Posted on 04/30/2015 7:34:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
For a sense of the neighborhood in which Freddie Gray grew up, and which has been set partly ablaze over the last several days — the plot of West Baltimore known as Sandtown-Winchester — one need only read the relevant portion of the Baltimore City Health Department’s 2011 Neighborhood Health Profiles.
According to the department (which included in its analysis the adjacent neighborhood of Harlem Park), the 10,000-person neighborhood, which is almost entirely black (97 percent), had a median household income of $22,277 as of 2011– 40 percent below Baltimore City’s average. One in five residents age 16 or older were out of jobs, compared with one in ten in Baltimore City. Almost one in three families were below the poverty line, half of eighth-graders were not “proficient” readers, and a quarter of ten- to 17-year-olds could expect to end up in handcuffs.
By nearly any criteria, Sandtown-Winchester is among the worst neighborhoods in Baltimore. But it is not for a lack of trying to turn it around.
Throughout the early 1990s, Sandtown was Ground Zero of one of the largest, most closely watched urban-reinvestment projects in the country. Having done much to help revamp Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, mayor Kurt Schmoke, elected in 1987, turned his attention to Sandtown. The neighborhood was the preoccupation of one of his campaign’s key organizational supporters, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a West Baltimore–based community-action group under the umbrella of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Schmoke raised almost $30 million in federal and state grants and private funds to construct 210 new housing units and overhaul 17 others. For a nonprofit partner, Schmoke hit on the Enterprise Foundation (now Enterprise Community Partners), founded by real-estate magnate and Marylander James Rouse, who created Baltimore’s Harborplace and had turned his attention to low-income housing needs.
With the help of significant subsidies, those 200-plus houses, which each cost $83,000 to build, were sold at $37,000 apiece. Three hundred more units were planned for a federally funded “Homeownership Zone” nearby. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded the city $5.2 million for that purpose.
It was little surprise that HUD smiled (repeatedly) on Mayor Schmoke. He had close ties to department officials — too close, it now seems. In 1998, the inspector general of HUD announced that he was launching an investigation to determine how Baltimore had wasted $24.6 million in federal housing aid. The investigation, eventually shut down by HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, never implicated Schmoke personally, but the embattled mayor declined to run for a fourth term.
But all of that was far in the future when, in 1992, former president Jimmy Carter visited, spending a day pounding nails alongside other homebuilders. During his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton also visited, bringing national attention to the “urban laboratory” of Sandtown.
Yet by June 1997, when he entertained some 400 Sandtown residents in what he thought would be an adoring meeting at Gilmor Elementary School, Schmoke was chagrined to discover that Sandtown residents were not happy. They saw little progress.
Frustrated by an increasingly hostile business climate, employers left. And, exhausted by rising crime, so did residents.
And the residents were largely correct. By 1998, Schmoke had channeled approximately $60 million into revitalizing Sandtown, but almost all of it was devoted to housing construction and rehabilitation. And, as Barry Yeoman wrote in a 1998 article for City Limits, “Left Behind in Sandtown,” there was a problem with that strategy: “Nobody . . . was looking at demographic trends to see if they could fill 600 additional units of housing.” The city and its partners somehow failed to take into account that Baltimore’s population was not growing, but shrinking — and, in fact, had been shrinking, sometimes rapidly, since 1950. Between 1970 and 1980, a staggering 13 percent of the city’s population moved away. Frustrated by an increasingly hostile business climate, employers left. And, exhausted by rising crime, so did residents. By 1999, 10 percent of the city’s population was drug-addicted, and there had been almost a murder a day through much of the 1990s. In the 2000s, the trend continued.
In 2001, aid from the state and federal government accounted for a full 40 percent of Baltimore’s budget. The Abell Foundation, which targets problems in low-income communities in Baltimore City, estimates that $130 million (private and public) was pumped into Sandtown-Winchester through 2000, before the city’s money and attention were focused elsewhere under new mayor Martin O’Malley.
In his impromptu remarks on Tuesday about Baltimore’s riots, President Obama called for increased investment in urban America. House minority whip Steny Hoyer echoed his recommendation later in the day: “We’re going to have to as a country invest, if we’re going to have the kinds of communities we want.”
Insanity, it is said, is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Taxpayers have invested heavily in Baltimore, and in Sandtown-Winchester, for decades, and it has availed them little. Perhaps it is time to try something different.
— Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.
$1.2 BILLION + per year for the school budget
Why in the world would an sane investor invest ANY money in a neighborhood where there is even an outside chance that their investment will be looted / burned (see CVS) in a riot such as we saw in Baltimore. These cretins bring this on themselves.
Socialists.
Alinskyites.
Democrats.
Know-it-alls.
Waste.
Corruption.
Failure.
“Hey, let’s do it all again!”
When I lived in Maryland, folks used to complain about the high local taxes to supported Baltimore. I lived in Montgomery County NW of DC and the local income tax was 1/2 of the MD state income tax.
When I moved to Georgia, there was no local income tax (it was like a raise).
Yep, the Liberal Democrats are trashing Liberal Baltimore and the police force that they run there.
Excellent thread and eye opening historic information on Sandtown. Thanks—— its what the FReeps do— shine the light on a controversial topic with facts and insights.
Disorganized thugs trash what is convenient.
A scarier thought is organized thugs being transported around to trash other places. We see a milder version with bussing of voters or with transport of the unemployed who have nothing better to do to “Million Man Marches” or protest Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and the like. We also see it with labor actions, but we haven’t yet seen it as a co-ordinated assault (except in malls, organized by obama-phone).
Can anyone name ONE!!! neighborhood like the ones in Baltimore and other similar 'hoods that have benefited from the billions/trillions "invested" in them?
“We’re going to have to as a country invest, if we’re going to have the kinds of communities we want.”
THAT is f’n unbelievable!
After DECADES of money thrown at that s*&^hole.... MORE will be squandered.... AS IF it has worked SO FAR??!!!
Brings back memories. I also used to live in Montgomery County. I remember the “piggy back” tax, in which you paid a local income tax which “piggy backed” on top of the state income tax paid to the state of Maryland.
I always thought the piggy back tax was a crazy concept, undoubtedly invented by a bureaucrat and/or a liberal. A tax upon a tax was levied.
Is this right? 10% of Baltimore’s population are drug addicts??? That many??? Wow. Just wow.
Just like the U.S. government cannot build democracies out of dysfunctional states overseas, we cannot build thriving cities at home. Liberty must come from within the hearts and minds of the locals.
We should confront Obama with this.
In his planned opening to Cuba, he said if you have done something for 50 years which isn’t working, you should try something different.
Well, the War on Poverty is now 50 years old. Trillions have been spent in anti-poverty programs of various types. Have any of them worked???
These liberal programs are near and dear to the hearts of Obama and other liberals. Let’s make them use the same criteria as espoused for opening up to Cuba. 50 years in, the war on poverty is a failure. So let’s change what we are doing.
In the hood, the school budget has nothing to do with education, it has everything about providing jobs for the folks (and union membership). In Kansas City, a new school superintendent required all of the employees to report to their assigned school to receive their paycheck. Quite a few had never shown their face at school for years.
Can anyone name ONE!!! neighborhood like the ones in Baltimore and other similar ‘hoods that have benefited from the billions/trillions “invested” in them?
I thought some neighborhoods have redeveloped in places like Brooklyn? But, these neighborhoods have “gentrified” or been redeveloped through private investment, not through government programs. Just saying, you do hear sometimes about redevelopment in some cities.
Surely those wealthy Dems in Montgomery County and in Prince George’s County, which have grown rich due to DC’s financial generosity (our money of course), would gladly share some of it with their less wealthy fellow Dems in Baltimore? How about you wealthy Maryland lefties of those two counties show the country the benefits of the wealth redistribution concept your party always talks about? Is that the sound of crickets chirping?
Baltimore need as mayor the mother that took his son from the mob.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke: Obama ‘Quietly Enjoying’ Unrest in Baltimore
therightpundit ^ | 4/29/15
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3284576/posts
Not holding back one bit. Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke says O is “quietly enjoying” what’s going on in Baltimore because he’s a ‘promoter of division’ and has ‘benefitted politically’ from ‘dividing’ people.
Sheriff Clarke points out all the times President Obama has pitted one group of Americans against another. He also questions why Obama didn’t come out and speak about the Baltimore riots earlier. He was interviewed here on the Mark Levin Show
Clarke: Change In Baltimore Should Start With "Failed Liberal Democrat Policies"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3284755/posts
Breitbart.com ^ | April 30,2015 | Ian Hanchett
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke (D) blasted “failed liberal government policies” for miring people in cities like Baltimore in “generational poverty” and argued that change in Baltimore “needs to start in the politics, the failed liberal Democrat policies” on Wednesday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel.
Who in their right mind is going to invest now? Only the Federal government and any corporate stooges it is able to pressure (e.g., Starbucks). But whatever $$ “invested” will just be flushed down the toilet. Everyone knows this.
Liberals at their Finest.
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