Josh Shapiro’s Harrisburg problem The 2028 hopeful can’t fix his own backyard

The cameras loved it. In June 2023, when a chunk of Interstate 95 in Northeast Philadelphia collapsed into a pyre of twisted metal, Gov. Josh Shapiro and the state of Pennsylvania moved with an alacrity Americans had largely forgotten that government is capable of. He bypassed bureaucratic red tape, set up a 24/7 livestream, and crews worked around the clock to reopen the highway in only 12 days.

The episode instantly became a shorthand for his governing philosophy, one he repeats often and with pride: get shit done. It’s that reputation, along with his electoral record in the swingiest of swing states, that landed him on Kamala Harris’s short list of veep candidates in 2024. It’s also why he’s in the mix as a plausible presidential nominee in 2028. But if you want to see the limits of Shapiro-ism, visit the seat of his power — Harrisburg, Pa.

The Keystone State’s small capital city, on the banks of the Susquehanna River, is trapped in a post-pandemic doom loop, a place many Pennsylvanians avoid because of high crime, boarded-up storefronts, and chronic homelessness that range just beyond the glittering green-domed capitol building. Local politics are shackled by a corrupt mayor and a dysfunctional city council. The economy, once anchored by state workers who have remained stubbornly remote, keeps sinking. “Ghost city” is an often-encountered label for Harrisburg.

In 2023, the same year Shapiro rode to the rescue of I-95, an electrical fire consumed the Broad Street Market, the oldest continuously operating stone market house in the country, which first opened during the Civil War. A day later, Shapiro stood amid the charred remains and again promised lightning-strike efficiency. “You’re going to see government at all levels now work together,” he pledged. “We are all now going to come together and do what’s necessary.”

That didn’t happen. Nearly three years later, Broad Street Market is in worse shape than ever before. This winter, one of the market’s historic exterior walls, weakened by two years of exposure and the sheer weight of local ineptitude, crumbled to the ground. The collapse is forcing new delays and reopening questions that stretch into the indefinite future.

The same day the Market wall tumbled to the ground, Dec. 15, Shapiro was busy schmoozing in Midtown Manhattan. There, the governor attended a ritzy $1,000-per-plate Pennsylvania Society dinner with the state’s political elite, bragging about how good a job he was doing as the state’s chief executive. When a reporter asked Shapiro about the state of the Broad Street Market, he blamed Harrisburg leaders and said they need to “get their act together.” Meanwhile, the market’s site sits fenced off and inert, a civic wound slowly scabbing over, yet to heal.

To be fair, many of Harrisburg’s problems are indeed out of his jurisdiction, are self-inflicted, or predate his reign by decades. In the aughts, former Mayor Steve Reed went on a wild and reckless spending and debt spree that ended with the city seeking bankruptcy protection to manage its $315 million debt, and the state appointed a receiver. Yet it quietly crawled out of that hole, and by the 2010s, central Harrisburg enjoyed a mini-Renaissance, with a series of restaurant and bar openings that solidified into a Restaurant Row on 2nd Street.

Not anymore. Since the pandemic, Harrisburg’s downtown core has hollowed out, and the now-vacant storefronts of Restaurant Row make the city look like a set for a low-budget zombie movie. Why? For one, the state of Pennsylvania, the city’s biggest employer by far, doesn’t pay property taxes. Second, state workers, the lifeblood of Harrisburg’s core, aren’t fully back in the office, and they may never be.

Shapiro’s press team boasted to UnHerd of a 56% increase in state workers returning to the office last year. But walk down State Street at noon on a Monday, and you’ll see the reality: on a typical weekday, homeless people staggering about on the sidewalks outnumber state workers and tourists. To make matters worse, the Shapiro administration is in the process of severely shrinking the state’s office-space footprint, which hits Harrisburg the hardest. As part of his Space Optimization and Utilization project, the state didn’t renew a lease at a 22-story downtown building that had housed state offices for more than two decades.

The decay from disinvestment is visceral. Every week, it seems, a different local business fails, and there are few takers on vacant properties. In December, Zeroday Brewing Co. — whose taproom, a block away from the state capitol building, once buzzed with legislators and state workers (and where I once worked) — announced it was shuttering. The owners cited a workforce that never returned and an environment that has become hostile to small businesses. On Wednesday, a beloved Mexican restaurant, El Sol, announced it was also closing its doors a stone’s throw away from the state capitol. This, even as El Sol is keeping open its suburban branches.

Crime is a massive problem. While violent crime declined around the country in 2024, Harrisburg had 23 homicides, its most in nearly 40 years and the highest among central Pennsylvania’s largest cities. I live in Midtown, half a dozen blocks from where the governor sleeps. In one week in the summer of 2025, my e-bike and my car were stolen in two separate incidents. When I called the police about the bike — having actually located a stash of stolen goods where mine was likely sitting — they wouldn’t even take the call.

A few months later, a woman who talks to herself stole my cat. I had to beg a police officer to accompany me to her apartment just to get my pet back. This is the daily reality in Shapiro’s backyard, a place where package theft is so rampant that my neighbors have resorted to a sort of biochemical warfare, placing dog poop inside fake Amazon boxes to spite the porch pirates.

The elephant in the room — the one Shapiro refuses to truly tackle — is Harrisburg Mayor Wanda Williams, who was just sworn in to her second term. Williams is Harrisburg’s tiny version of Donald Trump: pugnacious, defensive, corrupt, and perpetually embroiled in a civil war with her own city council. Her tenure has been a masterclass in petty dysfunction. Williams reportedly placed as many as five relatives on the city payroll in full-time positions. A federal lawsuit filed by former Public Works Director Nathaniel Spriggs alleges that Williams pressured him to alter job descriptions so her relatives could be hired or promoted. The city is now spending taxpayer dollars on legal fees to defend those actions in court, while the mayor is busy trying to raise her own salary by 20%.

The Broad Street Market rebuild has been the city’s biggest fiasco. The market’s manager was convicted of stealing money to fund his doggie-spa habit and then tried raising vendors’ rents by 25%. In 2024, the city council voted against approving a construction contractor due to insufficient DEI promotion. A ramshackle tent structure meant to serve as a temporary holding space for the market’s vendors got the embarrassing moniker Tenty McTentface.

But if there’s one moment that defines Harrisburg in the mid-2020s, it’s July 4, 2024. That’s when the annual fireworks show on City Island was disrupted by an armed teenager fleeing police. The 18-year-old threw his pistol into the Susquehanna River and bumped into Williams during his escape from the cops, injuring her leg in a fall. Instead of boosting police presence or cracking down on crime, however, Williams simply canceled all future city-run fireworks on Independence Day. The best solution, she figured, was to tuck and run.

Shapiro’s response has been muted. His spokesperson didn’t respond to my query about the governor’s relationship to the mayor, which her press office characterized as “positive.” The spokesperson cited $850,000 in additional state funding to support the Broad Street Market’s $20-million-plus rebuild and said Shapiro is “working closely with the City of Harrisburg, the Harrisburg delegation, and other local leaders to help Harrisburg reach its full potential.”

The governor’s press team also noted a recent $15,000 grant to a group of local leaders trying to revitalize downtown. But that’s peanuts compared to the comprehensive revitalization plan Gov. Kathy Hochul is pursuing for Albany, New York’s also-struggling capital city. In mid-2025, she announced that the Empire State would be funneling $400 million of investments into revitalizing Albany’s downtown core.

There are plenty of other examples of blue-state governors boosting their capital cities. In the aughts, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick launched a 10-year, $1 billion program that helped establish Boston as a national magnet for the life-sciences industry. St. Paul, Minn., was one of the biggest beneficiaries of Mark Dayton’s two terms as the state’s governor, with a $100 million capitol renovation, part of nearly $1 billion in investments made in 2014.

I’d be surprised if Shapiro suddenly steps in to save Harrisburg in 2026. He’s gearing up for a national book tour to promote Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service, the kind of softly lit, hagiographic autobiography that usually indicates a warm-up to a White House bid. As 2028 whispers grow into a roar, the Shapiro narrative will be polished to a mirror shine. You will hear about the bridge constructions and the get-shit-done attitude.

Shapiro may indeed be getting shit done in Pennsylvania, but there’s little evidence of it in the city where he works and lives part-time. In Harrisburg, the only thing that seems to be getting shit done is gravity. Just ask the Broad Street Market.

There is, however, one construction project in Harrisburg that appears to be moving along with I-95 speed: The Wall. Last April, a troubled Harrisburg man named Cody Balmer, invoking the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, broke into the governor’s mansion and threw Molotov cocktails in a frightening assassination attempt. The state immediately went into action and spent $32 million to rebuild the governor’s fire-damaged dining room and erect a new permanent security wall. Plus, a controversial $1 million was spent on Shapiro’s private home in the Philadelphia suburbs, including $311,000 for a new security system and $290,000 for landscaping and groundskeeping. Shapiro’s office has argued that the security upgrades were recommended by law enforcement for the governor’s personal safety, but the optics are terrible. Shapiro is literally walling himself off from the city decaying around him.

What does that imply about his readiness to lead in a national environment also defined by slow, grinding institutional failure? We may find out in the next two years.

---