JHU POLITIK
special issue
our city December 2011
The Promise and Politics of Baltimore
Our City: The Politics and Promise of Baltimore
December 2011
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december 2011
interviews & editorial Looking Back to Move Forward
page 03
jeremy orloff, '13 assistant editor
Interview with Professor Matthew Crenson
page 04
randy bell, '13 assistant editor ana giraldo-wingler, '12 layout editor colette andrei, '14 staff writer anna kochut, '13 staff writer
Interview with Councilman Carl Stokes
page 10
matt varvaro, '13 assistant editor chloe reichel, '15 staff writer alex grable, '15 contributing writer
Interview with Professor Peter Beilenson
page 14
alex clearfield, '14 managing editor megan augustine, '13 staff writer rachel cohen, '13 staff writer colette andrei, '14 staff writer
editor-in-chief hannah holliday, '12 design by tessa law, '12 mica photography by will manning, '12
Our City: The Politics and Promise of Baltimore
December 2011
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December 2011
JHU Politik: Special Issue
looking back to move forward jeremy orloff
T
he city of Baltimore is a product of its rich history. The issues surrounding housing, education, and political representation exist today because of patterns in the past. Some problems can likely be traced to a single individual’s mistake, but many are the end result of movements, migrations, and broader economic change. Baltimore was founded at the beginning of the 18th century, an early city in the Catholic Colony of Maryland. The colony was governed by the Calvert Family, which had been granted proprietorship over the region by the King of England. The aristocracy of that early era is remembered in the names of the streets that crisscross the city. At that time, many of the richest land owners in Maryland never set foot in the new world but instead collected the fruits of their holdings from afar. These Europeans reaped the rewards of a colony and city being built by the sailors, workers, servants, and slaves that began to stream into the protected inner harbor. In 1826, an eight-year-old slave named Frederick Douglas was sent to Baltimore to work in the home of his master’s brother. Living in Fells Point had a profound impact on the future abolitionist’s worldview. He would later write in his personal narrative: I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked difference, in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation. He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the plantation. Even then, as the enslaved were traded on the docks, Baltimore offered a glimmer of hope in amongst the heartbreak. It was in Baltimore that Douglas learned to read and it was from Baltimore that he fled to freedom. Disparities, though perhaps not nearly as stark as those between the free and the bonded, have been everpresent in the city. A single lifetime after Douglas first entered the city, the technology and resources of early 20th century city planners left their mark on Baltimore’s landscape. Drive in any direction from the Johns Hopkins University campus and one can get a sense of just how huge a difference a few blocks can make. To the north, Roland Park is filled with columned mansions, built when that suburb was designed off-grid to separate it aesthetically and physically from the rest of the city. Directly to the east one can tour the burnt-out and desolate blocks that fan out from Greenmount Cemetery, a 19th century burial ground that holds the remains of Lincoln’s assassin and Johns Hopkins himself. When white flight during the 1950s created a distinct color barrier at the edge of town, the repercussions, in everything from healthcare to education, were powerful. The legacy of that continued geographic separation of the races, even after the end of legal segregation in schools and other public places, has filtered through the decades to the present day.
In 1968, in the days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., riots spread throughout the city. Those riots further segregated the city and irreparably damaged many vibrant black neighborhoods In their book, The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History, Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopes, and Linda Zeidman clearly explain the political situation. They write, “For most of its history, political power in Baltimore has been in hands of a relatively few privileged white men.” It was not until 1988 that an African-American was first elected to the mayor’s office. His name was Kurt Schmoke and his election brought an end to a white male establishment, which included both Nancy Pelosi’s father and brother. In a minority white city, the political machine had held onto power by taking advantage of the fragmented nature of the black community. In 1990, a study of housing disparity between whites and blacks in major American cities, conducted by the Brookings Institute, found that in Baltimore, African Americans paid a 30% segregation tax. In the study’s terms, this meant that for they money spent on housing, blacks got 30% less value than whites did. We are often told that being poor is expensive. This is certainly the case when it comes to housing in Baltimore. As late at the 1990s, poor blacks paid relatively much more for far less than their white counterparts living in other parts of the city. Men like George Peabody, Johns Hopkins, and Enoch Pratt donated their fortunes to educate the young men of Maryland. Their generosity worked best for an elite few. The education disparity in Baltimore has persisted ever since. A 2006 study illustrated the vast disparities that existed between high schools in the Baltimore area. Of the fifty largest school districts in the nation, both Baltimore City and its neighbor district, Baltimore County, were studied. They were, at that time, the 30th and 24th largest school districts in the country, respectively. Baltimore City was ranked as the second worst on the list, with a graduation rate below 40%. In the suburbs, over twice as many students—over 80% of the student population— graduated high school. The election of a black mayor was a symbolic shift for Baltimore. Compared to the aristocratic rule of Maryland’s beginning, true representatives of the people now govern Baltimore. There is additional good news as well. Since that 2006 study, graduation rates among Baltimore City Schools have grown considerably and for the 2010–2011 school year, 72%of students graduated. Despite some improvements, the last twenty years have seen the city suffer from many of the same old problems as well as new maladies. Drug use is rampant and because of that, blood-born diseases are commonplace. The city remains a collection of neighborhoods, with borders marked by different levels of wealth as reflected in education and housing. City hall is still reeling from a corruption scandal, in which Mayor Sheila Dixon was caught skimming funds off the top of aid to the poor. Yet, as in every era of Baltimore’s history, there are reformers, philanthropists, and community organizers working today to heal the wounds of this city. There are charter schools being built, neighborhoods being rethought and local economies being retooled. The lessons of the past are dark, but the future of Baltimore will be forged by those who refuse to give up despite the lessons of history.
Our City: The Politics and Promise of Baltimore
December 2011
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interview with
professor matthew crenson Dr. Matthew Crenson has taught at Johns Hopkins University for over 40 years and is currently a Professor Emeritus in Urban Government and American Political Development. randy bell ana giraldo-wingler colette andrei anna kochut
november 21st, 1:00pm
We want to give you as much leeway as we can to talk about the new studies you’re doing right now. And personal experiences too— you’ve been here in Baltimore for so long and you grew up here. crenson Let me start with that. I was born here and grew up here, and lived here for the first twenty years of my life, but never during that time, until the very end maybe, felt a strong attachment to the place, possibly because my parents had moved here from New York before I was born. They taught me how to talk. So I didn’t speak the way Baltimoreans speak. I always felt like a displaced New Yorker instead of a Baltimorean. But then I left Baltimore and went to graduate school in Chicago, and soon thereafter began to have persistent, repeated dreams of Baltimore street intersections; the city had insinuated itself into my subconscious…. Let’s start with race. First thing, Baltimore is not like any other city when it comes to race, for a couple of reasons. I came across an account given by a wealthy British social reformer named James Silk Buckingham who made a yearlong tour of the United States, in
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interview with dr. crenson
1840, and spent about a month in Baltimore, and when he got back to England he wrote a two volume book about his experiences. One of the things that he said was that in Baltimore, he heard less talk of race and slavery than in any other city he visited in the United States. He said nobody here tried to defend slavery; they mostly just didn’t want to talk about it. Unfortunately he didn’t explain why that was; I can only speculate about the reasons. The business and social elite in Baltimore in those days consisted of several different groups. First were people who migrated to Baltimore from the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland, who took slavery for granted and owned slaves. Another group was a bunch of Scots-Irish merchants, who came to Baltimore by way of Philadelphia or Pennsylvania, and they seemed to have been indifferent to slavery, in the sense that if they could make money out of it they would. There were a couple of them in fact who were slave dealers. And then there was a very large population of Quakers, who were merchants, some of whom arrived under the Act of Toleration in 1649 because the only other place they were welcome was in Pennsylvania and not always there. There were others who came later to take advantage of local prosperity, also another contingent that came during the Revolutionary War when Philadelphia was occupied by the British; it was bad for business. So you had these disparate elements: Quaker abolitionists along with a bunch of people who endorsed slavery or at least took it for granted. These people had to live together in what was then a relatively small town. They socialized together, they had to do business with one another. So there was one obvious subject they couldn’t talk about with one another, and when slavery came up, they changed the subject. You can see this even among the Quaker abolitionists; in 1789 there was a Maryland Society for the Abolition of Slavery—it disbanded in 1800. Somebody attempted to reorganize in 1806. It failed because the leading Quakers in Baltimore would not have anything to do with it. But in 1816 they organized a “Protection Society” whose purpose was not to free the slaves but simply to prevent those who were already free from falling into the hands of slavers. So in public, at least, the Quakers toned down their opposition to slavery in order to accommodate the people they had to live with. The people they had to live with also toned down their practice of slavery. They practiced ‘term slavery’, for example, almost like an indentured servitude; they said, “You’ll work for four years and I’ll give you $50 and your freedom.” In more recent times, the role of the Quakers was assumed by liberal Jews. In Baltimore even racists are wary about raising the race issue because they know it’s going divide whites and unify African-Americans. But on the side of African-Americans themselves, there are also difficulties in raising the race issue. In 1810 Baltimore had the largest population of free black people in the United States. In 1860, before Lincoln had freed a single slave, according to the census of that year, 92% of all the black people living in Baltimore were free, which meant that at a very early date they had the opportunity to build independent community institutions that were completely separate from those of white people. First was a church congregation organized in 1802, the Sharp Street Methodist Church, although it’s no longer on Sharp St. anymore. Since there was no school for African-Americans, they organized their own school and
that propagated throughout the black community, so in a very short time you had different black church congregations, black private schools, fraternal organizations, charitable organizations, social clubs—very dense organizational network. On the one hand that was a good thing; it meant, for example, at the end of the Civil War, when ex-slaves poured into Baltimore, also black soldiers who had been mustered out but were sick or wounded, there were institutions here to take care of them. The local trustees of the poor just waved them off [and] said, “We can’t handle all these people,” so it was black organizations that took care of them. But on the other hand what this organizational density did was to divide the black community. There were different churches, different denominations, different fraternal organizations, lots of leaders who were potential rivals with one another, different constituencies. And what that meant right up to the present is that while whites didn’t want to talk about race in public, African-Americans couldn’t agree who was going to be a spokesman for the race. So you had, all the way back to the 1820s, these conflicts within the AfricanAmerican community itself about what their position was going to be, most notably on the African colonization movement. Abraham Lincoln was one of its foremost proponents before he became president. The idea was that we would get rid of slavery gradually by shipping black people, whether free or enslaved, back to Africa, to Liberia. Baltimore was the hub of colonization activity because this was a way to talk about race without having conflict; in effect, they were exporting the whole thing out of the country. Among African-Americans it was a controversial movement because its presupposition was that black people could never live as full citizens with white people. Some people, one of them a guy named William Watkins who was a teacher at one of the church schools, wrote fiery letters to The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper, and made speeches in opposition to colonization. But he was opposed by other elements in the black community, including the pastor in his own church.
Do you think that the African-American community is disillusioned with the political process? Do you think that the community as a whole is disillusioned? There’s a lot of apathy. crenson Well there’s a very low turnout now, extremely low.
There are 637,000 people in Baltimore, 80% are voting age, according to the 2010 census; with only 380,000 registered voters, there’s 137,000 who are not registered, and only about 25% of these came out to the primaries in September. crenson And only 15% came out in the general election, maybe less.
This is a time when the old lines of conflict seem to have disappeared and new ones are still emerging.
Our City: The Politics and Promise of Baltimore
December 2011
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interview with dr. crenson
What is your reasoning behind that kind of apathy? Is there not enough fervor for the political process? crenson This is a time when the old lines of conflict seem to have disappeared and new ones are still emerging. For example, the four or five candidates in the democratic primary for mayor…no one of them emerged from the pack to set up a kind of polar opposition with the incumbent mayor. There is a split in the black community: there are those on the council and outside the council who oppose the mayor because they see her as being dominated, or at least in alliance with, the governor or with white power-brokers and with the political establishment of the city, including its members of Congress, the senators the Democratic political party establishment. And then there are those who say that her relationship with the governor is an advantage because it gives us a step up when we deal with the state, apart from the fact that O’Malley himself was formerly the mayor. In fact, the reason she is close to O’Malley is because her father, Pete Rawlings, was the chairman of the budget committee in the House of Delegates and was very powerful man and was one of the first black politicians in Baltimore who endorsed O’Malley in 1999 and the rumor was that she was the one (she was sitting on the city council at the time) who convinced her father to make the endorsement. And so, there’s been a link between the two of them for a long time. As to why they don’t register, they are poor people for one. Last time I checked, 60% of poor people in Maryland live in Baltimore under the old measure of poverty; probably more under the new measure. This is supposed to be the second or third richest state in the country in terms of income. It’s got more college graduates than any state, save Mass[achusetts] and the District of Col[umbia]. It’s third in percentage of its residents who are considered “professional.” There is an enormous chasm between those who live in Baltimore and everybody else in the state and I think that combined with the recession, distracts people from registering and voting. People have got more immediate concerns than voting. They’re just trying to make it from week to week.
The physical condition of the public schools is terrible. They need billions of dollars for construction and repairs.
What kinds of things are being done to alleviate poverty in the city? crenson Well not a lot. There are federal programs like the earned income tax credit. There is an Urban Services Agency, which is a descendant of the old poverty program and the model cities program. It still operates to try to alleviate poverty. There are new housing programs like Hope 6, mixed income housing, which were designed to take the place of the high rise projects torn down in the early 90s. But I think the biggest thing going is the public schools. The physi-
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cal condition of the public schools is terrible. [They] need billions of dollars for construction and repairs. The mayor has proposed raising the bottle tax again,but it’s gonna raise maybe $12 million…$20 million at the most. It’s gonna be a drop in the bucket. But the remarkable thing is that for some time now, the test scores of the kids have been going up, especially lately under Andres Alonso [CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools]. But also under the man who died just a couple of days ago, John Crew, who was previously superintendent back in the 70s; he also had some success raising test scores. So that’s a hopeful sign. And have you heard of the Thorton commission? Back in the governorship of Paris Glendening, it was appointed to…to see how the state could meet its constitutional requirement for a thorough and efficient public education system for children. And what it did was to come up with an estimate of how much would be needed to equalize educational resources across the state subdivisions. And it took $2 billion a year. The general assembly earmarked funding sources for Thorton for the first two years. After that, it went over the cliff. So, to their credit, the legislature’s made a really strenuous effort to provide that money every year, even though it means raising taxes, fees, especially now. They do cut corners; certain components of the program are optional. If they don’t have the money, forget about it. Like adjusting teachers’ salaries to inflation and stuff like that. But that’s been a major asset to the city. And it’s also gotten extra money, besides Thorton, for which it had to pay a price. The city school superintendent, who is now called the CEO, used to be appointed by the mayor. Actually, the mayor appointed the school board and the school board chose[s] superintendent. Now the superintendent is chosen jointly by the governor and the mayor because the insistence was that if the state was gonna provide this much money for Baltimore, it had to have some control over the system. One of the issues that animates many of the opponents of the current mayor, and she may change her position on this too, is to try to get back from the state the authority to appoint the CEO. That’s been one of the most salient demands.
Do you have any more thoughts on Mayor Stephanie RawlingsBlake as she overcomes the scandal of former mayor Sheila Dixon? Also, could you talk about the fact that both are women and how this affects gender politics? crenson There was a period of several years in which everybody in Baltimore who was elected citywide was a black woman: the mayor, the state’s attorney, the comptroller, and the city council president. And that reflects in part voter registration. The biggest single block of voters in Baltimore is black women. Black men have very low registration. Very low turnout. Many of them, I forget what the exact figures are but it’s quite astonishing, between the ages of 18 and 30, as many as half I think, but you might want to check with Stefanie [DeLuca, Associate Professor in the sociology department] on that, are in the care of the criminal justice system. They’re in prison or they’re on parole or probation. And of course when you’re in prison, you can’t vote. And until recently you could never vote, but now you can have your civil rights restored on request if you’ve kept your record clean for a certain amount of time after you get
JHU Politik: Special Issue
interview with dr. crenson
out. That’s another respect in which Baltimoreans today have much more to worry about…than who’s gonna be the next mayor, especially when the question seems to be settled even before the election.
crenson I’ll tell you what some Hopkins students have done. I’m a faculty director of the Baltimore Scholars Program and one of the members of our first class, Jessica Turall, graduated two years ago and shortly after graduating, she went out and set up a non-profit called “Hand in Hand.” She’s a remarkable person. She got funding from the Open Society Institute, George Soros. Her organization counsels people who are now in prison, but were prosecuted as adults; juveniles who commit very serious crimes can be taken out of juvenile court and tried in adult court. That’s who these people are; they are the really hard cases. And she has 40 volunteers now plus a staff and they begin by counseling these people in prison. When they get close to time for release, they come up with a post-incarceration plan for them and after they get out of prison, they work with them and their families to make sure that they get jobs and don’t get back in trouble. And I think it’s quite successful. Some of the students who are interested in psychology and counseling could volunteer, especially if they’re seniors. Jessica was a psychology major when she was here and she is just now thinking about getting her Ph.D. At the beginning of every academic year, the Baltimore Scholars organized a “Welcome To My City” program where students who come to Hopkins as undergraduates from all over the world can attend this job fair for non-profits where you can talk to people from different volunteer service organizations and see what interests you. And that happens every year. So there are lots of opportunities to find out what you are interested in doing and make contacts with people who can tell you how to get into it.
How do you think that the city as a whole views the Hopkins community? crenson Not very well. And this is not just a recent thing. In East Baltimore, there are people who still believe that Hopkins Medical School students kidnap people off the streets and experiment on them. And East Baltimore has a lot more problems than we do because of where they are and the EBDI (East Baltimore Development Inc.), that’s imposed an additional strain on relations between Hopkins and Baltimore. But the image I remember goes back long before that. The Hospital or Medical School or both built a swimming pool for staff or residents and it was surrounded by a chainlink fence and I remember on a hot day seeing black kids hanging on the outside the fence watching the interns and residents leaping into the pool. We have made some mistakes.
There was a period of several years in which everybody in Baltimore who was elected citywide was a black woman. Do you think there is anything Hopkins students can do to get more involved in this process? For instance, with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
What can we do, specifically Hopkins students, to try to remedy this disconnect between the Baltimore community and us? crenson Baltimore Scholars is a first step. Volunteer services is another one. I didn’t mention that the tutoring program that has been around for over 50 years. But I think that there isn’t much that students can do because this is so much an institutionalized animosity. There’s a lot of mistrust on both sides. There’s a local paper that no student ever sees, called Daily Record; it’s written mostly for local attorneys. They published a five-part attack on EBDI that made the university look really bad. People in the president’s office published a response, a point-by-point response, saying that this was a shame-
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interview with dr. crenson
lessly inaccurate account. Basically, the problem is that EBDI made certain promises to people who had to leave that neighborhood about when they were going to be able to come back and about what was going to happen next. But because of the recession, it hasn’t always been able to stay on schedule. And you should check the two versions of the story. I don’t want to get into the middle of that [laughs]. It’s a $1.8 billion project that includes housing, a new public school that’s going to be run by Hopkins, major research buildings, and the promise of some jobs. But of course most of the jobs there are going to go to people with advanced degrees and technical competence. It’s not going to reach the really poor people. I think the division between Baltimore and Hopkins is so old, has gone on so long, and it’s so entrenched, that it’s going to take a lot of effort at the highest levels of the university, and the city, to form a new connection. I think President Daniels has started in that direction. We had a meeting earlier this academic year about a program like Teach For America that would put Hopkins students into city agencies on the promise that they would work there for two years in college and then two years after; like Teach For America, they’d continue to work for city agencies. There are students now working in the city, and apparently, from what we’ve heard in the meeting from several deputy mayors, they’re very popular; they want more. So that’s another way you could go.
I think the division between Baltimore and Hopkins is so old, has gone on so long, and it’s so entrenched, that it’s going to take a lot of effort at the highest levels of the university, and the city, to form a new connection. I think President Daniels has started in that direction.
You mentioned in your book with Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg called Downsizing Democracy that collective citizenry has deteriorated over the years. What other effects do special interests and lobbyists have on decentralizing this process? crenson Well it’s mostly because so many important decisions go on at the state level, not in Baltimore. The people who have the power to make decisions don’t live in Baltimore. And because of (what I was talking about before) the enormous inequality between Baltimore and Howard, Montgomery, Prince George’s, the interests of Baltimore very seldom coincide with the interests of people who are making decisions. Today the single largest concentration of population in Maryland is in Montgomery County; it used to be in Baltimore. Montgomery and Prince George’s together are the two most populous counties in the state. Baltimore has been sinking, and everybody was disappointed and shocked when the 2010
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census results came out and showed that the city continued to lose population when everybody hoped that that was over. But they lost another 30,000. So, Ginsberg and I essentially made that argument more about national than local politics. But, my undergraduate term papers about neighborhood Democratic clubs may help to explain the decline of citizen activism. They were racist organizations, but they were organizations, and they were neighborhood-based. Where are they? They’re gone. I think the only one that still exists covers Southwest Baltimore: it’s called the Stonewall Democrat Club. They were not politically correct, there’s no question about that. They were all male and, on the East side, they were all white. In their charters, like the club where I met my mentor and political role model – “Murph” – you had to be male, white and 21 to be a member. On the West side, they didn’t say you had to be black, but that’s what it came out to be. There was a kind of accommodation there. For example, remember I said how the black community in Baltimore had constructed this network of organizations and social clubs very early on? That made them different from the black populations in almost all other northern cities. In almost all of those places (Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee), the black population arrived in a single wave, sometimes as early as WWI. They were uprooted from their home communities with no other connection to one another aside from their race. The only way to mobilize them politically was to appeal to race. In Baltimore you had this very dense network of community institutions, which meant that black voters could be mobilized not just by appeals to race (especially not by appeals to race), but by ties of direct and indirect acquaintanceship, because they belonged to the same church congregation, because they belong to the same social club. White politicians would form alliances with black leaders to mobilize black voters through these networks on Election Day to elect white politicians. Black leaders would get patronage jobs in return. The most notable exploiter of this system was Jack Pollack, who continued to elect white candidates from his majority black district well into the 1970s. Baltimore, as a whole, became majority black in the early to mid '70s. The old fourth district where he came from was overwhelmingly black much earlier than that. So, as venal and corrupt as it was, there was a network of organizations that mobilized people to vote that no longer exists. Now, I suppose after the organizations stopped, the mobilizing institutions became newspapers, television news, and stuff like that. If you look at the Baltimore Sun lately, of course you have nothing to compare it with, but there’s nothing. In the local nightly news there’s almost nothing about Baltimore politics. So the institutions that might mobilize people in large numbers are much weaker than they used to be. There are some exceptions, like churches for example. Bethel AME, which is within blocks of the Sharp Methodist Church. Bethel, in fact, was formed in about 1815 when its pastor and a minority of the congregation seceded from Sharp Street Methodist because although Sharp Street was an all black congregation, it was governed by a white denomination and the people of Bethel didn’t want to do that anymore. So they were participants in the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Frank Reid, the pastor today, and the Ministerial Alliance are powerful forces in city politics. They were, some of them were part of the agreement that got Martin O’Malley elected mayor.
JHU Politik: Special Issue
One final question, hopefully on an optimistic note: there’s been a lot of fragmentation in Baltimore, what are you optimistic about in the future, and what have you been seeing that have been the greatest sources of growth in your time here? crenson The most hopeful sign, as I said before, is public education. Given the resources available, what has been done is really remarkable. We aren’t anywhere near where we ought to be, but at least we’re moving in the right direction. One of the reasons we have so much murder and violence in Baltimore is the same reason we have 295 neighborhoods. Contrary to The Wire, Baltimore has had very few citywide drug lords like Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale. A lot of drug bosses have little drug posses in control of two square blocks, or five blocks, or three. They demonstrate that there’s one thing worse than organized crime, and that’s disorganized crime. There are so many boundaries to be defended that, as a result, there are more murders. Every time the police arrest one of these bosslets, the other guys all move in to compete for his territory, which leads to more murders. Unfortunately, under Mayor O’Malley, we pursued New Yorkstyle “quality of life” enforcement where you could get jailed for painting graffiti, urinating in the street, or carrying an open bottle of alcohol, small-time drug trade. All kinds of people entered the prison system who were not especially violent. They were exposed to people who were very violent and they couldn’t run away because they were in prison. For protection, they joined gangs. In addition to drug-related violence, we now have gang-related violence. We dropped that kind of policing strategy, very sensibly, to concentrate on people who do have serious records of violence. They are on probation, parole, and the police check up on them frequently.
Still, we’ve had the murder of Steven Pitcairn, the Hopkins medical researcher on St Paul Street. That guy who killed him shouldn’t have been out on the street. I wish that would happen less frequently. I think the main hope for Baltimore is that it will finally learn to be itself. We try to deny who we are with Harbor Place, the Grand Prix—that’s not us. HL Mencken said “I’ve lived in one house in Baltimore for nearly 45 years. It has changed in that time, as I have—but somehow it still remains the same. It is as much a part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it, I’d be as certainly crippled as if I lost a leg.” Baltimore, much more than New York, he said, is centered on hearth, and perhaps more fully than any other city in the United States. This glitzy stuff is not Baltimore. Baltimore is a, for better or for worse, a town where people live on a modest human scale within neighborhoods and with some friction. The friction can be a good thing. If you live in a neighborhood where everyone is like you, and you don’t have arguments—you assume that somebody else will take care of will take care of local problems in pretty much the same way that you would deal with them yourself. If you live in a neighborhood where you are in conflict with other people and you see something wrong, you cannot be confident that someone else will take care of it, you go out yourself and deal with it. If you want to look at this phenomenon, it’s discussed in a book called Neighborhood Politics. That was my last book on Baltimore. I hope to finish my next one. r
Our City: The Politics and Promise of Baltimore
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Councilman Stokes, left, with Matt Vavaro.
interview with
Councilman Carl Stokes Councilman Carl Stokes has respresented District 12, which includes Waverly Main Street and Station North Arts and Entertainment District, for over 24 years. matt varvaro chloe reichel alex grable
november 15th, 3:00pm
You were first elected to the City Council in 1987 after having owned a small business, namely a clothing retailer. What made you get into politics? stokes In 1983 I think it was, there was some movement in the City Council and actually at that time, we had six districts as opposed to the fourteen districts we have now, and there were three members in each district, as opposed to the one member per district now. I had been very active in the East Baltimore community. I was a businessperson, actually on the west side of town. But I was very active in coaching and teaching and working—when I say teaching, not professionally, but as a mentor more so—and working with the community. Long story short, I remember there were about nineteen or twenty people who said they were going to run for City Council in the district that I lived, and I didn’t know eighteen of the nineteen people who were running. And I thought that didn’t make much sense to me that I didn’t know any of these people, meaning that, I thought I was pretty active and I didn’t know these persons,
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JHU Politik: Special Issue
interview with councilman stokes
meaning they must not have been very active at all in terms of the community, et cetera. So in a sort of egotistical way, I said, well I could do a better job than any of these people I don’t know, because I do know the community, and so I decided to run. I actually lost the first election, I don’t know, six hundred or so votes, but I decided right then that I was going to run four years from then, and I began to close down my business because I felt very strongly that I wanted to make sure that the area in which I lived was well-represented, in terms of people who knew the community and the community knew them, and were familiar with the issues and concerns of the community. So I chose myself to be that person, and four years later, I did run and I was fortunate enough to win.
How has the political climate changed in the past 25 years since you entered Baltimore politics? How is Baltimore’s political arena different today than it was then? stokes When I first came on board, there were, out of the six districts as I mentioned that we had in those days, three of the districts were totally [represented by] white males, even though the city itself was probably fifty-five to sixty percent African American, and obviously fifty percent or better females. There were still three parts of the city so ruled by political clubs and the “good old boy” party that neither blacks nor women were able to be elected to City Council in those districts. That’s the way it was drawn. And so, in 1991, we had a chance to redistrict the city, and I and other members of the Council, black and white, changed the lines of the Council districts so it would give more opportunity, not just for African Americans and minorities or women to be elected, but it also broke up the strongholds of the entrenched political organizations. So not only did we get African Americans coming into the Council from those districts for the first time in the two hundred-year history of the city of Baltimore, but also, it brought in new progressive candidates and elected officials from those districts. So that is one major change that took place some twenty years ago. And, of course, '87 saw the election of the first African American mayor, some twelve years or so later saw the election of the first female mayor of the city, and now we have the second female mayor of the city. So, in many ways, the city government is more diverse than it was when I first came into the Council.
What have been your primary areas of focus as a councilman? What are the policy issues you are most passionate about and have tried to advance during your time on the City Council? stokes Education has been my primary area of focus. When I came into the Council the first time, I asked then President Mary Pat Clarke if she would appoint me to the Education Committee. She said that she would not only appoint me to the committee, but she would appoint me to chair the committee. At that time, it was the subcommittee of health, I believe, and I asked her if she would make it a full committee. She said yes she would, so education became a full committee. I was the first chair of the full committee and, as I said, Mary Pat Clarke, serving as president at the time, appointed me to the committee. And so through that all, education has still been
my primary focus. Some five years ago, when I was out of elected government, I and some others formed a school. We created a school for boys, a Baltimore City public charter school called Bluford Drew Jemison STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) Academy for young men—sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. It’s an all-male school in East Baltimore.
How do you see the role of charter schools in the broader context of education reform, and what other policies or programs are needed to improve Baltimore’s education system? stokes I think charter schools are a great component of public schools. I don’t say they’re better or they’re worse. They’re different in that they have more autonomy, and because they have greater autonomy, they are able to be more inventive, more creative, and their autonomy allows more grassroots input from students and parents and others who are not educators to be a part of the process. It also widens, I believe, those who are a part of education, improving education: business people, people from other disciplines other than education get together with educators and see a problem in terms of strengthening schools, academically as well as otherwise, and they’re able to make that happen easily, or let’s say easier, in a charter school situation than the traditional public schools.
You were an executive at a medical equipment company. What are the major healthcare issues facing Baltimore and do you think the recent federal healthcare reform legislation will effectively address those issues? stokes The lack of access to healthcare, particularly because of lack of medical insurance, is certainly one of the major problems in terms of health in Baltimore City. The federal healthcare plan hopefully will support folks right now who do not get proper healthcare, who do not even have a primary doctor, or who do not go to clinics or hospitals for illnesses, [to] be able to access better healthcare. So I believe [the greatest problem is] the lack of healthcare services in and about many neighborhoods, as well as the inability of people to get healthcare insurance, either because they’re unemployed or underemployed. Many people are working poor; they may have a bit of a job, but it has no benefits to them. They’re working part time and, frankly, these individuals are some of the ones who have the greatest healthcare needs, and so I think that lack of true healthcare access and lack of healthcare insurance is as big an issue regarding healthcare as there is in Baltimore City.
The housing collapse has dramatically affected the city, not only increasing the homelessness we see, but the homelessness we don’t see.
Our City: The Politics and Promise of Baltimore
December 2011
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interview with councilman stokes
What has been the effect of the financial crisis on Baltimore’s economy, particularly in terms of the housing industry and the mortgage market? And what do you see as the key to reviving Baltimore’s economy? stokes Like in other cities, the housing collapse has dramatically affected the city, not only increasing the homelessness we see, but the homelessness we don’t see, which, of course, means that families are living together—more families, four and five nuclear families are living in a larger group in the same home. Children [are] not leaving sooner, and their children [are] living also under the roof of the grandmother and three generations of people. Then sometimes families or friends—family groupings, let me say—wind up living in a single-family household, but you really have two, three, four families living under the same roof in a house that’s a single-family home. I think this impacts greatly, not to mention the jobs: economic fallout from the whole financial fallout has caused there to be less jobs and greater under- and unemployment. I think that one of the ways to turn around is to be prepared for the turnaround. I think that this is some of the toughest and worst economic times the country has faced, including the Depression era (it’s a different scale, of course). But I think that the one item that’s going to help cities to return to strength is to be prepared when the turnaround comes and so I believe the city must prepare for the turnaround, that [it] must take advantage of this time to get rid of very poor housing stock that cannot be renovated, but need to clear the land. There is some housing stock that we have to be sure doesn’t continue to deteriorate at such a rate that they cannot be rehabbed when there [are] funds to bring it back up. I think this city must look also at changing its property tax rate, which is twice as high as surrounding jurisdictions’, and sometimes two-and-a-half times as high. I think that makes the city non-competitive when the turnaround comes and people are deciding where they are going to live or rehab or put their business. If the tax rate in Baltimore City is twice or two-and-a-half times greater than your surrounding jurisdictions’, then I think it’s a disincentive for people to invest in this city, so I think that also must be addressed in a significant way. And then good planning all over the city that takes into account not only housing, but good schools, safe communities, easy bike pathways, green spaces. So this is a good time for the city to lay out a strong master plan of what neighborhoods should look like so that we’re prepared when the economy turns upward again.
This is a good time for the city to lay out a strong master plan of what neighborhoods should look like so that we’re prepared when the economy turns upward again. Is there any one overriding issue in particular that you’re working on right now on the City Council?
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stokes To be a little repetitive, we have to prepare while we have a lean budget. Actually, it’s the best time to examine our priorities; it’s the best time to take your budget and to decide you no longer need some items in the budget. When you’re in good times, you tend to spend more; not only than is necessary, but more than is prudent. We do that in our own households: when times were good, I had all the movie channels on the cable, I didn’t care if I turned the heat off when I left home or not—I didn’t cut the thermostat back, silliness of course, but now the thermostat is set back and I wear a sweater before I put it up. I have basic cable, and I don’t really miss the movies I didn’t have time to watch anyway. And so it sort of is the same thing with a household [as it is with] a city. There are a number of things that we’ve added. There are core services that a city must perform for its citizens: education (schools), public safety (police, fire department). But then there’s a lot of stuff that we add because people think it would be nice to do. It’s not necessary, it adds to the cost of living—frankly, nothing comes free—and I think it’s a good time for the city right now, while we are financially depressed, to decide, what are the priorities for the city? What do the citizens see as their core priorities? And to, in a sense, pare [down] the budget and make a commitment not to pad it going forward so that we can better take care of our core issues. Education is poorly funded in Baltimore City—very poorly funded. Most jurisdictions in the state of Maryland give forty to fifty percent of its operating budget to schools. Baltimore City gives eleven to twelve percent of its budget. So it’s not merely a matter of dollars; it’s a matter of priorities because I’m saying, percentage-wise, we’re horrible in terms of our commitment to public education in this city. At the same time, we must make the city a desirable place for people to live. I spoke earlier about too high a property tax, [which] also goes with other fees and small taxes that the city has—the bottle tax, the container tax that we have—that other jurisdictions don’t have, making the high costs of living in Baltimore a disincentive. Now there is some reward for that, in that we’re the only jurisdiction around that has a symphony, an opera, hopefully ballet is coming back, et cetera. We have very wonderful museums of art that counties don’t have; they don’t have museums of art, they don’t have a Walters [Art Museum], they don’t have a Baltimore Museum of Art. The city has those things, and it’s a great magnet.
What are some of these programs to which you are referring that should be cut away? stokes Well, once I start down that path politically, I can’t win, so we should do it as more of a consensus conversation with elected officials and citizens. I think rather than discerning what we cut away, we put a chart of services up and we pick the priorities, frankly. So we say, theoretically, we have a hundred dollars and there [are] a hundred programs up on the chart. We can say, let’s give each a dollar, but that wouldn’t work, and so we would say, well, what’s the first priority? We’d say, public safety, and we’d say that needs thirty dollars out of a hundred, we’ve got to give it to it. We might say the next priority is education, and we might say that needs twenty-five dollars, and we’ve got to give it to it. We’re up to fifty-five dollars, and obviously somewhere on the chart we’re going
JHU Politik: Special Issue
interview with councilman stokes
to run out of money. And I think that it just says that the last twenty things are not going to be funded, because if we take money from public safety, if we take money from schools, in fact, they may not work very well. So I think my philosophy is it’s better to fully fund the priorities than to try to fund everything. It’s better to fully fund the priorities and either not do the others, or find a way through volunteerism or someone else’s dime to try and help fund those other items. So, politically, I’m not going to name those things which I think we should not be doing, frankly.
Democratic Party because we have to fight among[st] ourselves. In running for office, we have a very competitive primary every four years, and so, no one could challenge and win if everybody said we believe in the same thing and doing it the same way. So there is a great sort of diversity of thinking and philosophy. Now, it is true we’re all Democrats; it is true that we’re not going to be right of center very much. So that is true, that if there were Republicans, or Green[s], or Libertarians [who] were stronger, it would force some differences in how we operate, and frankly, I welcome that, I do, and I really do wish that the other parties could drum up stronger support. I am not opposed to an open primary, in which everybody gets to run, not just the parties separately run. We really would have a diverse primary and electoral process, and folks can do what they want to do. But the other part of that is that, frankly, the city is dominated by Democratic voters, and so the fact that the elected officials are all Democrat is a reflection of the citizens, so the citizens are getting what they want.
In 1999, you ran for mayor but lost in the Democratic primary to then-Councilman Martin O’Malley, with whom you had previously served on the City Council. What were impressions of him at the time, and could you envision his political rise to governor? stokes Well, he’s—even then was—a consummate politician, frankly. That’s not a bad thing, that’s not a criticism, [or] a judgment in a negative way. But certainly, I could see him going far in terms of the political arena. He organized well, he was very targeted on issues, and stayed pretty much focused when he found something that he felt hit or struck a nerve. He pretty much did not steer from a single issue, particularly [when] his polling or his political sense told him this was something striking a chord with a strong electorate. And so I thought he was a pretty thorough councilperson in terms of research, et cetera.
You recently considered, but ultimately decided against, running for mayor in the next election cycle. What are your political ambitions going forward?
The Baltimore City Council is composed solely of Democratic members. Do you believe this has affected the council’s ability to govern and, if so, how? For example, does it reduce the problem of partisan gridlock? And would you welcome the opportunity to work with people on the other side of the aisle?
stokes My ambition is to work with the present mayor and my council colleagues and the general populous to determine how to prepare Baltimore to be a very, very strong take-off city when we come out of the recession that we’re currently in. I think the city has great potential, but I think that if we don’t spend the next couple of years preparing ourselves to take advantage of strong investment in the city, or if we continue to go along a path that discourages investment in the city, we will drop to a third-tier city, that people will leave the city, other than, for the most part, the very poor or the very rich. We will have a gold coast of the wealthy, as we are building now, and we will have a great much of the city made up of people who are working poor, and a very, very small middle income population. I just think that the city can’t withstand that. r
stokes Of course, yeah. But I don’t think that Democratic, oneparty rule has caused any issues in terms of governance. I don’t believe it has. That is to say, there’s so much diversity among the
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14 December 2011
JHU Politik: Special Issue
Our City: The Politics and Promise of Baltimore
December 2011 15
interview with
professor peter beilenson Dr. Peter Beilenson was the Baltimore City Health Commissioner from 1992–2005, and is currently the Health Commissioner for Howard County, MD. alex clearfield megan augustine rachel cohen colette andrei
november 16th, 3:00pm
Your father was a congressman from southern California for 20 years. How did growing up in a political family influence your decision to enter public service? beilenson It influenced me a lot. My father always viewed himself as more of a legislator than a politician. For example, he didn’t take special interest money. And he really never raised all that much money, so he couldn’t run for other higher office. But he was very interested in public service and made it seem like a noble calling, so being the oldest child and idolizing my father I decided to kind of follow along in his footsteps. I worked in his office [while he was a California state legislator from 1963–76] and he paid me out of pocket so there was no nepotism. Since I was two he was elected to something. When he went to Washington I didn’t work in his office. He was the head of the Public Health Committee in Sacramento, so that got me interested in that, and when I went to medical school I ended up going into preventive medicine as a specialty, which is sort of a combination of public policy and medicine so it actually turned out to mesh my combination of interests.
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JHU Politik: Special Issue
interview with dr. beilenson
Do you remember around what age you decided to enter public service? beilenson I knew when I was eight that I wanted to go into medicine. I was always interested in politics and potentially running for office, but I decided to go into public health when I was in medical school and realized that a lot of conditions that we were treating were related to people’s behavior or where they lived or “place matters.” I was thinking of ways, instead of suturing someone up in the emergency room for the fourth time because they’ve been stabbed, because they’re involved in drugs or whatever, or living in a difficult neighborhood, you could do something about the neighborhoods or about drug abuse in a population-based way that would benefit the public much more, so that’s what public health tends to do. That’s when I switched over to the public health arena.
What do you want to achieve through teaching the course, “Baltimore and ‘The Wire’” at Hopkins? beilenson This is the second year I’ve taught it. This year’s class is much more socially conscious, notably so. The original idea was to kind of, we had a lecture from Dr. [Jonathan] Rich and his view, a very qualitative and open way, young African-American men getting shot, and kind of try to look at them as individuals rather than as stereotypes, even if some of the issues they were dealing with were stereotypical issues. That’s kind of writ large what I want to do with the class, to use The Wire as a lens on urban issues and certain problems in the population and try and let people know that, “There but for the grace of God go I;” if you were living in these places, you really have to look at the places these kids are coming from. One of the things, a mantra, we use in the class is “Place matters.” If you grow up in a place that has livable wage jobs available to the parents, that there are decent schools, the housing is safe, and there’s access to healthcare, then you’re vastly more likely to be successful in life. And conversely, if you don’t have that, which many of the kids on The Wire don’t have, and many real, live Baltimoreans, Philadelphians, and New Yorkers don’t have, that’s going to be related to what their lives turn out to be. So I’m trying to expose freshmen and sophomores, predominantly, to looking more broadly and more deeply at where these kids are coming from and try and hopefully influence them when they go into their public service jobs, which I think a lot of them are going to do, that they look at changing the place.
You’ve been very involved in overseeing the public health of the city of Baltimore and now Howard County. What would you say is the most pressing issue affecting both of these areas and do you find that they have the appropriate political power and funding to tackle those issues? beilenson Good question. Howard County, yes. Without sounding facetious, it’s the third wealthiest jurisdiction in the United States, and although there are some issues and some vulnerable populations, like some undocumented folks living along Route 1, the corridor between Laurel and Elkridge in the eastern part of
Howard County. There are some STDs and some lack of access to care, predominantly among undocumented individuals. In general, of 280,000 residents of Howard County, 270,000 of them are in decent to really good shape. What we’re working on is to be proactive, with the Healthy Howard program [which offers basic medical care to the uninsured], healthy schools, healthy workplaces, healthy restaurants, all the kinds of things we really couldn’t do in Baltimore because we were fighting rearguard actions. The County Executive, who is like the mayor of Howard County, wants to make Howard County the model public health community in the country, which we’re working on doing. It’s a political role, and he’s running for governor, he wants me to do stuff all over the state, so it’s set up very nicely for us to do our projects. Baltimore, on the other hand, for a variety of reasons, some of which we talked about, the city is almost unique in that there are very few cities that are their own counties. A third of our properties are non-taxable because they’re non-profits or churches. A huge percentage of the population doesn’t pay either property tax or income tax because they’re so poor. Meanwhile, we’re trying to take care of all sorts of problems that are greater in magnitude than lots of other areas with less revenue. Less and less, as the population shrinks, the state legislature, which used to be dominated by Baltimore, is now 1/6 to 1/7 Baltimore so we don’t have the power to push funding here anymore. It’s a significant problem. There’s not enough resources, and one of the potential things to do is “moving to opportunity”, which is moving poor folks into mixed-income areas and spreading people around so you don’t have the concentration of poverty. There are pluses and minuses to it. It was much more reactive than proactive in Baltimore because we were dealing with AIDS, infant mortality, STDs, teen pregnancy, and early deaths from chronic disease and disparities. It was a more interesting job, but it was not as proactive.
If you grow up in a place that has livable wage jobs available to the parents, that there are decent schools, the housing is safe, and there’s access to healthcare, then you’re vastly more likely to be successful in life. How as health commissioner did you take steps to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in Baltimore? beilenson At the end of 1997, one of our systems commissioners came up and said, “We are having problem with syphilis.” This was in November, and he never said anything more. He just stopped me at a meeting one day. I am not very hierarchical, but after this I did require that something like had to be presented in a memo, you had to give me something in writing because you can’t just say something like that and leave. A month into 1998, he said, “Oh by
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interview with dr. beilenson
the way CDC report is coming out, and we are number one in the country for syphilis.” And, actually we were more than number one, we had one out of every twenty cases in the entire United States occurring in Baltimore city. So Jay Leno did a thing on his Tonight Show, with a billboard on I-95 that said, “Welcome To Baltimore, Fasten Your Condoms.” The first thing you have to do in public health is assess the issue, what’s going on, develop some policy and legislation to deal with it, then assurance. Assure what you did makes a difference. So syphilis is actually a perfect little mini course in 10 seconds. So syphilis, unlike gonorrhea and chlamydia, which were a trifecta this year by the way we were also #1 in the country in all three. Which you might say would make sense, but in two different populations. The chlamydia and gonorrhea population is 13–25 year olds, serially monogamous teenagers who know their partners but are serially monogamous. So this is a different population from syphilis, in syphilis the assessment we did was 20–50 year olds who didn't know their partners which makes it hard to track down. Drugs for sex and very lower socioeconomic status and multiple partners. A nightmare. We did four things. We wanted to have a high level of suspicion for providers in town, so if they saw ulcer in the genital area called chancre they would immediately test. Because it was pretty rare and most doctors haven't seen it. Emergency room docs would say that it was a fungal infection or warts and send the person off, so we did physician awareness and provider awareness. We did individual awareness by putting things on busses all over the place. We went out to crack houses and drew blood to test for syphilis and the most productive thing was at the central booking center we did stat tests for syphilis. Why? Because a huge percentage of people doing drugs for sex were in some way related to getting arrested in their near future. So we identified a lot of people that way and shot them up with penicillin with in a year we had an 82% drop. So that dealt with that population. For the kid population, it’s really pushing condoms. That’s helped with teen pregnancy results too, because Baltimore was number one in the country in teen pregnancy. Teen birth, we are now 15–20 we have had a really big drop, the country has had a really big drop. And the best estimate is the availability of condoms and birth control through school based health centers and fear of aids so kids are using condoms.
What do you consider to be the main success of the needle exchange program that you spearheaded? beilenson It’s been very successful. It’s the best evaluated by far, the best needle exchange program in the world, by far. Partly because of the relatively small number of them that are legal. Hopkins has done a study and there have been tons of other peer-reviewed studies. It’s clearly shown to reduce the risk by a substantial margin of developing HIV. It’s also kept neighborhoods cleaner. It’s also led to increase in drug treatments so overall it’s been very successful. I could have been a primary care doc and taken care of 75 addicts let’s say over a 10-year period, where most of them would have developed HIV/AIDS. I probably wouldn’t have gotten very many of them into drug treatment. Well let’s say I helped five or seven
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of them in a 10-year period. But with the needle exchange, when you’re dealing with public health, you have 15,000 people or more. The needle exchange program has clearly shown to have prevented hundreds of cases of AIDS, thousands of people went into drug treatment, in a relatively short period of time. That’s sort of the benefits of being public health in terms of what you see.
Has the drug usage decreased over the past 15–20 years the program has been instituted? beilenson It’s a very good question. Since there is no registry like there is for cancer cases, we don’t know. You need to do a behavioral survey, like a neighborhood behavioral survey. You can look at things like people attempting to get into the drug treatment program, sort of the way people look at people applying for jobs to get unemployment benefits. But, just like as unemployment benefits goes with people with chronic unemployment, where people just give up and drop out of the system, the same thing happens with drug treatment, when treatment wasn’t there. There’s really no good formula to figure out how many people are using, so it’s hard to say.
JHU Politik: Special Issue
interview with dr. beilenson
Do you think the drug trade itself has changed and how has that affected the public health of Baltimore City? beilenson Yes. The drug trade in the '60s or '70s actually had a credo. Don’t sell drugs to women, especially pregnant women. Don’t use the kids. But that all kind of fell apart in the '90s, as you know from The Wire, which is pretty realistic. It used to have a value system. That has completely fallen apart. It has remained a heroin town. There obviously is crack and cocaine, which is the same thing, and some marijuana and all that sort of stuff, but it’s always been a heroin town.
As you know some people have been opposed to the needle exchange program. Do you think there is a relationship between the needle exchange program and violence with the surrounding areas where stations have been set up? beilenson If anything, it’s reduced. A lot of the things we studied, we look at a lot of things. Particularly crime rates. And in the areas where there were needle exchanges it was dramatically lower. Certainly, if there was a correlation it was a negative one.
a livable wage, and the more of them that can lead to neighborhood economic development. It is a huge fallacy that grocery stores can’t survive in inner cities. For one thing there are plenty of people there that are buying food at crappy corner grocery stores. They do have vouchers or food stamps or money, but these food deserts (urban areas where fresh food is hard to get) are tremendously existent. There was one African-American run supermarket chain that closed because they couldn’t find drug-free, and that was the only grocery store in many parts of the city. I think it’s insane for people not to try and set up businesses in the inner city. There’s a huge dearth of products, and people are going out to Wal-Mart and Target out in the counties, where people should be starting up businesses. My argument is for livable wage jobs, in neighborhoods, hiring neighborhood people. They generally aren’t even that high-skill jobs. As an example, a friend of mine is in an inner city neighborhood that has no stores and is setting up a healthy food grocery store called Apples and Oranges. Their business plan shows they’d clearly be self-sustainable and they’d be hiring people from the neighborhood.
What have been some of the most successful initiatives in Baltimore aimed at preventing crime?
I think it’s insane for people not to try and set up businesses in the inner city. There’s a huge dearth of products, and people are going out to Wal-Mart and Target out in the counties, where people should be starting up businesses. According to census data, the homeless population in Baltimore has increased by over 50% over the last 8 years. How, as health commissioner, did you deal with the challenge of providing shelter to the homeless and providing health and medical care? beilenson Mostly emergency care. My wife worked for Healthcare for the Homeless, which is this whole big organization which provides most of the healthcare to the homeless. Medical care, psychological care, substance abuse care. So that was done and that was funded from a whole variety of sources. As you know, the vast majority of the homeless population is uninsured. What we tended to do was emergency shelters so we set up a Code Blue system. We’d add an additional 300 beds when it got below a certain temperature, and then they would staff those with health services and connections to health services for the days when they got out of the shelter.
What steps need to be taken to create jobs for more Baltimore City residents?
beilenson Drug-treatment increase. Eighty-five percent of all crimes committed in Baltimore, the vast majority which are nonviolent, are drug-related crimes, and most of them are for money to get drugs. So by getting more people in drug treatment you know you don’t keep them from using all the time, it’s not 100% teetotaling. Like our studies, a very good study that the drug czar for the country came and touted and it was Bush’s drug czar, so it’s not like he was wanting to come to Baltimore particularly. The study was an n of 1000, which is very big, showed whether people succeed in treatment or not so it took into account even the failures and there was a 70% decrease in drug use a year later; so that is much less money, we’ve gone over the numbers, but that’s billions of dollars less in drugs that are needing to be obtained illegally. Because of that there is going to be much less crime so I would say that is probably the most important thing rather than policing strategies or whatever.
How large of a role do you think education plays in the fight against violent crime in Baltimore? beilenson In so far as it turns out kids who feel hopeless and don’t feel like they can have a productive life and therefore get into the drug trade, which is where the vast majority of violence comes from, it’s not like people just go out to be violent (with one caveat). You know it is sort of indirectly related that a poor education system turns out kids who don’t have much hope and so they go into more destructive behaviors than constructive behaviors. The one caveat to toss in is that the exposure to lead in some of the poor neighborhoods is directly related both to behavior disorders and very likely violent behavior as well. So that is something not to be forgotten.
beilenson The single most important thing is to have jobs that pay
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interview with dr. beilenson
How does being involved with Johns Hopkins University help you affect change in Baltimore and the surrounding area? beilenson Our class is pretty socially involved and we actually decided that last half of the last class we are just going make available connections, if you will, for students who want to work in the next year to two years over the summer in some field. Like, in the summer coming up they want to do housing redevelopment in economically developing neighborhoods. Who should they talk to? Others want to do STD training in the schools. Who should they talk to? Some want to do Big Brothers, Big Sisters stuff. Last year we were actually on TV shows, the class was on TV, there was a big article in the paper and it went all over the world. 141 newspapers all over the world were covering it. Michael Kenneth Williams spoke here, and he is very interested in doing the grass roots film thing which I mentioned. So you use the cache of Hopkins to get good speakers, and people who might be interested in funding the opportunities, and then also giving opportunities to the students.
How well does Hopkins handle public health issues in the city and how can it improve? beilenson I think with the last three deans of the School of Public Health and the Med School, I have been here for 20 years or more, it used to be a very much a “town-gown” split, a schism, and there were actual rumors that still go around East Baltimore about little kids being plucked out in the middle of the night and take back for experimentation at the Med School or the School of Public Health. There was a lot of mistrust and I think, you know there was a fair amount of predigest on the part of the schools, this was a while ago, not now. But there has been a real strong effort to get more involved with the neighborhood surrounding Hopkins. Hopkins would fly in the Emirates from Yemen and give them high cost stuff, but then they wouldn’t be taking care of kids and families right in the neighborhood of Hopkins, both the School of Public Health and the School of Medicine and Nursing. And now they are much more involved because of the Urban Health Institute, et cetera. So I think there has been a lot of strides made, I think there can always be more, but I think certainly the leaders are more cognizant of it and there is more of an effort.
Hopkins who need projects done in their community, but don’t have the money or the resources to do it. And teach the student teams skills like marketing, business plans, architectural drawings, advocacy, and how to relate to the community. They will work on these projects and finish them.
It used to be a very much a “town-gown” split, a schism, and there were actual rumors that still go around East Baltimore about little kids being plucked out in the middle of the night and take back for experimentation at the Med School or the School of Public Health.
If there were four things you could just snap your finger and fix in Baltimore, what would they be? beilenson That there is a livable wage job for every able-bod[ied] person. That the public schools are adequate for each student, and safe. That housing be both decent and safe so lead free, mold free, cockroach free, and mouse pee free, which is the largest cause of asthma. And that there be access to healthcare for the entire population. r
How can Hopkins do a better job at engaging students in Baltimore public health issues? beilenson I would say a service-learning requirement. So the class I am co-teaching next semester is interdisciplinary engineering class, but this is an example where we have brought together kids from four different disciplines: engineering, social sciences, humanities, and public health studies. They will be in teams of four, and we are going to bring in organizations from areas around
20 December 2011
JHU Politik: Special Issue
Special Thanks to Dr. Peter Beilenson, Dr. Matthew Crenson, and Councilman Carl Stokes for their time and to Dr. Steven David, and Dr. Lester Spence for their advice.
Our City: The Politics and Promise of Baltimore
December 2011 21
22 December 2011
JHU Politik: Special Issue