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1. 

   uche uchema

   May 7, 2019, 01:34 AM

   The real issue is never addressed. In a community that is run down, contains large numbers of vacants, high illegal drug use and many low income residents you have to ask yourself how do you turn a community like this around. If you take a community like say, N Fremont Ave. and Bennett Place here in Baltimore where you have lots of vacants. You have lots of people standing around on corners doing “whatever” all day long and into the night. Lots of low income families and I suspect lots of unemployed people with many of them pursuing “alternative methods of income”. You also have a high rate of drug addiction in this community. How do you turn this community around? Do you renovate every house in the area retaining the same mix of people living there? If you do this, do you get a safer community? Do you eliminate the groups of people who hang out on corners all day after you’ve renovated all the homes in the area? Do you reduce the incidence of drug addition in the area?

   On the other hand, if you vacate every family living in that area, then renovate every house in that area raising the cost to live there, you begin to attract a different type of family with a higher income and different attitudes towards the community they live in, will you get a cleaner community? Will you no longer have “… lots of people standing around on corners doing “whatever” all day long and into the night”? Will you get a lower rate of illegal drug use? This action is called “Gentrification”.

   Some people seem to miss the point that a community is really it’s people who happen to live in the homes located there. The phrase “Turning a community around” means getting the people who live in a given community to change their life styles. Or, if you are primarily concerned only about the buildings in a given community then you simply move the poor, the drug addicted, the unemployed and other “undesirables” out of that area, renovate all the homes and replace the original families with families with high income and thus, more “social” tendicies. Look at the Reservoir Hill community as an example. These are the unpleasant realities that Baltimore’s “So called” Black leadership never addressees. Unless this conversation starts, Black people in Baltimore will always be at the bottom of the totem pole, as we’ve been for the last hundreds of years and thru every Black run administration and majority on the city council in this city.

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