by Benn Ray
After the Baltimore Sun article about the census and city continuing to bleed residents came out, I've had a number of conversations with friends about it.
The questions come up:
Is it because of crime?
Is it because of taxes?
Is it lack of career opportunities?
Is it schools?
The answer is, of course, yes. Yes. Yes. And yes. It is all these things and more.
It’s also because of government corruption and lack of enforcement.
It's power outages, water main breaks and pot holes that rip the bottoms out of our cars.
It’s also because of a police force that largely stopped policing after it got called out for murdering Freddie Grey and then, when it does do something, it’s usually something criminal.
It’s because of the failure of city institutions and the encouragement of such failure by a hostile Republican governor in Annapolis.
It’s because of a dysfunctional mass transit system recently made more dysfunctional except for when it moves suburbanites into our tourist areas and back out again.
It is all these things, and still more.
According to most cultural anthropology/studies text books, some of the main reasons of urban flight include:
- property and land prices as central dynamic and social value
- decay of infrastructure, pollution, environmental issues
- indifferent/selfish middle class bent on tax reductions and reduced public expenditure
- corrupt political establishment
- growing social and economic polarization, poverty, low pay, urban unrest
- crime and high-tech policing
- severe racial divisions and discriminatory practices
- police committed to a war on drugs
Sound familiar?
If we’re being honest with ourselves, Baltimore is really just one more economic downturn away from becoming Detroit. The major difference is, though, that while cost of living is relatively cheap in Detroit, Baltimore just keeps getting inexplicably more expensive. (Is the planned DC-ification of our city actually succeeding?)
Properties are regularly bought up by developers and renovated and converted into higher-dollar living.
When the city has to form an artists task force (and decides to put Jon “Let’s Bring A Wal-mart To Remington” Laria in charge of it), it has essentially already lost that community.
But to summarize the problem of Baltimore’s fleeing population, it is simply this: we no longer do much to encourage people to stay.
Most of what we do in the city, much of the new development here, the food scene in the city, etc. – all of it isn’t for those of us who live here. Most of what’s being done in Baltimore follows the Stadium Model – to bring people who have already decided to abandon the city to come and recreate and maybe drop a couple bucks. These people aren’t ever moving back. And as long as our efforts are designed appeal to suburban weekend adventurers, we are also encouraging our residents to become suburbanites.
Ask yourself: who are those new luxury apartments for? That "upscale" eatery that just opened - who's eating there regularly? That exciting arts event - who is its target demo ?
We need to do more for ourselves. We need to get the city back to being, to quote a corporate-owned beer made out-of-state and sold back to us as some perverted form of regional pride, "The Land of Pleasant Living."
If we want to stop the city from bleeding our population, Baltimore needs to be for Baltimoreans first. Then the others will come.