Baltimore a tragedy? Time for better explanations

“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (The Tragedy of MacBeth, William Shakespeare)

Baltimore a tragedy?

Is Baltimore a tragedy, as the New York Times headlined a story a few weeks back, or are Baltimore leaders tragic figures as in Shakespeare's MacBeth?

Either way, with tragedy as an explanation, bad outcomes are unavoidable by definition,  taking out the dimension of accountability and responsibility. If events unfold according to pre-ordained karma and actors are only cogs of a machinery which they don't control, then they can't be blamed either. Consciously or not, those who use this term put the causes for the bad outcomes into a sphere that is unreachable, whether they mean "fate", "the system" or "the culture".

On the other end,  those who attribute all the calamities to individuals because they are evil, greedy, incompetent, too ambitious or any combination thereof put all the blame in one place and hold the rest of society harmless.

Pugh with PG County Executive Angela
Alsobrooks in March of this year

Both, the higher-power and the bad-person explanation maintain that the institutions and people of Baltimore don't have to take any responsibility; finger-pointing is enough, possibly combined with feeling sorry for oneself for living in such a place. Potentially even feeling exceptional in a bad way, assuming that Baltimore has a special place in the Olympus of the gods. "We can never get a break, police scandals, riots, corruption, population loss, it never ends". Those who like to see themselves as victims sometimes also blame the media. Not for the bad results but for the bad news about them. "The false narrative" about Baltimore. Again, the fault resides with "others". (It were the media, by the way, that uncovered the current cases of self dealing at the UMMS board).

None of those explanations will set Baltimore's trajectory on a better path, because none are based on an analysis which  properly links cause and effect. Not having a good explanation condemns continued repeat of the same mistakes.

As someone who lived, voted and engaged for 18 years in a different political system and who has come here by choice and then engaged here for almost twice as long, I won't be able to do the necessary analysis in this space, but I will attempt to explore to what extent Baltimore is really special, has unique personalities, or represents a system that must produce these outcomes. Reason would suggest, that in the conclusion, there isn't one single explanation.

Its the system, stupid!

Those who blame "the system" either mean the "Baltimore system" or they talk about the political system at large. What speaks for an explanation that is bigger than Baltimore, is the simple fact that many other cities are gripped by scandals and political failures just as ours or bigger. Just think New Orleans, Detroit, Flint or Chicago. Those who tend to say that "the entire system is corrupt" can find the common denominator between those cities and use  a set of explanations such as de-industrialization, capitalism, racism etc. to craft their favorite pattern to see the world, develop a fitting ideology. Capitalism as the culprit, for example, receives much new fuel every day the current president remains in office and glorifies individual greed over common interest. Racism and white supremacy would be similar broad explanations, especially if combined with capitalism as a driver. A more targeted criticism would aim for campaign financing as the source of all evil. It, again, can be combined with both of the other explanations. Indeed, those three factors combined create a toxic brew with which the downfall of many cities and their politicians can be explained.

Harlem Park at US 40

There is a class of people in power which buys political influence to maximize profit and most power resides in the hands of older white man. The fact that Baltimore's most recent mayors were all black and female or that Associated Black Charities is involved in the current scandal as well, hardly slows those down, who know the true culprit. Those female mayors were simply "mascots of their political system" and ABC was  "collateral damage" (Dayvon Love). That is how it was explained by a guest on Monday's Midday radio show. That the exercise happy mayor had used a little African American girl to promote better family health through a figure that looked like her is not noteworthy in this broad brush approach to explain the bigger context, nor that the mayor's fundraisers were always thick with black entrepreneurs enjoying their access. While the systems theories are intellectually satisfying and even plausible, if the problem is that big and pervasive, a solution can't be found in Baltimore. Nothing less than a veritable national revolution would be needed, a prospect for which only very few have an appetite, even among the disenfranchised. So how actionable is this explanation?

Its the person, stupid!

A much less political explanation springs straight from the American obsession with public personas. In that narrative everything becomes gossip and the Internet is its holy grail. The three African American female mayors of Baltimore fare especially bad in this arena, each received a whole litany of adjectives that male politicians rarely ever attract.  Most of the condescending comments had to do with looks, fashion, hair, facial expressions and the like. It would be easy to dismiss those superficial ways of judging politicians, if the Internet wouldn't amplify these "explanations" on an almost inescapable scale. That is not to say that finding fault in the character of people is always slanderous or wrong. Sometimes the Internet provides a platform for thoughtful comments based on careful observation. For example, those of attorney Dan Sparaco, who served as Deputy Mayor under Stephanie Rawlings Blake and who also picked up on the question of tragedy and accountability.

Dialogue: Police Commissioner Davis with activists Devin Allen
and Kwame Rose

We’ve certainly had “tragic” figures in Baltimore, overcome by their own hubris or desire — like MacBeth, overcome by ambition, or Hamlet, overcome by indecision. Consider, for example, an elected official, with life-long dreams of becoming mayor, leveraging a position on the board of a very powerful institution, full of very powerful people, to profit from a book deal, then not fully disclosing it — only to become mayor, and then face losing it all, when the secret deal comes out.....There are a great many people served by this kind of thinking because it creates an unaccountable status quo. A status quo where results don’t matter. A status quo where leaders can get re-elected despite the state of our neighborhoods because nothing – not the problems, not the solutions – is their fault. This kind of no-accountability environment leads to corruption, and those who want to continue with “tragic thinking” should at least be honest about our “tragic flaw.” It’s not ambition. It’s not indecision. It’s not even greed. It’s the secret-keeping. It’s the denial.  Dan Sparaco March 22, 2019

 The overall effect of armchair commentators deliciously dissecting every move of every politician often before they are actually elected, is cynicism and contempt for public service. Every office holder is seen as a crook lining his or her pockets. This narrative conveniently overlooks that most politicians work very hard for little pay and that, if money were the objective, almost any other occupation would be more lucrative. When the system explanation is too broad, the individualistic character analysis is too narrow to lead to any actionable consequence other than better vetting at the time of "hire".

Its Baltimore, stupid!

The parochial inability to look beyond the hometown to see that other cities suffer from very similar experiences is instilling this particular feeling of helplessness common among residents: The idea that Baltimore is such a very special place, that it has its very own "culture" in which people behave in a specific way. Those behaviors attributed to one's peers is the expression of a collective inferiority complex, unless one believes to exist outside that "culture". The assumed Baltimore "culture" encompasses a lot of undesirable attributes. In Baltimore people somehow become especially prone to throwing trash in the street, driving like maniacs, killing other people, burning down their own neighborhood or electing corrupt officials. This too is a fatalistic explanation. It is easy to see that this particular way of seeing the hometown easily enables classicism and racism; still, this narrative is quite popular, no matter that even in  Smalltimore no longer everybody is necessarily born here. Not even the drinking water comes from only one source! An especially unproductive subset of Baltimore exceptionalism is the desire to fill every position with someone "from here" and the suspicion against folks moving into town from far away places, although Baltimore needs influx more than anything. Many hailing from other places just shrug their shoulders and do their thing, no matter how much Baltimoreans say it can't be done here, others actually stay away leading to the population stagnation. In short, the Baltimore exceptionalism isn't a rational explanation for anything and isn't far off from American Exceptionalism as a disastrous foreign doctrine relying on tariffs and walls.

New resources for disinvested neighborhoods: Barclay

Putting it all together

Obviously, any sound explanation for why Baltimore is one of the few cities that can't quite break out of the urban ills that have ransacked American cities for way too long, would need to go beyond those three simplistic, cartoonish narratives and allow some combination of all. Reality is typically not entirely black and white or binary as its called today, not even when it comes to race. Capitalism, racism and bad leadership provide a rich context for explanations for many problems that plague in one or the other form even very successful cities such as San Francisco, namely that poor people are left out, no matter how much money is sloshing around in corporate pockets.

Forces that produce bad urban outcomes can be observed way beyond the US: in the French "banlieue" as well as the slums of Bangalore and lately in the entire country of Venezuela. But they don't suffice to explain  the adventures of Healthy Holly in Baltimore. It is about time, to look at Baltimore's condition less in terms of what hand fate has dealt this place, and more in terms of what needs to be done to make this city and all its residents live up to their potential. This isn't a matter of a "narrative" or "branding", it is a matter of lifting an invisible lid that keeps the city from performing on par with its peers who operate under the same macro paradigms.

Mayor Schmoke at groundbreaking for
Hope III Sandtown initiative in 1992

One can't blame those who believe there must be something special going on in Baltimore that prevents success. If one reads the books of Finnish immigrant Antero Pietila "Not in my Neighborhood" and "The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins" one can see that a sense of inferiority and a tendency to self destruct has a long history here. But unlike a person, a city isn't defined by DNA and psychology can go only so far to explain it.

Nothing in the actual history and fabric of this city condemns it to perform below Pittsburgh, Philadelphia or Oakland. Or Detroit, for heaven's sake! The negativity with which residents view their city isn't unique, it also happens in all the other places with their own history of unrest, corruption, industrial decline, race tensions and large swaths of abandonment and poverty. And yet, some cities have broken through this and formed a consensus on how to progress.

Some of the necessary change has to do with leaders, some with policies, some with regulations and much with governance and how resources are applied. Baltimore in the orbit of Washington, located at the center of a prosperous, well educated and economically vital and growing region, blessed with ocean access, beautiful landscapes all around, rich architecture and most of all a diverse culturally rich population, has no real excuse not to  perform better. As far as I can tell, there is no need to start from the ground up again. Many of the right steps have been put in place in the last thirty years. Much progress has been made, even if it hasn't added up to a break-through yet.


Personal observations

Clearly, once one lived in the system and among its players, neither the people nor the system explanation is just dry theory. Instead real life provided juicy insights and experiences. I had been a small-potato borough council member for ten years in a Borough of Stuttgart, Germany where hobnobbing with the famous wasn't the way how things got done, because money didn't play this all important role in politics. In 10 years of being on the council I never attended any fundraisers, never received any other solicitation from the mayor or council members than to vote for them, nor did I ever ask for money. Instead, I edited a 40,000 copy monthly newsletter advertising our positions funded by some of our party member dues.

In my time here I got to know Donald Schaefer, Kurt Schmoke, Martin O’Malley, Sheila Dixon and Catherine Pugh as Mayors or Governors, sometimes one on one. Stephanie Rawlings Blake is missing in this line up, she was so elusive that I never had a real conversation with her.

What is somewhat "special" is that today none of these mayors seem to enjoy a high esteem among Baltimore residents, at least not across classes and races. Schaefer may enjoy the best reputation, but he is said to have been too focused on downtown. Schmoke is seen as ineffective, O'Malley as too ambitious and responsible for mass incarceration. Dixon as too corrupt, SRB as too quiet and reclusive, and now Pugh, as self dealing. This short-hand leaves few nuances and, indeed, suggests that Baltimore is special: incapable of electing a decent leader or incapable of nurturing one. This, in spite of a charter that gives the mayor plenty of power. Sure no single person can save an entire city,  even great leader needs a good team, and a great team still needs the support of the community. Greatness is not there at the start, it gets cultivated and grows on the job. Its like in a good marriage. It isn't the result of having found the perfect partner but of a long hard process of finding together. Baltimore's population seems to be too fractured to ever unite behind a team without tearing it down at the same time.

Sandtown in 2017

Shortly after I arrived in Baltimore I asked a well connected developer how I could become politically active here. His answer was: "If you can't make donations yourself, organize a fundraiser". I had wanted to know ways to introduce ideas and develop policies. When I asked the same developer why he wouldn't want to run for office, he said: "Too many skeletons in the closet". There in those two answers hid the entire malaise, the American political dilemma: The focus on money and the web of often improper connections. This is not unique to Baltimore, but thanks to the well cultivated parochialism, this toxic web is especially well dense here. The country of "open opportunity" displays in Baltimore a wall that is far from the border but was and remains hard to penetrate for any newcomer. But there is also this:  Power isn't beyond reproach. At least as many of the systemically advantaged developers tanked in my time here as politicians did. And in the American tradition of redemption, both, politicians and developers manage surprising come-backs even after they had been demolished or had imploded.

So I made my contacts through my work. As an urban design consultant on Baltimore's light rail and later for Port Deposit, I met Schaefer. When he had just become Governor with some magic move he had upended SHA's five year investment plan to add streetscaping in the historic Cecil County town. It was a kind of early Complete Streets move, so I liked it, but I was also stunned because it entirely circumvented the regular process.

Work also allowed me to meet Mayor Schmoke who, as the the Ivy League educated first elected black Mayor, who was for a while for Baltimore what Barack Obama later was for the country. His agenda was bold. Together with Jim Rouse, the Baltimore churches organized in BUILD and the Housing Department and their federal HOPE III funds he embarked on the attempt of turning Sandtown around. My firm designed vacant houses for rehabilitation. In 2015 after the Freddie Gray unrest, the world would get to know the Sandtown project as a big failure, in spite of $100 million that had been spent there.

O’Malley, who as council man had once been challenged by then Housing Commissionioner Dan Henson “to meet him in the alley”, had out-maneuvered the black candidates, was meaner than Schmoke, and went on to invent CitiStat and embrace a strategy of "building from strength", notably two biotechnology parks.  O'Malley's occasional  Rambo behavior interlaced with lyricism brought him many enemies which blamed him for the mass incarceration wave, which was then rolling through the entire nation. O'Malley's EBDI project started out with racist displacement. But by now it brought huge investments into a heavily disinvested area and spawned the revitalization of Oliver, Greenmount West and Barclay, more than ever happened in Sandtown.

Later, as a member of the first Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council I participated in bike rides with Sheila Dixon. and spoke with her at some length during holiday party table conversations. She seemed less educated but more authentic than O’Malley. Most of all, she listened to her advisers. Her downfall came sudden and swiftly. The cool and possibly more intellectual SRB who followed seemed a welcome antidote. But she ran aground in the rough waters of the uprising.

This line of experiences should have taught me to keep my distance from mayors. But I had met Pugh already when she was still on the council, and like me, a member of a State Task Force on Transit Oriented Development. I was fascinated to discover how she leveraged folks in power, whether they were community or business leaders from this most local level of political work, the council.  Her interest in art set her apart, manifest in her initiative Fish out of Water, a way of bringing in money which I had never heard of before. Then the marathon, which she not only brought to Baltimore but also ran herself , finishing with a glass splinter in her foot. Finally, the creative way how she forced Baltimore’s first new school in ages into existence by coercing the president of MICA, an ambitious architect and Seawall to do the design construction and capital funding. She announced a big act on Artscape’s main stage with aplomb. She wasn’t a local inbred, her experience in other big US cities, as past as TV anchor and Dean of Baltimore's Strayer University made her look much more world savvy than Schaefer or Dixon. Of course, in hindsight, her uncanny ability to collect money foreshadowed her eventual downfall.

Back then Pugh was an accessible and incessantly working city council person. I knew that being mayor had been a long dream of hers, and given her tenacity and versatility I expected she would excel in the job. Hopes were high in her transition team in which I participated. When she engaged Bloomberg and sat one day arm in arm with Zadik Khan, the former New York traffic commissioner who pedestrianized Times Square, I expected that she would begin a transportation revolution right here in Baltimore, not undo bike lanes. Her courage to show up in the midst of the unrest to face the upset young people at Penn and North was still fresh  in people's mind, an act that back then set her apart from SRB who seemed to be unable to decide what to do. Pugh's first cabinet meeting in a bus to Sandtown was a refreshing start.

But just as with Mayor Schmoke, the high expectations were met with early disappointments such as her veto against the minimum wage bill, her repeated missteps with several police commissioners and some department heads. Her entanglement with the powers to be always had a dark side, for example when she was chummy with a convicted Maryland lobbyist. A somewhat inebriated developer who wrestled my I-phone from me at her victory party to delete a photo I had taken of him with her was outright alarming. So yes, the flaws of the system shapes the leaders and enlarges their own weaknesses.

But the future of Baltimore cannot be fixated on personalities. Residents cannot forever reject their leaders like adolescents who realize with disgust that their parents aren't perfect. Nor can the future forever be blinded by race and all that has been done wrong to the majority of this city. That is not to say that politics should be "race blind" (there is no such thing), affirmative action and maybe even reparations have their legitimate place. Certainly re-investment, equity and affordable housing funds.

But it is time to acknowledge that many of these steps have already been taken. More equity: community benefits agreements, equity and affordable housing funds and a better balance of capital improvements have yielded first results. Progress should not be buried under the simplistic mantra that "all politicians are crooks" or that the poor never get a thing or that we have to start over from scratch. If there is tragedy in this recent scandal, it is the idea no progress has been made, the perpetuation of helplessness and the reinforcement of the seemingly unshakable truth that the poor never get a thing.

“There seems to be two basic groups in town, the power people and the everyday people. The power people — the people with money, the establishment — they work together very well. People find ways to get influence and connections, and people who don’t have those connections, they don’t get anything, or maybe a few crumbs. “While they’re being ignored, the power people are taking care of themselves.”Community activist Ralph Moore

From Schaefer to Pugh we have seen mayors who each learned from the past and have created an ever smarter system of responses to the inequities in our city, from recreation centers to social "wrap around services" to the way how vacant houses are handled or equity has been worked into the sustainability plan. There is hardly any "best practice" which hasn't been tried in Baltimore. What is missing is consistent implementation and persistence. It isn't the time to throw the school superintendent or the housing commissioner or the new health or police commissioner under the bus, even if they won't be able to perform miracles but only incremental progress. Baltimore is far from having only incompetent department heads, no matter how easy it is to diagnose incompetence on Facebook.

CitiStat and Mayor O'Malley

Many of those good initiatives may be set back through yet another scandal just when national policies make it harder and harder for cities to cater to ever growing needs, thus further nurturing a sense of hopelessness.

Baltimore's City Council has become bolder, younger and more diverse. Monday's resolution signed by all but the acting mayor is a sign of new confidence that now needs to be mined for a path forward with confidence.

"Baltimore will continue to have a cloud over its head while the investigations into Mayor Pugh's business dealings go on. These issues are extremely severe and prohibit the Mayor from focusing on the business of Baltimore. Today I join my colleagues in asking for the Mayor's resignation. Baltimore deserves a Mayor who can focus on reducing crime, improving our schools and restoring trust in our government." Statement from Councilman Brandon Scott 4-8-19)

It isn't clear yet, how this chapter will end. It is clear, though, that without a better way to analyze Baltimore's problems, progress will remain spotty and slow, in the manner of two small steps forward and one big one back. A better future isn't just a matter of hope or optimism but of an entire city putting in the hard work to build consensus and follow through on thorough analysis.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

updated for language and clarity