Reply to Hogan Slashes Baltimore Redevelopment funding

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP, you’re obviously thoughtful and unlike so many on DCUM are informed about the topic you’re discussing...thank you for the post.  Do you have any thoughts on ways to reverse the decline in Baltimore?[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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