Since the Baltimore Uprising began, many confused Baltimoreans (and outsiders) have asked about the $130 million in redevelopment funds poured into Sandtown-Winchester over a ten-year period (1989-1999).
Investigations into how that money was spent have turned up very little. It appears that most of it went strictly to housing, but even that was not well accounted for. More importantly, there is no evidence that the City worked with local community groups in the redevelopment project, and therefore it is unknown whether housing was even the community’s highest priority. While housing is important, there are many other needs the Sandtown-Winchester community may have wanted addressed, such as drug treatment programs, education, and job training.
For comparison sake, the annual cost of maintenance of the Inner Harbor is $43.4 million. That means the City continues to invest the equivalent of the Sandtown-Winchester investment into the Inner Harbor every three years. To say nothing of the $2 billion invested in the Inner Harbor in the first place.
The basic tenet of trickle down urban development is that more money for the City means more money for disadvantaged communities. It is the belief that rising tides lift all boats.
But yet, the Harbor is thriving, while Sandtown-Winchester and its people, are dying. This development tactic, coupled with residential segregation, actually creates a dam that allows the rising tide to lift some boats, while leaving others to moor.
In our community work in West Baltimore, we have seen some horrifying examples of how this works in practice. One such example involved the State Center project, a new $1.5 billion redevelopment project in West Baltimore. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake recently said that this project is “very important to the community” and is hailing it as a “real catalyst for economic development.”
However, at a Druid Heights community meeting in November 2014, a developer working on project came to hear community feedback about the plans. During her presentation, she mentioned she was having difficulty convincing grocery stores to come in due to the “demographics” in the area. This was her cold, academic way of saying it is because the current residents are poor and black.
After she showed the plans, a number of residents said that it looked just like Towson (a White suburb of Baltimore for those unfamiliar with the region). One man stood up and said, “This looks like somewhere I won’t be allowed to go!” The woman responded with a rundown of the ways they have incorporated community input. But she was completely missing his point: a poor black man walking around a place like that is likely to be discriminated against by shop owners and patrons, or worse, targeted by the police. He seemed to recognize something she didn’t—this redevelopment project was not for him, or people like him.
The approach to urban development in Baltimore, and many other cities like it, seems to be: either pour billions of dollars into redevelopment projects adjacent to struggling neighborhoods, or throw a comparably small amount of money towards one of those neighborhoods, but dictate precisely how the money can be used. Either way, the community loses.
Let’s imagine that money went directly to the community instead. Block by block, residents were involved in every step of the planning. What might they come up with? The people who live in those neighborhoods see what is needed better than any outsider ever could. But further, they can design a redevelopment project that honors and celebrates their cultures, rather than imposing an artificial white design concept on their community.
It may not look like the types of redevelopment projects we are used to seeing—tall, glassy buildings, chain shops and restaurants, and lots of fountains—but maybe that’s how it should be.