Conservatives base this logic—that the city somehow proves government investment and social programs are bad policy—on a selective history of Baltimore, noting for instance that its residents have elected only one non-Democratic mayor since the 1940s.
Federal and local policymakers of the time redlined areas with "undesirable racial concentrations" to omit them from mortgage insurance programs.
And over the century, the same neighborhoods faced one destructive policy after another, from mass incarceration to the rise of predatory banks.
“If the goal of early segregationist policies was to concentrate black Baltimoreans in a single location, separated from opportunity, then it worked,” Jamelle Bouie writes at Slate. “More importantly, it’s never been unraveled; there’s never been a full effort to undo and compensate for the policies of the past. Indeed, the two decades of drugs and crime that marred Baltimore in the 1980s and 1990s helped entrench the harm and worsen the scars of the city’s history.”
throughout Baltimore’s history, lawmakers at the local, state, and federal level adopted policies that entrenched poverty and segregation in the city.
As the Washington Post notes, research from the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center on Society and Health shows that the segregated black neighborhoods of the 1930s “still have lower rates of homeownership and college attainment and higher rates of poverty and segregation today—as well as worse health outcomes.” Another fact from the Post: “From 1951 to 1971, 80 to 90 percent of the 25,000 families displaced in Baltimore to build new highways, schools and housing projects were black.” Only a decade ago, banks marketed subprime mortgages to poor black homebuyers, leading to a wave of foreclosures.
The tough-on-crime approach WSJ suggests only made things worse. During Thomas Carcetti's mayorship, arrests spiked as police swept up people for offenses as minor as loitering by targeting low-income neighborhoods with Carcetti's database, CitiState. Today, neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester in West Baltimore, which is 97 percent black and where half the households earn less than $25,000 a year, are still reeling from these policies.
Democrats couldn't have failed Baltimore during their reign of absolute power because they adopted bipartisan, corrupt and wrongheaded policies, just like Republicans do!
The cac author of this piece was born in say, 1989. (Started her BA in 2007.) Like a lot of these other writers who mostly came of age in the 1990s they haven't and don't study any of the stuff like Father Mike is posting that "reset" the post-Civil Rights table of relations between the races and the new urban/suburban divide, nor how much it was the elite of black communities that wanted the vicious crackdowns on drugs, especially crack, during the overall expansion of the War on Drugs during the Reagan years.
The decline, fall and creation of "rings" around all the major eastern cities (where the suburbs and downtown are for middle class or higher mostly whites and the inbetween is for everyone else) is all whitewashed away in a narrative of "budget "cuts", "underfunding", racism, gentrification, etc." as if those things just randomly occurred out of bad luck that piled up on each other.
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Things this cac likes: The Unseen
