Why circling the wagons is probably not what the City needs

That the City's last big annexation occurred exactly a century ago and that the resulting boundaries were made immutable by a  not so secretly racist referendum in 1948 is an often cited reality which has served to explain Baltimore's particular problems.

 “It’s hard to think, looking back, of any single public decision that’s proved to be more important to Baltimore City than that question in the 1948 election. It was a very shortsighted decision.” (Bob Embry)

Indeed, aside from Virginia's cities, which under provisions of the Dillon rule are constitutionally separated from their counties, and the District of Columbia, which is an all around anomaly,  only St Louis and Baltimore are "independent cities", i.e. cities that are not part of a county but separate entities from it, which usually means they can't expand. In a region of over 2 million people, Baltimore is a geographically small entity which is choked by the ever growing surrounding  Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties. This isn't so much a problem because the city doesn't have enough space, but it is a fiscal problem, because too people preferred living further out with more nature, areas the City couldn't annex. As a result, Baltimore County has now a larger population than Baltimore City and charges only half the property tax. Of course, Baltimore County hasn't been the latest frontier for some time, losing its more upwardly mobile people to Harford and Howard Counties. Neither a smart nor a sustainable pattern. To manage such "dumb growth" where one jurisdiction simply cannibalizes the next one, there is a State Department of Planning and even an Office for Smart Growth, but the Republican Governor isn't one who wants to interfere with "home rule" and local zoning. So he shelved O'Malley's "Plan Maryland", an attempt to better coordinate what each jurisdiction is doing.  A new State plan  is underway because it is mandated by law, but there isn't a clear agenda for it, certainly not one that could be called "smart growth".

Because of Baltimore's geographic insularity, plenty of people working in Baltimore don't live in the city, not even those who are employed by City government.

 "Do you live in the City" has become the litmus test that City residents like to apply with ever more fervor, the more a sense of crisis spreads. Many blame the corruption and poor services of the police on the fact that so many officers don't live "in the community" and the Mayor makes city residency a requirement for any new senior staff she hires.

Ryan Dorsey did some data analysis which he published in his most recent newsletter. It shows that almost one half of City employees have their home outside the City lines and that a majority of those with higher salaries live outside the City.

Graphic from Dorsey's Newsletter

Only 53% of City employees are City residents, but they take home less money than the 47% of City employees who are not. Employees who work in the City but live outside the City don’t pay income taxes here and don't spend their paychecks - funded by your property taxes - here.(Dorsey Newsletter)

Does the argument that the City would be better off if more of its own employees would live where they work? On the face of it, it makes plenty of sense. Surely it would be preferable that those who receive a paycheck out City coffers would pay their taxes back into those same coffers instead of enhancing the fiscal health of a neighboring jurisdiction; that they would buy their groceries and goods in the city and support local retail, vote in local elections and generally care more about their community.

On the other hand, the tendency to circle the wagons in crisis is not always a good instinct since casting the net wider may yield more solutions. Suspecting everybody as unreliable who wasn't born or raised  in a place or otherwise has bona fide citizenship credentials is already a national past-time, should we really repeat it locally? Would police born and raised in West Baltimore be any better in policing the disinvested communities there? One can easily argue that nepotism, corruption and unbecoming networks would be even more pervasive in that case.

Graphic from Dorsey's Newsletter

Transportation continues to be a huge driver of economic inequality and our policy priorities remain misplaced, having a real cost in money and lives. Consider that even though the vehicle non-access rate is 30% in the City, it is as high as 80% in Baltimore’s historically red-lined communities.(Dorsey Newsletter) 

Would a Baltimore based transit agency like the old Baltimore Bus Company provide better transit than the State run MTA? Many believe so. A transit agency that would respond to the Mayor and Council seems like an appropriate response when the State prefers rural highways over urban transit. Even aside from the cost question, would it really make sense in a time where systems need to integrate over a large space with a common fare-card and coordinated schedules and hubs?

A modern metropolitan area functions on a much bigger scale typically across several jurisdictions, Baltimore is not alone in this. Transit, water, energy, all those systems operate across City boundaries. No private company would ever consider limiting its talent pool to a small segment based on geography.

Baltimore City is still Maryland's economic engine, in spite of all the blood letting. Peripheral jurisdictions shouldn't get the idea that they are propping up the City, a narrative that the the Governor often feeds more or less subtly. Certain school fund transfers or token payments for Baltimore's cultural institutions notwithstanding, the region does not support the city in a manner that would be appropriate if one sees the entire metro area as an organic unit. Part of the lack of support consists in suburban locals not pulling their weight: The suburbs don't provide enough affordable housing, do little for the homeless or the addicted and generally happily let the City carry the many burdens of concentrated poverty. The maps and statistics of the Opportunity Collaborative tell the story and provide the data for what is needed.

Minneapolis area tax base sharing (MinnPost 2011)

“If Baltimore City and Baltimore County had consolidated—obviously, that’s something that’s not really possible any more, but if it had been possible and if it had happened—Baltimore would be the fifth largest city in America in population. It would have all kinds of different resources and tools and flexibility to deal with the urban problems.” (David Rusk as quoted in Baltimore Magazine)

What is really necessary, then, is not that each jurisdiction circles the wagons, but that regional collaboration increases and that a true cost sharing system is implemented. Tax base or revenue sharing between counties and cities is usually seen as deeply un-American and something that couldn't happen in our metro region, even though it is reality in several regions of the US, most famously in the Minneapolis region where such a compact exists since 1971.

The Fiscal Disparities Act, which took effect in 1975 after being upheld by the courts, requires all communities in seven-county area to share 40 percent of the annual growth in their commercial-industrial tax base. The tax base is redistributed to communities under a formula based on their fiscal capacity to provide urban services.The idea was to reduce the disparities between the "haves" and the "have-nots" — communities with a lot of commercial-industrial property and those lacking in such development.(Source)

In spite of the deep crisis of Baltimore police it would also be unpopular to hand city police entirely to the State where it structurally already resides in part. My birth-city of Stuttgart did just that a few years back. Not because their police was under federal investigation for corruption and rights violations, but because the City of Stuttgart found it too expensive to maintain its own force and City and State were in conservative hands. Nobody seems to mind that the cops changed their uniforms, even now when Mayor and Governor hail from the Green Party. In the US a growing number of mostly smaller cities ditched their own police as well in favor of control by the county, a solution that the "independent city" status of Baltimore clearly precludes.

The Baltimore crisis requires unorthodox responses and upending some of the long-held believes of the City, the counties and the State alike. The upcoming elections for Governor and Baltimore County Executive present excellent opportunities to move the needle in the right direction.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA