Drive down the Schuylkill Expressway at dusk and let the billboards speak before the politicians do. They are, in their way, more honest. “Top Dog Gets You Top Dollar.” “We Win or It’s Free.” “Philly’s Legal Champion.”
The highways of one of America’s oldest and most storied cities are festooned with the advertisements of personal injury and malpractice lawyers, urging citizens to view any injury, accident, or bad outcome as an opportunity to extract multimillion-dollar jury awards from each other and from the very institutions that sustain them.
Then cross the country to San Francisco, where, along Interstate 80 and across every bus shelter in the Mission, a very different language is being spoken. Slogans like “Agents don’t work without evals” and “Intelligent AF” have sprung up across that city, bearing messages incomprehensible to most passersby, aimed not at the average consumer but at the engineers and investors who constitute the intended audience.
One city is advertising the monetization of grievance. The other is advertising the future.
Now imagine that you are a voter in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, West Philadelphia, parts of North Philadelphia, and reaches of South Philadelphia, preparing to choose, on May 19, the person who will replace Dwight Evans in Congress.
You might expect, with 300,000 of your neighbors living below the poverty line and an unemployment rate that has crept back up to 5.1 percent as of 2025, that the race consuming the city’s political oxygen would be organized around a vision for your economic future. You might expect to hear a serious conversation about what it would mean for West Philadelphia, sitting in the literal shadow of one of the great research universities on earth, to finally receive its share of the $50 billion biotech and life sciences economy flourishing in its midst. You might expect the candidates to be competing on the basis of who has the most credible, ambitious plan to connect the district’s residents to the industries that are remaking the world.
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Instead, a bitterly contested race for this open seat is echoing the broader national debate among Democrats about using the proper words to criticize Israel and AIPAC. Economic concerns, public safety, and healthcare are the top three daily issues affecting the lives of the constituents of the 3rd District, but the defining topic among the candidates has been the wars in the Middle East.
The key dispute among the three leading candidates is largely not about policy. Rather, it is about whether they are willing to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide” and the role the pro-Israel lobby plays in Democratic politics.
This is the personal injury billboard problem in electoral form.
Let us be clear-eyed about what is happening, and who it is happening to. The 3rd Congressional District, as of the 2020 Census, was home to more than 765,000 residents, with a population that is more than 55 percent African American, 32 percent white, 6 percent Asian, and 5 percent Latino, the most reliably Democratic district in the country.
Philadelphia’s poverty rate, while continuing its incremental decline, still means that more than 300,000 residents have incomes of $33,000 or less for a family of four. The unemployment rate is the city’s highest since 2021. The city’s median household income, at $60,302, lags behind Washington D.C., Boston, Phoenix, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Houston, with significant disparities that persist stubbornly along racial lines.
These are the conditions of a city that has not found a way to translate its extraordinary institutional assets, Penn, Drexel, Temple, Jefferson, CHOP, the University City Science Center, into broadly shared economic mobility. The distance between University of Pennsylvania and West Philly is one mile, but the political distance is a generation. So, it is noteworthy that the conversation consuming the most politically engaged residents of this district is not about pipelines from West Philly’s rowhouses to West Philly’s laboratories.
The wars in the Middle East, however morally urgent, produce no jobs, no STEM degrees, no biotech startups, no retraining programs for the 3rd District workers displaced by automation. At the bare minimum, the 3rd District constituents deserve representatives in Washington arguing for their access to the next economy, as well as being surrogates in a proxy debate whose primary audience lives elsewhere.
State Rep. Chris Rabb took the strongest position on this proxy debate among the candidates, calling for an immediate ceasefire and for the U.S. to stop funding Israel. “We have to acknowledge our complicity in an ongoing genocide in Gaza; it’s our taxpayer dollars that are sending bombs,” he said.
State Sen. Sharif Street, the son of a former Philadelphia mayor and the establishment’s candidate, has declined to use the word genocide while broadly supporting Palestinian rights. Dr. Ala Stanford, the physician who gained national recognition organizing mobile COVID testing across Philadelphia’s underserved communities, has stated that Palestinians deserve safety and freedom, but her campaign has been overshadowed by the terms of the Gaza debate rather than the healthcare equity platform she entered the race to advance.
Three serious people, one consuming question, and the district waits.
Back to the billboard, which tells us something about the psychology of cities, and of campaigns. The personal injury lawyer’s advertisement is a market signal. Law firms spent an estimated $2.5 billion on advertisements nationally in 2024, with the Philadelphia media market ranking in the top ten nationally for legal advertising spending in both digital and radio.
In Pennsylvania alone, $84 million was spent on lawyer billboards in a single year, an increase of more than 62 percent compared to 2019, far outpacing inflation. That money flows where opportunity concentrates.
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And in a city where upward economic mobility has been chronically constrained, where institutions feel extractive rather than inclusive, where the pathway from generational poverty to dignified work remains narrow and treacherous, the lawsuit is not merely a legal instrument, but a cultural strategy for economic survival. The truth is that the personal injury billboard grows in soil that has been left untended.
The Gaza debate functions similarly. It is not that the suffering in the Middle East is unreal or unworthy of moral attention. It is that in a district where jobs in AI, biotech, and advanced manufacturing represent the most promising pathways out of multi-generational poverty, the displacement of that conversation by a foreign policy argument, one in which a freshman congressman from West Philadelphia will have limited leverage regardless of what they call Israeli policy, represents a profound failure of political imagination. It is the billboard economy of the mind: the monetization of moral passion as a substitute for material program.
Meanwhile, the future is being built a few miles away, and it is not waiting.
Pennsylvania’s own 2025 Energy, Data Center and Artificial Intelligence Roadmap describes Philadelphia as a leader in biotech, pharmaceuticals, and applied AI in life sciences, positioning the city as one of the nation’s fastest-growing health innovation hubs.
Analysts have proposed that Philadelphia could leverage the innovation district in University City and build a Broad Street corridor linking Temple University’s hospital and campus to the Navy Yard, hubs where interdisciplinary collaboration, rapid experimentation, and scaled deployment could happen in real time.
The University of Pennsylvania has declared 2026 an AI Month across the entire campus, focusing on human-centered artificial intelligence and highlighting research and collaboration that puts people at the center of technological innovation. Penn’s Center for Innovation reports more than forty Penn startup companies currently raising capital this year alone.
Penn Engineering has made the reinvention of STEM education for the AI era a central goal of its new Penn Engineering 2030 strategic plan, prioritizing hands-on learning, research opportunities, and interdisciplinary collaboration for students across Penn, Philadelphia, and the world.
The Wistar Institute, using a $600,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation, is continuing its Biomedical Technician Training pre-apprenticeship program, a 25-year-old pipeline that prepares community college students and adults from non-traditional backgrounds for jobs in biomedical, pharmaceutical, and biotech labs. Penn’s Graduate School of Education, with $1 million from Google’s philanthropic arm, is expanding its AI education program into more schools across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
These programs are proximate to the 3rd Congressional District, in some cases physically within it. They are building the on-ramps that could connect West Philadelphia’s young people to an economy that rewards STEM fluency, that values the curious mind trained in data science over the body broken in a workplace accident. But they are fragile, underfunded relative to their potential, and desperately in need of the kind of sustained federal legislative attention and investment that only a focused, effective congressman can deliver. They do not appear, as far as one can tell from the debate transcripts and campaign trail coverage, to be at the center of this race.
The cities that are thriving in this new dispensation, the Raleigh-Durhams, the Austins, the Huntsvilles, are not thriving because they lack moral seriousness or because they are indifferent to injustice. They are thriving because they have organized their political ambitions around the creation of new capacity rather than the adjudication of old grievances. Austin’s tech employment now represents 16.2 percent of the regional workforce and contributes $51.2 billion to the local economy, with net tech employment expected to increase 4.4 percent, while Apple, Google, and Amazon continue to expand there.
The Carolinas boast three of the top fifteen best-performing large cities in the country, anchored by research universities, community college pipelines, and aggressive investments in high-tech sector growth. These cities are winning the future not by forgetting their past but by refusing to let their past determine the ceiling of their ambition.
A landmark 2025 study from the Complexity Science Hub, analyzing 650 million census records and six million patents spanning 170 years of American urban history, found that the cities which thrive maintain a constant level of economic “coherence,” a measure of how well their industries fit together and mutually reinforce each other.
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Cities cannot leapfrog their industrial DNA overnight. But they can, and some do, make political choices that gradually realign their DNA with where the economy is heading rather than where it has been. Philadelphia, with Penn, Temple, and Drexel, as its triple helix, has the biological machinery for this transformation. What it has lacked, in race after race, is political leadership oriented toward translating those assets into accessible opportunity for the residents of the 3rd District.
I say all of this not as a critic of the candidates’ characters but as a citizen who has watched this city struggle with the same structural question for decades: how do you build a bridge between the Philadelphia of Nobel laureates and the Philadelphia of generational poverty, when the political energy of each electoral cycle gets consumed by something else?
The personal injury billboards and the Gaza debate are growing where the political imagination has been allowed to wander from the immediate and the urgent to the distant and the symbolically resonant. Both phenomena reflect the same underlying condition: a city that has not yet found the political language, and the political leadership, to make the future feel as urgent to its residents as the grievances of the past.
Somewhere in West Philadelphia tonight, a young person of exceptional curiosity and talent is sitting in a classroom that did not receive the technology investment it needed, applying to a job that will not use the intelligence she possesses, passing the billboard of a lawyer who profits from her misfortune. A mile away, behind the gates of a great university, the tools that could reshape her life are being developed, refined, and largely exported to other cities whose political leaders came to Washington with a different kind of ambition.
The May 19 primary will choose someone to represent her in Congress. The question is whether that person will arrive in Washington with a plan to close that distance, or simply with the correct position on what to call a war in Gaza.
History will not be moved by the latter. She might be transformed by the former.
What, Philadelphia, do you want your billboard to say, and to whom?