Mourning the Loss of Former UCD Colleague Seth Budick

Seth spent nearly a decade leading our data work at University City District before taking a position with The Pew Charitable Trusts in 2017. While with UCD, Seth’s data analysis informed our public space initiatives including The Porch at 30th Street Station, helped shape our approach to public safety deployments, and was a key driver in our yearly State of University City publications. He was passionate about pedestrian and bicycle safety and helped push forward several of our pedestrian plazas throughout the neighborhood.

More than that, Seth was a great colleague and friend. Those able to get him started talking about one of his passions, whether it be weird statistical quirks, public transit, the best places for obscure foreign delicacies in Philadelphia, or the films of Hayao Miyazaki, were rewarded with a small smile followed by a deluge of information and opinions. A great joy for his coworkers was to look up to find Seth at your desk with a gleam in his eye and a simple question: “Can I show you something cool?” It could be anything from an interesting article about a Polish restaurant in the Northeast to a way he’d figured out to manipulate stoplight data from Google Maps to calculate transit times, but whatever it was, it was going to capture your attention. You felt privileged when he shared some small part of his remarkable mind with you. 

A lover of plants and insects, Seth’s greatest passion was the natural world. Seth studied ever-increasingly complicated biology at Swarthmore, the University of California, Berkley, and Caltech before landing a job in using data to study public spaces. He was able to combine his love of gardening and insects at UCD by creating and leading The Dirt Factory, a composting facility for neighbors Seth ran out of an empty lot at 4308 Market Street until the property was sold. You never saw Seth more happy than when his hands were covered with soil. Learn more about Seth in the video below.

In what would become his final years, Seth found solace in between difficult treatments and stays at the hospital by maintaining a plot at the Warrington Community Garden and sharing his love of gardening with his family and friends. He became fascinated with native plants and decided to research and catalog the types of flora that have long survived in the Philadelphia region, taking a particular interest in plants that were often cast aside or viewed as nuisances like weeds and banes. He drew inspiration from the types of plants that could grow in abandoned lots and from cracked concrete. This passion led to Seth creating a searchable database of nearly 1,000 native flora pulled from William P.C. Barton’s two volumes of fieldwork study first compiled in 1818. This research project was Seth’s final gift to local plant lovers, and you can learn more about it and view the database at Phillynativeplants.org. 

Seth was an exceptional colleague and a great neighbor, and while his absence in the neighborhood will be felt for years to come, we take solace that his contributions to West Philadelphia will endure.