavily among people with the fewest alternatives.
The museum steps made effort visible and elective. Transit showed the institution capable of absorbing some of it. But my ability to stop remained protected by a private room at the end of the ride. Remove that room and refusal changes character. The question is no longer whether to skip a gallery. It is where a person may sit, sleep, wash, store possessions, recover, and remain without being expelled.
The Freedom to Remain
Homelessness is often presented to the housed as an interruption of public order: a person sleeping where others pass, carrying private necessities into a space designed for circulation, asking the street to do work assigned to the home. Looking cannot tell a visitor who is unhoused or why. I will not convert a posture on a sidewalk into a diagnosis. The relevant evidence lies in law, counts, programs, and the testimony of people who must conduct life without private space.
Jeremy Waldron begins from an elementary proposition: no one is free to perform an action unless there is somewhere that action may lawfully occur. Property rules distribute places to be; for a person without property, prohibitions on sleeping, washing, urinating, sitting, or lingering can eliminate the locations in which the body’s unavoidable acts are permitted.26 Don Mitchell extends the argument into urban governance. Anti-homeless laws do not simply regulate conduct in a neutral public realm; by outlawing acts that people without private alternatives must perform in public, they can erase the practical space in which those people are allowed to exist.27
First-person accounts supply what legal analysis cannot. Josh Kruger, writing after having lived on Philadelphia’s streets, recalled, “I never felt safe enough to sleep restfully”; in shelter he could usually rest and reach services and facilities necessary to continue.28 The contrast is not between personal weakness and endurance. It is between conditions that consume attention and conditions that return some capacity to act.
Yasmine Forsaca, interviewed in Kensington in 2019, identified herself as a person who used drugs and had recently been homeless. She described hiding from family, being expelled from places, and having no private location for drug use: “we don’t have anywhere to go.” She supported an overdose-prevention site but asked for more than a supervised room—for financial help, resources, and support.29 Her account does not represent every person experiencing homelessness or every view of public drug use. It establishes a specific institutional sequence: lack of private space produces exposure; a safer site may reduce immediate danger; longer-term agency requires options beyond that site.
Kruger and Forsaca disagree in emphasis and circumstance. Their accounts resist a common substitution in which housed observers infer needs from visible disorder. They also expose the privilege hidden in my temporary refusal. I could stop climbing and return to a room. A person without housing cannot withdraw from public view on demand. A city that insists upon movement while withholding a lawful destination does not offer mobility. It issues a command without an acceptable endpoint.
A housed tourist, buffered by money and companionship, can easily turn fatigue into a master key and other people’s injuries into material for insight. Soreness cannot authenticate homelessness, disability, queer exclusion, or enslavement, and it supplies no knowledge of their magnitude or interior life. It disclosed only the smaller proposition that choice depends upon supports. Every larger claim here must stand on its own record. The comparison stops at cost routing: whether an institution absorbs a predictable dependency or orders the person with the least reserve to absorb it alone.
Philadelphia’s 2026 Point-in-Time count offers one constrained view of the present. Conducted on a single night, it counted 5,163 people experiencing homelessness: 4,452 in shelters or transitional settings and 711 unsheltered. The city reported a decline from the previous year, including a 39 percent decrease in the unsheltered count.30 That improvement matters. So does the method’s limit. Jack Tsai and Jemma Alarcón explain that annual one-night counts vary in coverage and practice, miss people outside observable locations or definitions, and cannot represent the number who experience homelessness across an entire year.31 A point-in-time count is a planning instrument, not a census of every precarious life.
Finite capacity narrows the institutional claim further. If every inconvenience becomes a public debt, load-bearing freedom becomes paternalistic in purpose and impossible in practice. Cities have competing obligations, limited funds, uneven authority, and uncertain evidence. They cannot guarantee comfort or prescribe a single good life. They can secure usable minimums for the rights and essential services they administer, prioritize costs by severity and the absence of equal alternatives, and make scarcity answerable. In a different domain, Norman Daniels and James Sabin argue that legitimate limits depend upon public reasons, relevant evidence, revision and appeal, and enforcement; those procedural conditions travel more safely than any particular health-care allocation.32 A queue meeting them may be legitimate. A hidden criterion, irrelevant distinction, or discretionary refusal is not. Support enlarges options only if privacy, consent, refusal, and appeal remain available.
That limit prevents both premature celebration and cultivated despair. A city should be able to name progress without closing the file, and identify failure without declaring every intervention futile. The evidence supports three distinct judgments proportioned to what different institutions can do.
First, prevent avoidable entries into homelessness. In a randomized trial involving people at imminent risk in Santa Clara County, David Phillips and James Sullivan found that priority access to temporary financial assistance—averaging roughly two thousand dollars—substantially reduced subsequent homelessness in the studied population. The effect was strongest where shelter demand was otherwise high.33 The trial does not supply a universal price for prevention or prove that cash resolves every cause of housing loss. It shows that some episodes are short financial gaps public action can bridge before eviction, shelter entry, and displacement multiply the burden.
Second, build durable exits. Housing First and permanent supportive housing begin with stable housing rather than requiring a person to demonstrate readiness through treatment or institutional compliance. A systematic review by Yinan Peng and colleagues found strong evidence for improved housing stability and reduced homelessness among populations with disabilities, while health outcomes were more variable. A National Academies review reached a similarly disciplined conclusion: permanent supportive housing maintained housing stability for most participants in studies of one to two years, but evidence about some health outcomes and longer-term effects remained limited.34 Housing is not a magic therapy. It is a durable platform from which privacy, sleep, medication, paperwork, employment, relationships, and appeal become more possible.
Philadelphia’s H.O.M.E. initiative states an ambition to invest two billion dollars over four years and to create or preserve thirty thousand homes, supported in part by municipal bonds.35 At the date of this visit, that was a commitment and financing program, not thirty thousand completed outcomes. The accurate verbs are aims, allocates, issues, builds, and, only after verification, houses. Ambition becomes freedom through parcels acquired, units repaired, rents made affordable, applications processed, and residents able to remain.
Third, provide public hygiene and rest while prevention and housing do their slower work. A toilet is not a substitute for a home. It is also not trivial. Philadelphia’s Philly Phlush pilot budgets for purchase, installation, repair, supplies, and three full-time specialists to maintain public restrooms.36 That staffing is conceptually important. A restroom locked, broken, unsafe, or too distant is a symbol of access rather than access itself. Public hygiene requires distributed locations, predictable hours, privacy, cleaning, repair, and treatment of users as members of the public rather than evidence of disorder.
The evidence does not warrant adding these measures into a single promise about savings to emergency rooms, police, or crisis systems. It supports a more exact sequence. Prevention can keep some people in housing; permanent housing can create durable exits for people already displaced; maintained toilets and places to rest can preserve hygiene, privacy, and bodily safety while the slower systems operate. None authorizes punishment of people the other measures have not reached.
This is what it means for a city to bear load rather than shift it. Public systems cannot remove dependence, and should not try to govern people by defining their good for them. They can organize foreseeable dependence without domination. A person should not need exceptional stamina, insider knowledge, perfect paperwork, private property, or public gratitude to enter civic life and stay there.
The Grid and the Key
By evening, Philadelphia’s grid had lost its innocence without losing its beauty. It still offered orientation: rivers, squares, numbered streets, long axes, a municipal tower visible above the blocks. But orientation is not belonging. A plan can show where institutions stand; it cannot tell us whether their promises will hold when a body tires, a household asserts control, a government revises the record, a clerk refuses recognition, a railcar ages, or a person has nowhere private to go.
Freedom, then, is the publicly secured capacity to enter, remain, move, be recognized, refuse, appeal, and endure within institutions designed for unequal human need. Each verb disciplines the next: entry without duration is a threshold; recognition without refusal is conscription; provision without appeal is dependence on grace; access that cannot survive maintenance is a temporary permission. Freedom’s opposite is not structure. It is a structure that privatizes its costs while claiming public virtue. The founding error was never dependence itself. It was the decision that some people’s dependence authorized other people’s mastery, and that those with power could transfer the price of the arrangement downward.
The sites of Philadelphia do not resolve that inheritance. They expose its operations in a necessary sequence. City Hall distinguishes visibility from accountability. The President’s House shows a liberty rule defeated by scheduling and its public meaning redirected through administration. Congress Hall separates the form of recognition from the struggle over whom it includes. The museum and SEPTA reveal refusal as an infrastructural achievement. The street asks whether a republic permits a person to remain. Remove any stage and the public promise can fail while its language stays intact.
No monument can carry all of that. The work belongs to forms, budgets, maintenance, law, housing, toilets, records, and people empowered to challenge them. The grid can tell us where the doors are. Freedom is whether the public keeps the keys in common.
Bibliography
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———. “H.O.M.E.: Housing Opportunities Made Easy.” Accessed August 10, 2026. https://www.phila.gov/programs/home-initiative/.
———. “Philadelphia 2026 Point-in-Time Count Report Finds Unsheltered Homelessness Drops for First Time in Two Years.” July 23, 2026. https://www.phila.gov/2026-07-23-philadelphia-2026-point-in-time-count-report-finds-unsheltered-homelessness-drops-for-first-time-in-two-years/.
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Library of Congress. “Election of 1800.” Creating the United States. Accessed August 10, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/election-of-1800.html.
National Park Service. “Congress Hall.” Independence National Historical Park. Accessed August 10, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/places/000/congress-hall.htm.
———. “Visiting the President’s House Site: From Enslavement to Emancipation.” Independence National Historical Park. Updated April 7, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/inde/planyourvisit/presidentshousesite.htm.
Obergefell v. Hodges. 576 U.S. 644 (2015).
Pennsylvania. “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” March 1, 1780. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/pennst01.asp.
———. “An Act to Explain and Amend an Act, Entitled ‘An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.’” March 29, 1788. In Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania, vol. 13, 52–56. Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/an-act-to-explain-and-amend-an-act-entitled-an-act-for-the-gradual-abolition-of-slavery-march-29-1788/.
Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. “SEPTA Board Approves Fiscal Year 2027 Operating & Capital Budgets.” June 25, 2026. https://www.septa.org/news/fy27-operating-capital-budgets/.
United States. Executive Order 14253. “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” March 27, 2025. Federal Register 90, no. 63 (April 3, 2025): 14563–65.
Whitewood v. Wolf. 992 F. Supp. 2d 410 (M.D. Pa. 2014).
Washington, George. “From George Washington to Tobias Lear, 12 April 1791.” Founders Online. National Archives. Originally published in The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 8, edited by Mark A. Mastromarino, 84–86. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-08-02-0062.
Secondary scholarship
Aden, Roger C. Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015.
Brownlee, David B. Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989.
Bruggeman, Seth C. “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation.” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 155–58. https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jat123.
Daniels, Norman, and James Sabin. “Limits to Health Care: Fair Procedures, Democratic Deliberation, and the Legitimacy Problem for Insurers.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 26, no. 4 (1997): 303–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1997.tb00082.x.
Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. New York: 37 Ink/Atria, 2017.
Gillette, Howard, Jr. “Philadelphia’s City Hall: Monument to a New Political Machine.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 2 (1973): 233–49.
Hamraie, Aimi. Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Jackson, Steven J. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, 221–39. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
Kittay, Eva Feder. “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability.” Ratio Juris 24, no. 1 (2011): 49–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9337.2010.00473.x.
Mackenzie, Catriona, and Natalie Stoljar, eds. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Mitchell, Don. “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States.” Antipode 29, no. 3 (1997): 303–35.
Nash, Gary B. “For Whom Will the Liberty Bell Toll? From Controversy to Collaboration.” George Wright Forum 21, no. 1 (2004): 39–52.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Permanent Supportive Housing: Evaluating the Evidence for Improving Health Outcomes among People Experiencing Chronic Homelessness. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.17226/25133.
Peng, Yinan, Robert A. Hahn, Ramona K. C. Finnie, et al. “Permanent Supportive Housing with Housing First to Reduce Homelessness and Promote Health among Homeless Populations with Disability: A Community Guide Systematic Review.” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 26, no. 5 (2020): 404–11.
Pettit, Philip. “Freedom as Antipower.” Ethics 106, no. 3 (1996): 576–604. https://doi.org/10.1086/233648.
Phillips, David C., and James X. Sullivan. “Do Homelessness Prevention Programs Prevent Homelessness? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial.” Review of Economics and Statistics 107, no. 5 (2025): 1187–96.
Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–91.
Stein, Marc. City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
Tsai, Jack, and Jemma Alarcón. “The Annual Homeless Point-in-Time Count: Limitations and Two Different Solutions.” American Journal of Public Health 112, no. 4 (2022): 633–37.
Vecchio, Giovanni, and Karel Martens. “Accessibility and the Capabilities Approach: A Review of the Literature and Proposal for Conceptual Advancements.” Transport Reviews 41, no. 6 (2021): 833–54.
Waldron, Jeremy. “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom.” UCLA Law Review 39 (1991): 295–324.
Contemporary reporting and first-person accounts
Kruger, Josh. “‘Homeless?’ ‘Unhoused?’ Who Cares?” Philadelphia Citizen, September 15, 2023. https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/homeless-unhoused-who-cares/.
Moselle, Aaron. “Federal Government Replaces President’s House Exhibit Focused on Slavery.” WHYY, July 15, 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/presidents-house-slavery-trump-exhibit-philadelphia-replaced/.
Reuters. “Trump Administration Puts Up New Panels on Slavery at George Washington’s Philadelphia Home.” July 15, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-administration-puts-up-new-panels-slavery-george-washingtons-philadelphia-2026-07-15/.
Savage, Henry, and Erin Blewett. “We Asked Dozens of Safehouse Stakeholders the Same Questions.” Kensington Voice, October 10, 2019. https://www.kensingtonvoice.com/dozens-safehouse-stakeholders-three-questions/.
Notes
1 Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xiv, 5, 8–9; Giovanni Vecchio and Karel Martens, “Accessibility and the Capabilities Approach: A Review of the Literature and Proposal for Conceptual Advancements,” Transport Reviews 41, no. 6 (2021): 835–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2021.1931551.
2 Giovanni Vecchio and Karel Martens, “Accessibility and the Capabilities Approach,” 835–40; Philip Pettit, “Freedom as Antipower,” Ethics 106, no. 3 (1996): 576–80, 589–92, https://doi.org/10.1086/233648; Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, “Introduction: Autonomy Refigured,” in Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self, ed. Mackenzie and Stoljar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3–31; Eva Feder Kittay, “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability,” Ratio Juris 24, no. 1 (2011): 49–58, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9337.2010.00473.x.
3 Norman Daniels and James Sabin, “Limits to Health Care: Fair Procedures, Democratic Deliberation, and the Legitimacy Problem for Insurers,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 26, no. 4 (1997): 322–43, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1997.tb00082.x. The institutional standard here adapts their procedural criteria beyond health-care rationing; it does not transfer their substantive allocation judgments.
4 Thomas Holme, “A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia” (1683), Free Library of Philadelphia, https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/item/41936.
5 Historic American Buildings Survey, “Philadelphia City Hall, Penn Square, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA,” HABS PA-1531, 1–4; American Society of Civil Engineers, “Philadelphia City Hall,” accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.asce.org/about-civil-engineering/history-and-heritage/historic-landmarks/philadelphia-city-hall.
6 Howard Gillette Jr., “Philadelphia’s City Hall: Monument to a New Political Machine,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 2 (1973): 236–44.
7 David B. Brownlee, Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989), 1–35.
8 Pennsylvania, “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” March 1, 1780, §§ 3–4, 10, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/pennst01.asp.
9 Pennsylvania, “An Act to Explain and Amend an Act, Entitled ‘An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,’” March 29, 1788, §§ 1–2, in Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania, vol. 13, 52–56, Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/an-act-to-explain-and-amend-an-act-entitled-an-act-for-the-gradual-abolition-of-slavery-march-29-1788/.
10 George Washington to Tobias Lear, April 12, 1791, in The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 8, ed. Mark A. Mastromarino (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 84–86, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-08-02-0062.
11 Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (New York: 37 Ink/Atria, 2017), chaps. 5–10, 77–168.
12 Association for Public Art, “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.associationforpublicart.org/artwork/the-presidents-house-freedom-and-slavery-in-the-making-of-a-new-nation/; Roger C. Aden, Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 5–17, 159–93; Seth C. Bruggeman, “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 155–58; Gary B. Nash, “For Whom Will the Liberty Bell Toll? From Controversy to Collaboration,” George Wright Forum 21, no. 1 (2004): 39–52.
13 Aaron Moselle, “Federal Government Replaces President’s House Exhibit Focused on Slavery,” WHYY, July 15, 2026, https://whyy.org/articles/presidents-house-slavery-trump-exhibit-philadelphia-replaced/; Reuters, “Trump Administration Puts Up New Panels on Slavery at George Washington’s Philadelphia Home,” July 15, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-administration-puts-up-new-panels-slavery-george-washingtons-philadelphia-2026-07-15/.
14 Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” March 27, 2025, §§ 1, 3, Federal Register 90, no. 63 (April 3, 2025): 14563–65.
15 City of Philadelphia v. Secretary, U.S. Department of the Interior, No. 26-1348, slip op. at 5–7, 32–33 (3d Cir. June 18, 2026).
16 Eisterhold Associates, “Exhibit Plan for the President’s House Exhibition,” 2010, archived by USHistory.org, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse/plans/eisterhold/index.php; “History Lost & Found,” panel 1, panel 2, and panel 3; “The House and the People,” archived panel; “The Executive Branch,” archived panel; “Systems and Methods of Slavery,” archived panel; “Life Under Slavery,” part 1 and part 2; “Memorial,” archived panel.
17 National Park Service, “Visiting the President’s House Site: From Enslavement to Emancipation,” Independence National Historical Park, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.nps.gov/inde/planyourvisit/presidentshousesite.htm.
18 John Adams to Abigail Adams, December 9, 1790, in The Papers of John Adams, vol. 20, ed. Sara Martin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 442, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-20-02-0262; National Park Service, “Congress Hall,” Independence National Historical Park, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.nps.gov/places/000/congress-hall.htm.
19 National Park Service, “Congress Hall”; Library of Congress, “Election of 1800,” Creating the United States, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/election-of-1800.html.
20 Whitewood v. Wolf, 992 F. Supp. 2d 410, 430–31, 446–47 (M.D. Pa. 2014).
21 Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644, 665–76 (2015).
22 Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 1–16, 219–57.
23 Vecchio and Martens, “Accessibility and the Capabilities Approach,” 835–40, 846–50.
24 Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, “SEPTA Board Approves Fiscal Year 2027 Operating & Capital Budgets,” June 25, 2026, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.septa.org/news/fy27-operating-capital-budgets/.
25 Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 382; Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 221–23, 227–29.
26 Jeremy Waldron, “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom,” UCLA Law Review 39 (1991): 296–304, 315–24.
27 Don Mitchell, “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States,” Antipode 29, no. 3 (1997): 305–10, 321–24.
28 Josh Kruger, “‘Homeless?’ ‘Unhoused?’ Who Cares?” Philadelphia Citizen, September 15, 2023, https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/homeless-unhoused-who-cares/.
29 Yasmine Forsaca, interview by Henry Savage, in Henry Savage and Erin Blewett, “We Asked Dozens of Safehouse Stakeholders the Same Questions,” Kensington Voice, October 10, 2019, https://www.kensingtonvoice.com/dozens-safehouse-stakeholders-three-questions/.
30 City of Philadelphia, “Philadelphia 2026 Point-in-Time Count Report Finds Unsheltered Homelessness Drops for First Time in Two Years,” July 23, 2026, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.phila.gov/2026-07-23-philadelphia-2026-point-in-time-count-report-finds-unsheltered-homelessness-drops-for-first-time-in-two-years/.
31 Jack Tsai and Jemma Alarcón, “The Annual Homeless Point-in-Time Count: Limitations and Two Different Solutions,” American Journal of Public Health 112, no. 4 (2022): 633–36.
32 Daniels and Sabin, “Limits to Health Care,” 322–43.
33 David C. Phillips and James X. Sullivan, “Do Homelessness Prevention Programs Prevent Homelessness? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial,” Review of Economics and Statistics 107, no. 5 (2025): 1187–95, https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01344.
34 Yinan Peng, Robert A. Hahn, Ramona K. C. Finnie, et al., “Permanent Supportive Housing with Housing First to Reduce Homelessness and Promote Health among Homeless Populations with Disability: A Community Guide Systematic Review,” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 26, no. 5 (2020): 404–11; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Permanent Supportive Housing: Evaluating the Evidence for Improving Health Outcomes among People Experiencing Chronic Homelessness: Report Highlights (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2018), 1–4, https://doi.org/10.17226/25133.
35 City of Philadelphia, “H.O.M.E.: Housing Opportunities Made Easy,” accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.phila.gov/programs/home-initiative/.
36 City of Philadelphia, “Frequently Asked Questions about the ‘Philly Phlush,’ the City’s Public Restroom Pilot,” October 16, 2024, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.phila.gov/2024-10-16-frequently-asked-questions-about-the-philly-phlush-the-citys-public-restroom-pilot/.