April 13: Philly’s most dangerous intersections | Business-to-business microloan | PA wage hike job losses

What are the most dangerous intersections in Philadelphia? The Inquirer’s Mari A. Schaefer digests a new report that analyzed more than 43,000 crash records using 2015 PennDOT information on the “number of people involved in the crashes, plus the total number of incidents per site, and the injuries and fatalities that occurred to determine a ‘danger score’ and rank for each intersection.”

Could Governor Wolf’s proposed 66 percent minimum wage increase to $12 potentially hurt small businesses? In an op-ed for NewsWorks’ Speakeasy, Jordan Bruneau argues that the raised wage floor would disproportionately affect young and less-skilled employees in the food service and retail sectors, citing Pennsylvania’s Independent Fiscal Office’s report that found that the proposed hike would cost the state nearly 54,000 jobs.  Bruneau also looks to the some outcomes from New York’s incremental minimum wage increase (aimed to reach $15 by 2021).

Curbed Philadelphia has put together a compilation of the 17 development projects that are under construction or still in the early planning stages on North Broad Street. The four-mile stretch starts at Aloft Hotel immediately north of City hall and ends with the Beury at Germantown Avenue.

Two Philadelphia business owners have developed a new “shared interest” microloan model to support each other and pay it forward in the local small business community. After Kate Strathem of Elysian Fields’ Kate Strathmann lent Little Baby’s Ice Cream’s Pete Angevine a $5,000 loan with a workable, tiered interest rate, she “matched it and put it into a fund for another small Philadelphia businesses or creative enterprise that needs a microloan.” The Philadelphia Citizen breaks down this business-to-business microloan model aimed to help fledgling small businesses that wouldn’t qualify for traditional bank financing.

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) has come out with a new interactive game to help players visualize how zoning and re-zoning shapes their neighborhoods, Next City reports. The game, aptly named “What is FAR?” builds on the CUP’s publicly available zoning toolkit and allows the zoning curious to mess around with moving blocks across a 2,000-square-foot lot and try out different floor area ratios “starting with a 1-story building that fills the entire lot and then experimenting with any number of building-block combinations that fit within various sets of regulations.”

What’s the holdup on Trump’s promised $1 trillion infrastructure plan? Mary Scott Nabers, contributing to the Hill, lays out a few of the missing pieces needed to turn the i public-private partnerships “notion” into a plan, including bipartisan congressional support and federal regulatory relief to reduce project timelines.

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