Reply to How and why is Baltimore so troubled? Is there any solution or is it terminally doomed?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]White flight killed Baltimore. I’ve been to a lot of mid Atlantic cities and it’s the most extraordinarily segregated. Whites took off to Baltimore and Howard Counties and let the city die.[/quote]

I used to know all these numbers off the top of my head, but now you might want to fact check these.

Between 1945-1990, Baltimore lost 400,000 white people (some who had come to work in the war industries just went home, many left for the suburbs). Business also left, some natural contraction from the wartime economy, and additional businesses following growth in the suburbs and other regions of the country from small mom and pops to large companies leaving-big employers are now universities, hospitals, and the city, so think about what that does to the tax base. After the Depression and the war years, Baltimore infrastructure was already worn.

During the period when whites were fleeing 200,000 African Americans, many former rural agricultural workers who had little formal education moved into Baltimore. They were people with much less capital than the white people leaving (Black people in the US are a particularly capital-poor group overall). During white flight, white real estate brokers bought low from white families and sold high to black families-because black families often couldn't qualify for mortgages through regular bank loans (redlining and lack of capital), they often entered into particularly bad mortgage products/agreements. So you have families stretching to buy homes, very little financial cushion, and then a changing and worsening labor market and a city with less money for services and improvements.

These structural changes were seen in many cities, but as a small city with the massive upheaval of people and business Baltimore got hit particularly hard, and as a majority Black city with that lack of individual and community capital it's really hard to come back.[/quote]

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