Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think Baltimore will come back in a big way. Will buy there in the next five years. It reminds me of DC when I was growing up there in the nineties. Everyone here loves it. This is the start of a major upswing.

I agree. I'm not sure that's a good answer for the poor people who live there now though as they will get pushed out.

No one on here cares about that though.

Anonymous wrote:Interesting post. In the 80's Baltimore was going under serious gentrification. The Inner Harbor was a date destination, leisurely walk over to Little Italy where the Nanas still sat on their front porches, the Aquarium had new exhibits (sea horses!) and there was a huge, live music venue in a power plant (name escapes me now, was it just the Power Plant?).

After the rioters destroyed the city (what was the point of that riot anyway?|, it's continued to go downhill.

Baltimore was wayyy ahead of DC in gentrification in the 80's. I worked in a DC office overlooking Franklin Park at 14 and K in the late 80's. The park was known as needle park and johns, pimps, and prostitutes mingled with the druggies 24/7. Wasn't safe to cut through the park in daylight, due to crime, needles, homeless camps.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For anyone busting on gentrification, name one functional and successful American city where the majority of the population is poor and black. I expect crickets. . .

When I was growing up, DC. You wouldn’t walk the city at nigh. Cap Hill was the worst neighborhood, now people have million dollar homes (seriously). Logan Circle was where you bought fake IDs and weed. Now it’s lattes, yoga, and babies. I just can’t even with that.

I lived in Logan Circle and it was exactly as described. DC was improved from that by its thriving gay community. They paved the way. First Dupon/Adam's Morgan, then 14th st and Logan. Everywhere they go turns cute and trendy. They deserve a statue/mention. Maybe Baltimore needs more gay professionals?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Study the history. Racist housing policies created dead zones in the inner city. Invest in some stores and businesses and medical facilities and grocery stores in areas that have nothing but liquor stores. A resident can’t get a job if s/he can’t get to it.

Investment happens in whites areas, just perpetuating the same problems.

And stores can’t stay in business if the merchandise keeps disappearing, they are regularly robbed at gunpoint, and the local job pool is filled with people with poorly developed work habits.

That’s not true. It’s just your racist stereotypes. You aren’t looking for solutions.

Denying reality isn't the way to change anything, PP. Arguing that it's this or that and putting efforts and money in the wrong direction doesn't help. Nothing can happen while people are in denial.

People know the way to improve these communities. I think someone even alluded to it on this thread. You need to do targeted education/campaigns and really try to RAISE those kids from the ground up, assuming almost nothing. In my mind, this would actually involve a completely different school program with completely different subjects and emphasis and rules. You need to step into the life of a 5 year old, or a 15 year old, and basically teach them what decent parents should have taught them all along from birth. But such a thing is un-PC to suggest, and so these types of REAL SOLUTIONS go ignored and the cycles continue.

In Australia, there are issues with the native indigenous communities. Alcoholism mostly, and related crimes and domestic issues. The government had to STEP OUT of those communities altogether, absolutely forget about the idea of educating them according to national standards and just let them try to sort themselves out. Luckily they tend to have very strong tribal leadership and they improve a lot this way. Actually some of them end up with a zero tolerance attitude towards all crime and all alcohol - they become "dry communities". It would have been totally outrageous and very un-PC for the government to suggest that by themselves, but since it came from within, there was no national protest and actually things are way better now. Fetal alcohol syndrome, for example, was becoming an enormous problem and it has improved a lot for obvious reasons.

Sometimes you really do need to treat people differently in order to have the best outcomes for all. Fair isn't always equal.

Or encourage birth control!! It’s not fair for any child to have to grow up in squalor with a drug addicted mother.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.