Streetviews: Q&A with NLNA’s Matt Ruben

This week we’re kicking off Streetviews, a series of video Q&As featuring some of the city’s bright neighborhood, design, and nonprofit leaders talking shop about the city’s biggest opportunities and toughest challenges as part of PlanPhilly’s Agenda 2015 election coverage. We begin with the ever-sharp Matt Ruben, president of Northern Liberties Neighbors Association, on Philly’s character, planning progress, just how good millennial urbanists have it, and how to make Philly a more equitable city. Dig in:

• Matt Ruben: President of Northern Liberties Neighbors Association, Chair of the Central Delaware Advocacy Group, Teacher at Bryn Mawr College 
• Home Neighborhood: Northern Liberties
• Favorite Place: Liberty Lands Park – “the geographical, cultural, and spiritual center of our community.”
• Three words to describe Philly: Authentic. Gritty. Beautiful.
• Local Heroes: (1) Larry Freedman, chairman on NLNA’s zoning committee. “We’re very different people in our choices and conclusions but we’ve got a close working relationship. We’ve become really close friends through struggling together to try to make this a better place. (2) Helen Gym, co-founder Parents United for Public Education – an “in the trenches truly progressive, caring, determined activist on the part of the most important issues that face our city and also on behalf of what I believe are one of the most important issues that face our country which is the future of educational reform and all of the social, justice and economic policy issues that go with it.” 

Interviewed Summer 2014