Baltimore Revival: Saving a Neighborhood. Or Not.

The Baltimore Sun is running a series about efforts to save a decrepit neighborhood in the city's east end. Part of those efforts involve refurbishing an old brewery building, but "experts" predict that more will be necessary. A lot more:

The experience of Baltimore and other cities demonstrates that such areas can be turned around - but at a steep price. At a minimum, urban experts say, it will take an investment of $20 million or more to revitalize the brewery area, a sum that is far beyond anything that is currently being contemplated.

Successive city administrations in Baltimore have largely agreed with Booker that the area will not improve without public intervention, although they have been reluctant to expend substantial resources there.

The newspaper sees this as quite a paradox. One requiring large words to describe:

The abandonment of the blocks around the shuttered brewery illustrates the difficulties of drawing private investment to decayed urban neighborhoods - as well as the Solomonic choice facing public officials. With limited public and private resources, which areas do you invest in and what happens to those left out?

Solomonic? Sheesh.

And at any rate, would it really have been tough to come up with $20 million? I guess so. Maybe because not so long ago the city decided to spend $300 million to build a hotel. Right next to the convention center. The same convention center that was supposed to save downtown but didn't. A downtown which has already been saved by hundreds of millions spent on the Inner Harbor and Pier Six and the Galleria and Camden Yards and Ravens Stadium, etc.

For that $300 million, the city could have "saved" 15 neighborhoods like the one surrounding the brewery.

I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing for the neighborhood that it didn't happen. City leaders built the Inner Harbor 30 years ago and the world's most successful urban revitalization STILL isn't drawing enough private investment downtown to preclude the need for a $300 million public investment in a hotel right next to all those messianic amenities.

Solomon, indeed.. 

Comments

[Jonathan Potts]

I read a book, written about six years ago, called "Comeback Cities" that described successful efforts to revitalize rundown neighborhoods in several cities nationwide. (The authors did not look at downtowns, focusing mostly on predominantly residential neighborhoods and former housing projects.) While some public investment was necessary, the successful plans always were generated by community organizations and neighborhood groups. Now, this takes the kind of grass-roots leadership that often is lacking, a problem that afflicts Pittsburgh. And it requires government to cede control, something that officials often are loathe to do.

[Mark]

Amen.

Downtown development can take place at a grassroots level. Whether it's through the elusive invisible hand, or through programs, subsidy, or political/legal intervention, small investors (that is, people who have a lot more money than me to invest) can be attracted to Downtown. What's going to bring more of them to the table?

[Sam M]

Mark,

I think the problem is pretty clear: There is no table.

Or there is one. But it is in some back room at city hall. Jack Piatt is going to sit there by himself. Because as always, the city wants to give someone exclusive rights to develop the URA properties.

So even if the grassroots effort was there, it would come to nothing.

Maybe that's why it's not there.

[John Morris]

I think it used eminent domain to get the table