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December 27, 2006
Yes, let's give him a promotion
City passes '05 homicide total
With six days left in the year, a pair of Christmas weekend homicides pushed the number of homicides in Baltimore this year past the total for 2005, city police said yesterday.The city has recorded 270 homicides, one more than in 2005.
And then there's this editorial - the Baltimore Disparity - that shows that Baltimore isn't quite doing so well in other areas either.
But then you look at Baltimore.Here is a city with one of the higher poverty rates in the nation. Yet Baltimore's suburbs have less poverty than those of just about any other metropolitan area. What can account for this stark, and long-entrenched, disparity? Why did Detroit's suburbs suffer with the collapse of their core city, but Baltimore's did not? The answer, we suspect, is rooted in part in the fact that, unlike eastern Michigan, Central Maryland remains one of the wealthiest areas in the country - and that choices and tradition and prejudice have served to isolate the city.
Prejudice? (In a city that's 65% black and 32% white the city council is split 60/40.) How about one party mismanagement? Or would that go against the Meme that the past 5 years have been a rousing success?
Blogdigger tags: Baltimore City, Murder Rate.
Posted by SoccerDad at December 27, 2006 1:03 AM | TrackBack
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The Sun ignores the wealth of Maryland's Black community in Columbia, Randallstown and Owings Mills. While those areas don't at all have the wealth of the Vanderbilt estates near Hunt Valley, there is a lot of quiet, non-flashy equity and net worth being built in those areas.
If anything, it is the prejudice of Black Baltimoreans who are prejudiced against the idea of their children getting pathetic educations and facing higher crime exposure - for twice the taxes, taken by an infamously corrupt and ineffective municipal government (which O'Malley, in fairness, did improve slightly with CitiStat.) So what do these "prejudiced" Black people do? Horrors, they move to Woodlawn and New Town for a better life.
There are several other factors in play. Detroit's public transit system is a total joke, far worse than Baltimore's. Its metropolitan area is more spread out, but it has more to do with Motor City politics. Detroit's municipal land area stretches for miles, such that if you are poor, and the City of Detroit itself is hopeless for jobs, you HAVE to live near your work even if that means giving up urban social support systems, since no urbanization economy of scale exists to support carless transportation.
The suburbs of Detroit also expanded out before Baltimore's did. Suburban Dearborn and more distant Flint were major automobile manufacturing centers for cars; prosperous in their heyday but generating poverty and desolation in their wake, and much more precipitously than what struck Baltimore with steel and automobile manufacturing's complete decline.
Finally, if the editorial board thinks that the Baltimore is more prejudiced against the City than is southeastern Michigan is against Detroit, he/she is dead, dead wrong. Blacks and whites in Baltimore live in proximity here and there are large numbers of Black middle class residents west of the City. Such is simply not the case in Detroit; Eight Mile Road does not look at all like Seven Mile Lane in Baltimore. Anti-black and anti-Detroit sentiment there is severe there, even though Detroit's crime rates are arguably slightly lower than Baltimore's.
Posted by: Bruce at December 27, 2006 9:31 AMI guess I'm prejudiced against political corruption and mismanagement, high crime, and some serious suckage of state tax dollars out of the pockets of Marylanders who live elsewhere.
Posted by: Attila (Pillage Idiot) at December 27, 2006 2:34 PM