30 YEARS LATER, CITY RENEWAL IS STILL A PROMISE UNFULFILLED

Urban Chronicles

Two Sundays ago, The New York Times ran a travel story calling
Baltimore the "forgotten middle child among attention-getting Eastern
cities" but noting that a "civic revival ... has given out-of-towners
reason to visit."

Two days later, seven people perished and six others were injured in a
fire in a rowhouse crammed with people in one of many city
neighborhoods untouched by renewal.

The former was the kind of coverage Baltimore didn't get when I moved
to the city to work for The Sun in 1977 -- before Harborplace and the
National Aquarium; Meyerhoff Symphony Hall; the renovated Hippodrome
Theatre; and a host of other projects, big and small, too numerous to
mention here.

The latter, sadly, is the kind of tragic event that has occurred too
often between now and then.

Thirty years is a long time -- in the life of a person and a
city.

During the time that I've been in the city, a virtual generation of
civic and political leaders has passed away -- Clarence Du Burns,
Walter Sondheim Jr., Howard "Pete" Rawlings, Walter Orlinsky, Clarence
Blount and, this week, Parren Mitchell.

The city also had its first black mayor in Burns; its first elected
black mayor in Kurt Schmoke; and, now, its first woman mayor in Sheila
Dixon.

And by electing Martin O'Malley mayor in 1999 and helping him become
governor last year, the city defied two pieces of prevailing wisdom:
that after William Donald Schaefer became governor in 1986, the city
would never have a white mayor; and that no future mayor of the city,
white or black, could become governor.

When I came to Baltimore, the city's population, which had already
been declining, was an estimated 830,000; today, it is about 640,000.

The year I came to Baltimore was the last one in which the number of
homicides in the city -- 171 -- was below 175. Since 1977, 8,063
people have been killed in the city, including 124 slain this year
through midday yesterday. Thirty years ago, the city's homicide rate
was 20.6 for every 100,000 residents; last year, it was more than
twice that, at 42.9 per 100,000 residents.

Other signs are more positive.

Three decades have been time enough to witness the deterioration of
the public housing high-rises -- and their subsequent demolition and
rebirth as mixed-income rowhouse communities. It has been time enough
to see the last gasp of the city's Howard Street retail corridor --
and its nascent revival as part of the west-side renaissance. It has
been time enough to see the departure of one NFL team and the arrival
of another -- and the tearing down of a stadium and the building of
two others. And it has been time enough to watch the collapse of the
neighborhoods north of the Johns Hopkins medical complex -- and the
near-completion of the first buildings for a planned new community
that will cover dozens of acres.

The last 30 years have seen the emergence of several nonprofit groups
- -- the Abell, Casey, Goldseker and Weinberg foundations -- that have
come to play a significant role in the city's efforts at
revitalization by funding programs, projects and studies.

A report by one of those groups, the Goldseker Foundation, issued in
1987, produced one of the most enduring descriptions of the city
during the time I've been here: "There is rot beneath the glitter."

Two decades later, there is substantially more glitter -- across the
Inner Harbor in Locust Point; eastward along the waterfront in Harbor
East and Canton and in parts of downtown. And there are projects such
as Frankford Estates in Northeast and Clipper Mill in North Baltimore,
plus individual rehabs in neighborhoods across the city, which, while
not glitzy, are substantial and important. That is no small feat, and
it should not be minimized.

But there is still far too much rot. City planners classify nearly a
fifth of the city's residential areas as distressed, based on such
factors as sales prices and vacancy rates.

The city's poverty rate has been little changed from the late 1970s to
today, with nearly one in five families living below the poverty level.

On crime, the city seems to be forever searching for the right
strategy, let alone the right results; on education, more time seems
to be spent debating who will control the schools than discussing how
to improve what goes on in the classroom.

Over 30 years, we seem to have slowly come to the realization that
drugs are a medical as well as a criminal problem. But the city hasn't
been able to marshal the resources -- for expanded treatment,
training, education and housing -- needed to give addicts the help
they need and to help ensure we don't get another generation of drug
abusers.

Personally, the city has been good to me. But that's partly -- check
that, largely -- because I've had the money and good luck to live in a
safe and stable neighborhood, where house values have appreciated
six-fold over 30 years and where the corners are the locales for
telephone pole postings for yard sales, not the province of drug dealers.

Only when people in those distressed areas can make a similar
statement -- that the city has been good to them -- can Baltimore be
said to have achieved true civic renewal.

After 30 years and four months, Eric Siegel is taking a buyout offer
from The Sun. His last day in the newsroom is tomorrow.