Posted on 07/05/2008 4:59:44 AM PDT by Zakeet
If you've seen HBO's "The Wire," you know why those of us who live in Baltimore are often asked whether our city really is the hellhole it is portrayed to be on TV.
Our answer is, well, yes. Baltimore deserves the Third-World profile it has developed because it has expanses of crumbling, crime-riddled neighborhoods populated by low-income renters, an absent middle class, and just a few enclaves of high-income gentry near the Inner Harbor or in suburbs.
This wasn't what Baltimore looked like in the 1950s. Then it was a prosperous, blue-collar city.
[Snip]
Today, the city has a population that is almost 50% smaller, and about 40% of families with children live at or near the federal poverty line. Among the country's 100 most populous cities, Baltimore ranks a shameful 87th on median household income.
How did this happen?
Most people think of cities as dense concentrations of people. They are that, of course. But they are also dense concentrations of capital – homes, offices, factories, theaters and roads. All of these assets are attractive to people because, when they are in close proximity to each other, they offer the chance of a more prosperous life.
The problem is that once capital is built, it can become a target for tax-and-spend politicians who bank on the fact that physical capital will continue to draw people, even as it is taxed more heavily. This is what has happened in Baltimore. The city has waged a war on capital for more than 50 years, raising property taxes an astonishing 21 times from 1950 to 1985.
But what politicians don't seem to understand is that the target may be degraded or destroyed in the process.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
What's needed is the political will to tighten the bureaucracy's belt in the near term, and the ingenuity to create a fiscal bridge to a recapitalized, healthier city. So far, Baltimore is sticking with its "capital punishment" policies and it's killing the city.
Mr. Walters is an economics professor at Loyola College in Maryland. Mr. Hanke is a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
Look at it this way.....you could be in Detroit.
Loks like any inner city after the ravages of the WOP, War on Poverty.
Get a ‘community organizer’ to clean things up. [sarcasm intended]
You laugh, but...
I used to live in a small Southern city that had a large university. Every year, the fraternities would do a community service project that consisted of going to the black neighborhood and cleaning it up.
The black neighborhood received exactly the same municipal trash pick-up and other services as the rest of the city, btw. However, from year to year, the residents trashed the place, dumping garbage everywhere.
The fraternities used to give out candy to the neighborhood kids to try to encourage them to help. But the thing that really stunned me was that some of the adult residents would actually bring out lawn chairs to sit and watch the fraternity members bagging their garbage and sweeping their streets. The rest of the population of the neighborhood didn’t even appear to notice, and next year, the neighborhood would be filthy again.
The thing that’s got to change is the attitude of the people who live there. Granted, they were undermined by Great Society institutionalized dependence programs, but it’s time to get a grip and accept some responsibility now.
Only 1 GOP Mayor of Baltimore since 1950, and that was 45 years ago. I wonder which party could be to blame... hmmm...
What I'd like to know is this: I live in a house that's 50 years old for which I have a mortgage and pay dearly for. Has anyone ever seen a housing project that's 50 years old? My point being that if you are not going to require some sort of personal responsibility these are the results that you will get every time. It's sad, it's predictable, and it's the truth.
How do you attract new people when they know the people living there in the low income districts are darn near savages? What will change the mentality of generations of welfare, entitlement, familial neglect and amoral behavior?
Why would anyone want to but property and improve it just to find out all of his neighbors resent and hate him because he has "money" and they don't?
I have thought about this recently. The people in ghettos and down trod neighborhoods all around the U.S. have us over a barrel. They know that they will get money and welfare as long as the threat of insurrection exists. The money can't be cut off because there will be hundreds of thousands of people who can't fend for themselves left to their own devices. They know this and will riot if the money is taken away.
Then there is the issue of the young inner city denizens. Those who are 12 to 19 years of age. As it is most of them have no direction; no force directing them towards good. The schools can't (and shouldn't) be responsible for teaching them how to be good, grateful ciitzens. But, who will?
There is a time coming where this will have to be addressed. It won't take money - there is not enough.
The great society murdered these people's souls....they will never get that soul back....only the substituion; the gunmint check.
The blame goes to all of us that accept this as normal not aberrant and do nothing about changing it.
Name one vibrant, successful city in the USA that is led by a minority mayor.
Cities are built on families. Destroy the family structure and you have Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans etc. Live by the government hand-out, and die by the government hand-out.
"an absent middle class"
It goes much deeper. High taxes and a failing school system which triggered flight to the suburbs. Most families could not pay city taxes AND send their kids to private or religious schools in the county, free from crime, like the former mayor or the professors at these universities. You could write a doctoral dissertation on how the organized blockbusting in the '40s and the '50s destroyed the city neighborhoods and the politics behind it.
Well, they got rid of D'Alesandro's and O'Conor's voting base along with the neighborhoods like they wanted to. And the bigots still oppose school choice so don't expect any turnaround. Maybe Nancy Pelosi could look into it? The People's Republic in Annapolis has not yet tired of raising taxes through the roof.
But as with the Roman Empire, destroy the middle class, you destroy the civilization.
Or they move to southern Pennsylvania or Delaware.
“Live by the government hand-out, and die by the government hand-out.”
This really is a d*mn shame. Some (formally) beautiful old neighborhoods with (formally) great old houses all around Baltimore. There are also some great opportunities and incentive plans for local investors if they could just put in a little hard work.
http://www.healthyneighborhoods.org/
These people have already destroyed their own neighborhoods. Everyone else moved as far away from the ghetto as they possibly could to escape the inner city. That being said, what exactly are the urban welfare recipients going to burn down should our monthly gift to them be cut off? As long as they can't get to me, I couldn't care less if they choose to destroy what is left of the inner city.
so high taxes = garbage in the yard... go figure
.....it is beyond me how people who LIVE in a neighborhood can STAND living amid all that dirt and garbage?
Wouldn’t you think they’d get together and spend a weekend day cleaning up?
Am I missing something here?
I have often wondered exactly what, if anything, can be done about this. There are individuals, one at a time, who escape it and become real, independent adults. But waiting for this to happen one person at a time is going to be a long wait.
The odd thing is that I have often noticed, driving around in the country here in the south, how many of the older rural black people seem to keep their little cabins very tidy and swept. Yet their grandchildren are probably living in squalor in town. I really think it has everything to do with these government dependency programs and wealth transfers (which is what these heavy taxes are meant to do, essentially) which began in earnest about 45 years ago. People got rewarded for being dysfunctional.
A book that I found very interesting is Justice Clarence Thomas’ autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son. He was brought up by his grandparents, and his grandfather was a tough, hardworking guy who built up a little heating oil business out of nothing in segregated Savannah. He was a remarkable man, but it shows you the type of attitude that a lot of black people had - before the Great Society focused on them was its social experiment.
As to what can be done now, I really don’t know. Unwinding the Great Society and stopping all these programs might be a place to start, though. But this population is so passive and unable to fend for itself that I don’t know if this would even be feasible.
But...but...th-th-that would be RACIST!
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