Give Mayor Parker all the respect: Mr. Joe, 65.
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To quote this piece: Mr. Joe, “Give Mayor Parker all the respect: Mr. Joe, 65,” We Them Media, https://wethem.xyz/watch/give-mayor-parker-all-the-respect-mr-joe-germantown. Each transcript line links to its second.
Germantown, April 2026, and by his own count Maceo’s seventh interview since coming home to Philadelphia. Mr. Joe is 65 and from the city, and he thinks it is going the right way: “the city has evolved right now. I think that we’re all on a good track. We’re cutting down on the killing.”
He gives the mayor her due without hedging. “I give all respect to the mayor. Oh, you like Sherelle? I like Sherelle Parker. She’s doing a lot. Some people don’t like her, but you know, I see what she’s doing.” What he has seen: “I really like the way how she cleaned up Kensington and Allegheny,” and options into rehab rather than only removal, and a starting point that was low, because “the last mayor that we had, he didn’t do anything.”
Maceo pushes on it, because a cleaner park is not the same as a park you will still live beside: “a lot of people have been displaced by gentrification,” so the people who enjoy it later may not be the people here now. Mr. Joe does not accept the framing. “it’s for all of us. You know what I mean? I don’t understand why they say is trying to separate us,” and “We all live here together.”
On money he is specific and unimpressed. He does not want the proposed dollar tax on ride-hailing, “because we’ve been taxed out a lot,” and he wants an accounting from the school district: “if you’re getting all the money from the state to city or different organizations and stuff like that, how come you’re always being broke?” His fix is a straight transfer: “if you stop paying these people with these doctor’s degree, higher class money and give the money to the teachers,” because those hires “don’t put their feet in the classroom. So they never put it, they don’t even know what the classroom looks like besides the one they came out of. But the real teachers is the one who needs the money.”
And on why people in Kensington might tell a reporter something different: “some of them are going to give you a good report, some of them are going to give you a bad report on it. That’s because people just don’t want to change.” He remembers what the neighbourhood was before: “Kensington always was a nice neighborhood at one point at a time.” The transcript below is from the original audio.
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