Hogan Slashes Baltimore Redevelopment funding
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Anonymous
You can say that but what have you done for them? When did you last visit ‘your village’? Putting a sign out on your front lawn proclaiming stuff doesn’t count. |
Anonymous
+1 And because most people, if they're not completely narcissistic, find it possible to care about other people who are not in their town. |
Anonymous
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Not caring about the largest city in your state is a fairly limited worldview.
I look at it this way. One PP is right, Washington (obviously, not a Maryland city) is the economic driver of Maryland. At the end of the day, the point is this. Given the current political climate and it's disdain for this region, economic growth in the region will likely be limited as the Fed Government stands pat or shrinks. I just do not see the Federal Government driving much more growth. Amazon may come but growth in Maryland is going to depend on non-government dependent business being willing to move to the state. As the biggest city in the state and being in a good location along the East Coast corridor, it would be stupid for people in MoCo to write Baltimore off. We may need it soon. |
Anonymous
This year, I'm tutoring at risk kids, donating all my baby gear and donating 3% of my income to charities that support the poor. And I go to Baltimore all the time (I just went a weeks ago.) What are you doing, besides spewing hate towards an entire city on an anonymous website? |
Anonymous
Wtf. We need Baltimore now. It has one of the finest teaching hospitals in the world, a world class university, and a gorgeous tourist destination harbor. |
Anonymous
Are you kidding me? The Harbor area is grossly over priced. The attractions are over priced. There isn't a reduced in state resident price to enjoy your own state vs. the tourist. The Hospital? You mean they one that was just caught patient dumping? World class University? You mean UMD College Park - the flag ship of the University System. And after that you can go to the Universities at Shady Grove and enjoy all of the Universities. Now if you want to go Private at JHU or Loyola that's one thing - but there is nothing stellar about anything in Baltimore City, nothing. |
Anonymous
And as a resident of Montgomery County I can't think of a single reason to visit Baltimore. Baseball - I hop the Metro to see the Nationals. Football - we support the Redskins in PG County. Museums - DC There just isn't any reason to drive 45-60 minutes in non rush hour up 95 to Baltimore. There isn't anything there we don't have. Vacation in my state - well I head to the Eastern Shore. Quicker to get out 50 then to get to Baltimore. Sorry...not gonna make it my village...nope. |
Anonymous
Ehrlich won Baltimore County in 2006. Look it up. Or if you're too lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland_gubernatorial_election,_2006 O'Malley did substantially eat away at his previous margin in the 2002 election but the comment is still valid, Ehrlich won the Baltimore suburbs as a whole. When the city with its heavily lopsided Democratic majority is factored in then O'Malley won the region, but splitting the city from the suburbs, Ehrlich narrowly won the suburbs. I suspect you live in a fairly narrow world, likely a world of highly educated and affluent people who are more open to the city for its cultural and social amenities. There are certainly people in Cockeysville who have never heard of Roland Park. They just don't move in your circles. You are also not familiar with the long history of white flight. The counties have substantially diversified in the last 20 years but up through the 1980s the white flight factor from the city was a very real thing. The county itself is also racially divided but that's a different story. You may enjoy reading this wonderful analysis on the history of bigotry in the Baltimore region, including the Baltimore County politics: https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-Neighborhood-Bigotry-American/dp/1566638437 |
Anonymous
I do. Just not popular ones. Crime is the most problematic issue facing Baltimore because it underpins so many of the other factors affecting people's decisions to live and work in the city. What can one do about the persistent crime problem? It's true that it's primarily drug-related and if you're not involved in the drug world you are far less likely to be affected beyond petty crimes (which, once again, are largely to obtain money for drug purposes). Still, crime has ruined many areas of the city and makes gentrification difficult for other areas. After so many decades of failed policies and initiatives the crime remains persistent. A less kind society (frankly, most of the world) would just turn Baltimore into a military state. Build military camps in east and west Baltimore and have military men and tanks patrol the streets and actively be part in cracking down on crime. Crime would disappear literally overnight if this happened. But we don't do this in America. We're not a military state but a civic state and we don't accept this level of intrusion by military forces. Even throwing many more policemen on the streets is only partially an answer as we saw with the Freddie Gray situation for there's huge tensions between the police and the low income elements that are involved and live around the crime-ridden, drug-ridden areas of the city. Reforming drug laws by decriminalizing hard drugs could potentially be a solution by removing control of the drug trade away from the criminals and placing it in the hands of the law-abiding, but this is no surety and may even exacerbate the drug addiction problem and create a different set of problems. As much of the problem, including crime, stems from the same 10-20% of the city's residents, it's just as much due to underlying cultural factors. The high concentration of these people in the same districts of the city means these cultural factors become exacerbated and feeds upon itself. A solution would be to forcibly break up the ghettos. A dictator could order forced resettlements of people (in smaller groups) across a wider region where they could be absorbed into local communities with higher standards and with the hopes that the cultural standards of these new communities would serve as inspirations and help weaken the poor values holding back the Baltimore poor. But, as mentioned, we don't do this in America. Politically unacceptable, certainly legally unacceptable. The closest approach has been using Section 8 vouchers to help voluntarily resettle families into better areas and the counties, but those have come with side effects, namely often weakening the areas the Section 8 people moved into. When the public housing projects were demolished in Baltimore in the early 1990s, the residents were given rent vouchers and what happened was that they moved into neighborhoods they could afford, which were already borderline/struggling areas, and literally overnight caused a major flight out of those areas (Northeast Baltimore was heavily white as recent as 1990 and this was one area where rent vouchers really propelled the decline and white flight of middle class residents). Ironically, there is a significant downside to dispersing poor people across a wider suburban region. The advantage of the urban city was that it was much easier to concentrate resources they needed in a smaller area also easily accessible. Poor families could survive in Baltimore using the buses or walking and reach the social services they needed easily, whereas that's not the case if living in an apartment complex in Cockeysville or Columbia. They are also much further away from jobs that do not require cars to get to. More problems! Another problem facing Baltimore and one that doesn't get as much talk as the other issues but it's still a very real one and that is so much of the city's housing stock is derelict and out of date. Miles after miles of old working class rowhouses that no one wants to live in because they're too cramped, they can't be renovated cheaply enough to justify the expenses, the area is derelict and underpopulated. While there are certain blocks or neighborhoods worth preserving or adjacent to gentrifying areas and could be the next wave in gentrification, most are not in those positions. Ideally I'd love to have a land bank program where the city condemns entire underpopulated neighborhoods and clears it for the raw land either for redevelopment on a large scale (like what Hopkins did to an extent) or simply hold it for future development. But this is politically unacceptable as it'd require the extensive use of eminent domain and socially unacceptable by forcing people to leave neighborhoods and houses, even with good intentions and ideas of resettling them in other areas to make them stronger neighborhoods. Just about everything that can be done within the acceptable frameworks of politics and policy has been done in Baltimore. When they don't work, the supporters cry for more and more money, but the money is just a band aid on a problem and doesn't solve the problem, which boils down to a high concentration of culturally dysfunctional people in a small area. Until you break up that concentration, you will not see much meaningful change. The next 20-30 years will be no different from the last 20-30 years. Slow but steady redevelopment and gentrification within the "white L" with some slight expansion particularly going north of Patterson Park towards Hopkins, and Pigtown/Hollins Market, but the deep east and west Baltimore and Park Heights areas will continue to be what they are and will not change. |
Anonymous
| You don't keep funding something that doesn't work. Where are the metrics of success? what has the fund achieved? |
Anonymous
I think people would rather go to DC The Wharf or National Harbor over Inner Harbor these days. |
Anonymous
This is a load of crap. That isn't "black culture," that's poor/lower socioeconomic culture. If it were "black culture," middle class and UMC black people would be behaving like that. You're ignorant as hell and likely get your perception of black people from TV...SMH |
Anonymous
One can then wonder why poor whites do not quite behave in the same way? Poor white neighborhoods can be just as riddled with drugs but are rarely, if ever, as violent. Let's call it poor/lower socioeconomic black culture. |
Anonymous
Or poor latinos. |
Anonymous
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Only a complete short-sighted moron would sh#t all over their state's largest city. Baltimore has the potential to be a powerhouse, yet MD suburban and rural residents repeatedly cut off their nose to spite their face.
So much untapped potential that is wasted in that city. Gorgeous architecture, a history that is centered at the creation of this country, cultural institutions that have spanned a century.....and yet MD residents continually use the city as a whipping boy. Do you realize the radiating positive economics effects a strong, vibrant, safe Baltimore would have on the rest of the state? It's incredible to me that in an era where we are seeing the fruits of re-urbanization across the country, Baltimore is still struggling. To me, that signals a lack of leadership and buy-in from the Powers That Be in Maryland. #wimps |