Broken promises and an evaporated dream: Innovation Village West Baltimore

Today I take the rare step of using this blog to amplify an article published in a commercial media outlet, the Business Journal's article titled: 

"They Never Followed Through"

The article is written by Morgan Eichensehr and Ethan McLeod.

Innovation Village founder Richard May at a  media
event" on June 20, 2016 (Photo: Philipsen)

It is a follow up I should have done myself after my 2016  hopeful reports about the Baltimore Innovation Village on this blog here and here.

I knew that not much has been left of Innovation Village for some time, but feared to "rub it in" when Baltimore has enough other broken promises. But even a layperson's "journalism" should maintain the unflinching view that I had, even when Innovation Village was first launched.

My skepticism was obvious in my opening lines of the article under the title:" Innovation Village: What's Next?"

In a well attended public "press conference" long on speakers and short on specifics, Innovation Village, a private and non-profit undertaking got another boost in public awareness. [...]

Questions about the hype also characterized the last paragraph of my article:

Practically minded people in the community, people who have been in the trenches of actual community development work for years, ask what specifically the Innovation Village has done or will do. That is a fair question. Proclamations alone won't do. But the array of people in support of the concept is impressive

The skepticism turns out to have been quite justified as today's inquisitive BBJ article shows. It quotes disenchanted stakeholders:

Dale Terrill, who served as vice president for the Mount Royal CDC before he left the organization in 2017, said May was “a very good salesperson and promotional marketeer,” but the internet access initiative amounted to “a farce” without any real plans for implementation. Mount Royal CDC itself has lapsed, having forfeited its registration last year, per state business records.

Lucas, of Moms as Entrepreneurs, said the whole situation is the kind that makes West Baltimore residents feel disillusioned and so often distrusting of those who come into their communities and say they want to build something new.
“Everyone made such a big deal about these big plans...and none of that ever really materialized,” she said. “Where was the accountability? Where is Rich May?" (BBJ)

Tammira Lucas and Leon Pinkett at the media event
(Photo: Philipsen)

The idea of investing in West Baltimore via innovation start-ups and technology was and is wonderful. Instead of innovation concentrations in already well to do cities and their wealthy communities, Baltimore would harness the start-up culture for investment in its poorest neighborhoods that had gained international notoriety after the death of Freddie Gray. Problem is, Baltimore's pool venture capital available for start-ups doesn't measure up to other cities.

"Technology mirrors those who developed it. We must not just be consumers but drivers" [of smart cities and] do the analysis and the math ourselves." (York Eggleston of Semantic Labs at the Baltimore Smart City summit 2017)

For his public "press conference" about Innovation Village Richard May, "the good salesman" had managed to bring out everyone with a name in Baltimore. They all lined up to take the podium on a warm and sunny June Monday in 2016: Congressman Elijah Cummings, Mayor Pugh, MICA President Hoy, Urban League President Howard Henderson, Delegate Barbara Robinson, Delegate Keith Haynes, BDC CEO Bill Cole, Councilman Mosby and Leon Pinkett, III, Assistant Deputy Mayor for Economic and Neighborhood Development. A slew of groups who practice equity innovation in Baltimore such as Jeff Cherry of Conscious Venture Labs, Sheldon Caplis of the Food Hub, Joe Jones of the Center for Urban Families and Tammira Lucas of Moms as Entrepreneurs seemed to vouch for the solidity of the concept. The late Congressman Elijah Cummings said:

"This is a faith event. It takes a village for a city to be healthy and children to be what they are meant to be. We finally have a model. We are under a microscope. How will we do in changing the trajectory of so many young people?

...Diversity is not our problem but our promise.

Congressman Cummings in 2016 at the same event
(Photo: Philipsen)

We make sure we will be here for the launching" [of Innovation Village]. [...]all of Baltimore" should be rising:...I will say 'all' until I die". (Congressman Elijah Cummings)

This is a large group of people to disappoint and essentially deceive. Worse, though, the result represents another broken promise for West Baltimore, where no big promise ever came through, from Jim Rouses' envisioned turn-around to the cancelled State Center and Red Line projects, to "North Avenue Rising" which due to lack of City investment never grew beyond being a streetscape and bus lane project.

The 2016 press conference took place in front of Coppin's big new Tech Center. Behind it literally the notion that an Innovation Hub needs to be backed by an institutional partner. However, Coppin was only a photo-op, there was never a formal agreement for Coppin to be an institutional anchor, plus: Coppin's Tech facility is also more promise than reality. The university is reeling from lack of enrollment and has neither staff nor resources to fill its own tech center with tech content, let alone provide the backbone for a concept like Innovation Village. This left Rich May doing his thing until he didn't feel like it any more. 

Founder Richard May can't be found anywhere, according to the BBJ, even his partners haven't heard from him for over a year. Partner Andre Robinson is sanguine about it. He told the BBJ:

“[Innovation Village] was essentially a framing moment, but never rose above that. It fell apart and that was a big blow. But we have to shake it off and look at what we learned. We have to continue the work of building an inclusive, engaged Baltimore.” (Andre Robinson) 

Richard May still active at a BIW '17  event

  

Robinson, always good with catchy terms, essentially tells us, the idea is described ("a framing moment"), but it didn't come off the ground. What he doesn't say is that the"blow" to the idea leaves it blemished. It is hard to imagine that another high powered group would come out any time soon to embrace Innovation Village 2.0, even less likely will it be that vulnerable communities would embrace it.

The warning signs were there, early on. West Baltimore stakeholders who had been in the trenches for years were miffed about May swooping in and getting all the attention. Some said they were not consulted.  As the BBJ enumerates in its article, Innovation Village's physical presence shriveled from being "an anchor" Madison Park North, a new mixed use development planned for Reservoir Hill along North Avenue that is in itself a broken promise, to being housed in Mondawmin Mall (more broken promises) and eventually finding refuge in a branch facility of the Baltimore Community College on 2600 Liberty Heights.

Innovation Village promised bringing education, jobs and opportunities to West Baltimore, needs that are now bigger than ever, given the huge economic downturn and the health hazards that COVID has brought and which hits disinvested and disadvantaged communities harder than others. Access, knowledge and control of innovation (i.e. information) technology is more relevant for equity than ever as well.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Innovation Hubs elsewhere: Curbed: Can Cities Create Innovation Hubs that Work for the Entire Economy?

The Russian Roulette of leaky gas pipes

Some Baltimoreans had just comforted themselves that a massive explosion like the one in Beirut would not happen in here, no matter how many complaints there are about the competence of local government. Nobody would put thousands of tons of Ammonium Nitrate into a warehouse and then throw away the keys. But then three Baltimore rowhouses blew away on a bright and sunny summer morning, just like that. The destruction happened on a much smaller scale than in Beirut, but what neighbors stared at in the 4200 block of Labyrinth Road in Baltimore's Milbrook neighborhood looked quite similar to what happened in Lebanon.

What's left of three rowhouses in Park Heights

Three houses were entirely flattened, people were trapped in the rubble and neighbors could feel the blast wave blocks away where it blew windows and doors out of their frames and knocked people and items over in the process. On a hot and humid Monday morning, the only plausible explanation for the blast is natural gas. The cause, however is officially unknown as of this writing. Gas is carried through lines which crisscross the city almost under every street, providing a fairly clean and efficient source of heat for furnaces, hot water heaters, dryers and stoves in tens of thousands of homes for a total of over 600,000 customers in City and County. Each of these appliances can be faulty and cause a leak.

The homes on Labyrinth Road were not some abandoned vacant structures with squatters in them, but neat home-owner or renter-occupied  houses with front and back yards in a block with one gap. The gap was adjacent to the three destroyed homes, which is why some initial reports spoke of four destroyed homes.

The three houses from the left are no longer standing. (Google Streetview)

Labyrinth Road isn't much in the news, nor is the labyrinth of pipes buried under our streets; until something goes wrong and water shoots out of ground in a giant geyser, a sinkhole opens up and swallows entire cars, or electric power goes out.

The most spectacular failure of all, though, is a gas leak that leads to an explosion, often combined with a devastating fire. In a city where the infrastructure generally has surpassed its intended life cycle, the idea that corroded leaky gas lines can be anywhere becomes unnerving, once one becomes aware of the destructive force of gas.  Luckily, in Park Heights whatever fire there may have initially been (some black smoke was reported) was snuffed out by the debris itself. Still, two people died and at least seven were injured, dozens were displaced from their no longer habitable homes. The full urban disaster response system, well organized in Baltimore, swung into action and remained busy all day and night to the point of exhaustion just to deal with the immediate aftermath of the explosion.

A labyrinth of gas pipes of various sizes crosses the City (SUN photo)

Natural gas travels from wellheads to consumers through a whole series of different types of pipes.

Huge new shale gas reservoirs retrieved through fracking have made gas more competitive and allowed the US to replace coal and reduce overall carbon emissions.

The country, in fact, has now so much natural gas, that a shipping facility in Calvert Cliff was retooled from import to export. 

In that case, gas would be liquefied, i.e gas under so much pressure that it is forced into a liquid state. But already, doubts about fracking and gigantic gas pipelines have reversed the fortune of this particular fossil fuel. Fracking has been banned in Maryland and elsewhere and just last month the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline has been abandoned midway through construction and after Virginia-based Dominion Energy and North Carolina-based Duke Energy had spent $3.4 billion on the project. Gas is a fossil fuel and not a green fuel. California and some other places have lately legislated gas bans that prohibit new "natural" gas hook-ups.

Pipelines, flowlines, gathering lines, transmission lines, distribution lines, and service lines, by contrast, carry gas in the gaseous state at varying rates of pressure. The higher the pressure of gas in a  gas line, the more potentially dangerous an accident with that line could be, as in the series of September 2018 Massachusetts gas fires and explosions that came from an accidentally over-pressurized line.  If local lines, not meant for high pressure, are suddenly inundated with high-pressure gas, it could result in an explosion by either the pipes themselves exploding or, more common, causing gas to leak out of pipes and valves and into homes, where it could be ignited by small sparks such as the ignition lights of the devices using gas. Rapid pressurization of normally low pressure pipes could be caused by a failure at a valve that separates high- and low-pressure pipelines or some type of human error in setting those valves. At this point, there is no indication that there was any over pressured gas pipe. More likely would be a leak from a degraded pipe that could have caused a large accumulation of gas somewhere underground or in the basement of a structure.  BGE stated late on Monday that it has found no leaks on the service lines to the destroyed buildings nor in the nearest main. BGE dates the gas lines to the 1960s. It says the lines in the area of the explosion were last inspected in July 2019. 

Nearly 4000 hazardous (dark) gas leaks (non hazardous: light blue)
reported for the BGE service area.
Source: Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration

The network of gas lines is much like a tree with a trunk at the center and ever thinner branches at the perimeter, or like the water system with huge pipes becoming at the end just 2" or less when servicing a house. When all those pipes become obsolete at the same time, because much of the network in the core city has been installed in the same period, we have a problem. That is the problem Baltimore is facing with all infrastructure in its older sections, whether it is water, sewer or gas. Yesterday's explosion, near the Baltimore City/County line in a somewhat newer section of the city, did not involve the oldest pipes.

Baltimore gas lines leak at a high rate as the Baltimore SUN reported in an article published in September of last year. In the article  BGE Vice President of gas distribution Chris Burton is quoted attributing the dramatic increase of leakages to what he called “accelerating failure" of  ¾-inch gas delivery pipes in suburban Baltimore which were installed before the 1970s. It’s a problem in many older cities and suburbs, he said. Older gas lines were constructed with cast iron pipes that corrode over time.  Burton says that BGE is replacing about 50 miles of old pipes each year under the the 2013 mandate of the Maryland Strategic Infrastructure Development and Enhancement program, or STRIDE. BGE has set aside $963 million in a five-year plan for gas infrastructure upgrades. 

Reportedly about 1,100 miles of BGE’s 7,500 miles of gas pipes are made of old cast iron that needs to be replaced. BGE told the SUN that they receive up to 30,000 calls a year about gas odor or suspected leaks. 600 people, plus 600 contractors are assigned to gas leak detection and repair. Gas leaks can undo a lot of the initial benefit of the normally clean burning natural gas over coal. A large component of un-burned gas is methane, one of the most potent greenhouses gases, at least five times worse than CO2. Undetected methane emissions from gas lines as well as from refineries and oil wells have been recently identified as being a much larger contributor to global warming than originally estimated. 

New yellow polyethylene gas replacement pipes (STRIDE image)

The problem of leaky gas pipes has not gone unnoticed for some time. A series of explosions has punctured the general disinterest in infrastructure: Three separate episodes in Queens in killed people, in the 2010s and a half-dozen others in New York City left people injured, according to federal records dating back 10 years. Across the country, a rupture in a major pipeline in San Bruno, California in 2010 caused an explosion that killed eight people. In 2011, a leak from an 83-year-old cast-iron main in Allentown, Pa., caused a blast that killed five people according to the New York Times. In Maryland a devastating gas explosion occurred in Columbia as recent as a year ago and destroyed 22 offices.

“It’s like Russian roulette. The chances are, you are going to be lucky, but once in a while, you’re going to be unlucky.” (Robert B. Jackson, a professor of environment and energy at Stanford University who has studied gas leaks in Washington, D.C., and Boston as quoted in the NYT).

New installation and replacement lines are usually made of plastic,  more specifically semi-rigid polyethylene, supposedly a gas pipe material that can last a hundred years. That's how old some of the cast iron lines also are. It can be expected that BGE and its parent company Exelon will come under pressure to accelerate its pipe replacement program. So far consumers can be charged as much as $2 a month for the gas replacement program. Other surcharges are for green energy. It remains to be seen, how much momentum the terrible explosion  will carry into the complicated deliberations of the State Public Service Commission and whether STRIDE will be further accelerated. 

Columbia gas explosion, August 2019

Gas, water, sewer, electric networks, public transit and housing are all on the ever larger list of items where the backlog of missed maintenance and infrastructure repairs has become nearly unmanageable. That an aggressive course of action can pay off is shown by Duke Energy in Ohio, which also serves Cincinnatti. According to the NYT, beginning in 2002, Duke Energy began a 10-year, $700 million program to replace about 1,200 miles of cast-iron and bare-steel gas pipes. The number of leaks per miles for Duke Energy now ranks among the lowest in the country, the paper reports. STRIDES higher funded program anticipates full replacement of old pipes over 20 years.

The explosion In Northwest Baltimore shows once more, that the strategy of kicking the can down the road until a disaster happens is deadly and irresponsible. The responsibility rests with greedy utility companies that spend money on giant new projects instead of upkeep, politicians who prefer ribbon cutting over maintenance and with us consumers who don't want to pay the taxes and fees that are necessary to maintain a good state of repair. Of course, COVID has put us in a worse position to catch up. 

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

The article was updated  Tuesday, 8/11/20 at 16:00h for additional information from BGE