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.
That’s why leftists do all their “charity” through the State - because when the resources run out, they just put a gun in the taxpayers’ face. They don’t have to worry about resources, and they get to feel good about themselves, which is the whole point.
A private charity inherently has to judge the worthiness of those receiving its resources. Leftists don’t like that, because that causes an examination of the recipients’ behaviors.
I wouldn’t set foot in Baltimore, no less invest there.
In the hood, the school budget has nothing to do with education, it has everything about providing jobs for the folks
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Where is Senator Cummings on this point?
Seems to me that when o was elected, certain people thought, ‘oh good now I can get what I want and stay home and watch t.v.’
Well that’s not how you maintain a life style. You find a job, it might not be in ‘the hood’ so leave Baltimore and go find a job, get an apartment, a savings account, and end up ‘being somebody’
You can pour mounds of money into something, if there aren’t people to work it, its going to fail....can you tell me why Senator Cummings is that stupid NOT to see this?
I heard Starbucks say they were going to open a store in Ferguson. No doubt trying to prove how liberal they are.
But the question is, how profitable will that location be?
I heard that too. Maybe they will open a token location just to show they are doing their part. I feel sorry for the people who will be working there—but at least they can quit.
Has anyone blamed Republicans or George Bush for the mayhem in Baltimore?
Maybe thews guys can help....Obama's "Public Allies"
www.publicallies.org
http://www.publicallies.org/site/c.liKUL3PNLvF/b.5106423/k.BD7E/Home.htm
Before she got to the White House, First Lady Michelle Obama lived some of her happiest times founding Public Allies Chicago in the early '90s
Public Allies 5 core values are 1) Diversity/Inclusion; 2) Collaboration; 3) Continuous Learning; 4) Integrity; and 5) Building on Assets
** Each Public Allies site manages their own recruitment process but use the same application. It is important to reach out to the site(s) that you are interested in applying to and talking with staff about their program and processes.
You and I both know the Dems don’t want things to change. Like LBJ said fifty years ago, they want to “keep these n.....s voting Dem” in perpetuity.
When whites left big cities in droves after their neighborhoods deteriorated due to a flood of welfare blacks, they were called racists. Now whites are buying back into the city neighborhoods, and what are they called? Racists.
When whites moved out they were called racists because according to libs they didn't want to live with black neighbors. The real reason they moved out is that didn't want their housing values to deteriorate, and they didn't want to be victims of black crime.
Now black activists actually have the nerve to say nobody but blacks should live in "their" (previously all white) neighborhoods. Unbelievable.
The multi-level recruitment sounds like Amway for social/political malcontents. I wonder how the money flows... what the ratio is of individual contributions to grants; what’s in it for the various sub-organizers, etc.
Baltimore County too, hon,
home of the white libs (and wealthy Jewish democrats) who elected Senator Cardin who makes Biden look like a genius.
Heard from Cardin or Mikulski lately?
WMAL reported today that combined govt spending in Baltimore has been ONE TRILLION in the past decade
Now it will be.
Ping to an article about the 25-year redevelopment efforts in the Baltimore riot zone.
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