As we discuss ways of raising revenue in the city, one way is to make the city home to new kinds of businesses. When a city or region becomes a hub of new business, revenue flows: just look at the region of San Jose and San Francisco, two of the 15 largest cities in the country. They are still awash in high tech revenue that really started to flow over twenty years ago.

One common criticism of Philly is that we have not been associated with growth industries for a long time, especially now that consolidation has made pharmaceutical jobs more scarce.

Reminder: San Francisco has about 1/2 as many residents as Philly, collects about twice as much revenue each year, taxes their residents at lower rates, and gets to spend the largest share of its budget on providing public health care.

That said, the mayor and others (including Vice President Biden) have been pushing the idea of making Philly an east coast hub of new green business. Boston became an east coast high tech hub in the 90s and has greatly benefited from it. Nutter and Biden point to the city's rowhouse architecture as being especially beneficial to new methods of weatherizing and collecting solar energy.

Don't think we're too cold for solar: today the country that collects the most free energy from the sun is Germany.

Anyway, this week Councilpeople Blondell Reynolds Brown and Curtis Jones Jr. suggested an interesting way to insure that new major building projects in the city would be green: make LEED certification as a green building a stipulation of the 10-year tax abatement.

That's not the only change that the abatement needs, but the idea of Philly being a place where only green new buildings grow could make us more attractive to the new green businesses that President Obama is going to be encouraging every day he's in office.

Thanks Blondell and Curtis.