Today, the City released the results of the 2019-2020 Philadelphia Resident Survey, which measured attitudes on a wide range of City services.

These latest findings will also help determine spending priorities for the Fiscal Year 2021 and the Five Year Plan that the Mayor will deliver to City Council on March 5, 2020.

Some of the findings included:

  • City services rated as Excellent or Good by a majority of residents included fire services (76 percent), recycling services (53 percent), quality of drinking water (51 percent), and quality of parks (48 percent). 
  • Streets, Police and Public Safety (including police, fire, traffic enforcement, EMS,  and emergency preparedness), in that order, ranked as the top three services that residents want to see the City prioritize.
  • More than 75 percent of residents surveyed rated “overall” City services as Excellent, Good, or Fair. However, those ratings decreased slightly, and Poor ratings increased, since the previous survey of 2016-2017.
  • Slightly less than half of Philadelphia residents (48 percent) believe services provided by police are Excellent or Good, with the same percentage reporting that police services are Fair or Poor. This represents a slight decline in positive ratings compared to the previous survey.
  • Only about one in five residents rated street conditions as Excellent or Good; the majority rated street conditions as Fair (29 percent) or Poor (46 percent). These perceptions stayed relatively unchanged since the 2016-2017 survey.
  • Residents are split on the quality of trash collection, with about half rating it as Excellent or Good, and the other half rating it as Fair or Poor.
  • Nearly two-thirds of Philadelphians reported that they could easily travel between their home and their job.
  • Fifty-nine (59) percent of Philadelphians reported that they volunteered in the past year. This was an 11 percentage point increase since 2016-2017 when only 48 percent reported they had volunteered in the past year.

The survey was conducted by the Mayor’s Policy Office with support from the Mayor’s Office of Public Engagement, the Mayor’s Office of Civic Engagement and Volunteer Services, and the Office of Performance Management. Temple University’s Institute for Survey Research (ISR) helped develop and administer the survey.

View the full Philadelphia Resident Survey report.