This is kind of a core centric view.

I think most of the complaints about Philadelphia involve things happening outside center city.

For people who live and work in center city, it’s a pretty good place. To them, Center City is Philadelphia (plus a handful of other neighborhoods).

So you get a lot of “uggh, Philly crime is nuts!” met with “what?! center city is pretty good! That’s just ignorable stuff in the bad areas!” They just hand wave away about 60-75% of the geographic area that constitutes the city Philadelphia.

Those people typically don’t talk much about what’s happening in Frankford, Juniata, Olney, Carroll Park, elmwood park, or dozens of other neighborhoods they don’t personally go to. And there’s a lot of commercial arteries in those areas that are really not doing well, including spots along the subway/El that should be flourishing, but are instead some of the worst places in the entire country by any metric.

On the flip side, to use one your example cities, Dallas’s downtown has always been a cultural dead zone because, as you say, it’s not a residential area.

From a cultural perspective, how downtown Dallas is doing doesn’t matter much. The culturally relevant parts are Uptown, Knox Henderson, Oaklawn, Bishop Arts, Lower Greenville, etc.

From a govt tax revenue perspective it probably matters but in terms of where you live, eat, shop, and go out for the night, not really.

Philly’s core is great. It’s issue is that 2/3 of the non-core are some of the worst parts of the entire country.

Dallas is the opposite. It’s downtown sucks. But it’s got a lot of other great areas in the surrounding parts of the city full of great food, good shops, and fun bars.

But there’s a type of urbanist who immensely discounts and disregards all but the densest parts of a city. So Dallas sucks because downtown sucks. All it’s other cool neighborhoods are dismissed because they don’t have the desired density or walkability. They’re not “a real city” so they don’t count in comparisons.

And when you do that, you’re using a question that makes sense for one city and imposing it on others where it’s not really the right question.

But if you look at it from a more holistic view of the entire city, or even a comparison of the culturally important parts of the city, maybe the answer changes.

That is, the affluent Urbanite in Philly cares a lot about Downtown, and probably never goes to uptown. How Downtown is doing is all that matters.

The affluent urbanite in Dallas cares about Uptown and doesn’t care as much about Downtown.

And as a result, when you limit the scope of the question to just the “core” you’re kind of rigging the game. It’s a trick that writes off all the problematic areas of Philly, while only retaining its strength that also writes off the good parts of other cities while only retaining what’s often their weakest part.