Tag Archives: public:private partnerships

Baltimore’s 2023 road to privatization and why we continue to organize and build a people’s movement for public benefit

Baltimore excelled in 2023 in its privatization/neoliberal practices of assuring elite private  entities benefit disproportionately at the expense of public control and social good.

[Neoliberal- a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices, such as public:private partnerships (explicit or implicit)] Adapted from David Harvey

Let’s look at some of these privatization redevelopment practices which were camouflaged in the language of ‘benefiting the public’ in Baltimore throughout 2023.

Public:private strategies ignoring public control and social good

Most recently, the unanimous vote in the Planning Commission to allow a private developer, P. David Bramble of MCB Real Estate, LLC, to accumulate more of the Inner Harbor public waterfront space is a typical taking of public land (land owned by the city of Baltimore) for private development and profit. This will allow Bramble’s group to expand their holdings and profit while removing public access to the waterfront. In addition, there is existing legislation which requires that these lands remain accessible for the benefit of the public. Some city council members have already indicated they support amending this legislation to accommodate this privatization of public lands. This is how the state accommodates the private developer, hence neoliberal practices.

Another examples: earlier in 2023 the state of Maryland under the direction of Governor Wes Moore turned over the Orioles baseball stadium-Camden Yards- and management of the land to John Angelos, the Orioles owner. Camden Yards was previously managed by the Maryland Stadium Authority, a public entity. With the turnover to the private owner Angelos, a publicly controlled private entity is now set to work with a profit-making motive. What this means is in order to maximize profits, necessary infrastructure upkeep will need to be minimized to maximize profits. Assuring that the stadium receives the upkeep needed to maximize benefit to the public is of little value because the benefit is turned inward to the private entity and its profit-driven motive. Because of the control that sports franchises have over entertainment we can see this private entity demanding government support to maintain the stadium in the future.

Then there is the upcoming attempt to privatize our water and sewage system, again! [As a reminder, in 2018 Baltimore city voters turned out in high numbers to ban privatization of the city’s water and sewer systems.] And yet five years later in 2023, the neoliberal government (officials who have a responsibility to the public’s health but honor elite corporations) are back at it again with another attempt at privatizing a public resource. This time a Baltimore Regional Water Governance Task Force is making recommendations to allow privatization of our local water and sewage system which would potentially minimize local control of local resources while ensuring profit to private interests. With a suggested $5 – $15 million price tag for this transition, this line from the Task Force’s report leaves the public wide open to foot an indefinitely pricey bill:

Transition costs assumptions are forward-looking and actual costs will be based on resource availability for yet undetermined set of issues, by parties not yet determined that will once formed determine the extent of need for third-party support.

Baltimore Regional Water Governance Task Force

Why couldn’t this ‘undetermined’ cost be better directed to hiring and training up government staff to assure a functioning and adequately maintained water and sewer system? This would allow greater local control of this valuable resource instead of control by a private profit-driven entity: profit margin yet undetermined.

In 2023, Baltimore’s struggle with privatization did not stop with only one utility. We are experiencing the disaster of a profit-driven utility ownership with our gas and electric provider as well. Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) delivers gas and electric utilities to Baltimore city and surrounding counties and presented to the state’s Public Service Commission a rate increase over the next three years. Many residents testified as to the severe hardship this would incur for them, particularly those with lower and set incomes. Regardless of this public rally for fairness and benefit, public officials agreed to BGE’s rate hike resulting in a greater than 3% rate increase each year over the next three years. Besides continuing a reliance on gas through more infrastructure development, the company will receive almost  an additional $408 million in revenue. Instead of voting against this severe hike, Maryland Public Service Commission voted to defray some of this cost from customers by using a federal tax credit and assure BGE receives its income. Again, using public funds to assure the company receives the income they want.

At the funding level of the state, Maryland’s Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) continues to misrepresent itself it stating it is supporting local grassroot efforts in impacted communities. Its’ supposed role of assuring equitable development that provides a social good has been slow to manifest. Instead what we see is consistent funding to the Goliaths of anchor institutions with profit-driven motives and little funding to organizations doing community-based cooperative redevelopment in historically low income and Black neighborhoods-legacied by urban renewal and redlining. Unless local community-driven organizations partner with anchor institutions known to the Department, funding is mostly denied. This reliance of the state on anchor institutions to define what equitable development looks like continues historical public:private partnerships that do not serve the public. For example, the Johns Hopkins Medical Complex and its proxy development arm East Baltimore Development Inc. receives yearly grant awards for inequitable development from Maryland’s DHCD (and city funders over the years). This occurs even while such institutions continue to engage in uneven development that disproportionately benefits the institution relative to the local Black community that it is gentrifying. One example of DHCD’s uneven grant funding can be seen in the lack of support for a local Black-led non-profit located in Old Town/Middle East, Village of Love and Resistance (VOLAR), two block from the Johns Hopkins Medical Complex. After four consecutive attempts to receive funding for its affordable cooperative housing and community hub development, it has resigned itself to stop seeking funding from the state which insists that it partner with the likes of Johns Hopkins University, who the state trusts. Meanwhile, the local community does not trust this anchor institution that has systematically exploited the people and the land of East Baltimore.

Organizing for local control and public good

With such clear corporate and elite preferential strategies advantaging private businesses over the public good and local control, organizing to reclaim benefits to local communities has been growing in 2023, extending into 2024.

While the Baltimore Planning Commission has shown their allegiance to elite ownership with little regard for community input in the planned expansion of the Inner Harbor (including increased parking, removing maximum height limits for buildings on the site), residents still have the opportunity to change this. Approval by the city council for the conditions that will allow redevelopment of the Inner Harbor by Bramble’s Team is required; this will require hearings with testimony and hopefully deep listening before a vote is made. The first public hearing will be held on February 13 at 2pm est and public testimony is invited. So 2024 will see residents and activists testifying as to the clear privatization disadvantages to the public good (less green space for public use, lost of view due to increased height of buildings and increased buildings, maintenance that is cost-cutting to assure larger profit margin, lost of flowing design from street to waterfront, city dollars supporting a private developer’s planning process, finding public funds to support a private developer’s development and profit making, lack of a transparent public process for development of this public land). Due to the existing City Charter governing the explicit use of this land for public benefit voters will decide through a ballot in November, whether to amend the City Charter. In addition, developers, activists and residents have organized themselves in the form of the Inner Harbor Coalition. This group hopes to build sufficient support to place an opposing plan on the November ballot for redevelopment of the Inner Harbor. They require 10,000 signatures to place this on the ballot.

The pushback on the attempt to privatize our water and sewage system is another of Baltimore’s growing social movement against privatization and for local control and public benefit. A coalition of organizations sent a clear letter opposing the Water Governance Task Force efforts toward privatization. On January 8th 2024 the sixth meeting to discuss the Task Force’s report was held by Baltimore City government. The seventh and final meeting will be held on January 25th at 6pm virtually. Notes from all six meetings can be viewed here (scroll to bottom). Please join the movement in opposing privatization of Baltimore’s water and sewage system by sending your comments (individual or organizations) to this email address: [email protected] and cc [email protected]

Another part of the movement to stop privatization has been 1199 SEIU’s organizing for fair payment by anchor institutions into the city funds, to be redistributed back to local community for investment in public health infrastructure, housing, transportation, education, recreation. This payment program is the PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) agreement that city council officials negotiate with big anchor institutions. Instead of these big institution, such as hospitals and universities, paying property tax like regular citizens or private corporations who own land and/or conduct businesses, they negotiate to pay a percentage of the taxes they would pay were they not in this category. The last PILOT negotiated in 2016-set to expire and renegotiated in 2026- literally gave these anchor institutions a way out of paying their fair share of taxes by paying only 10% of what most people pay. Yes, again Baltimore city government favored capitalist exploitation by not ensuring that big institutions pay their fair share of taxes even while the city continues to provide infrastructure and other city resources to them as it does to regular citizens. However, regular citizens do not get to ‘negotiate’ with the city, state, or federal government how much taxes they should pay.  Now we have an opportunity to negotiate a more fair PILOT with these big institutions who, like the Johns Hopkins Institutions, receive grants from the city, state, and federal government (noted above). With decreased payment of taxes and continued grants from the government, these institutions do not pay their fair share into the city and state coffers to assure our city is habitable and safe. The 1199 SEIU campaign is organizing to assure this is on the ballot for voters in November 2024 and require 10,000 signatures. To support this campaign reach out to [email protected] for more information.


Placard reads: YOU’D NEVER GUESS
This forest you are walking through was once a beach. Although beaches always seem to look the same, geologists know that they are constantly changing. Three thousand years ago this was open ocean. Over time, the shoreline has moved to the west, while the cape has moved north, creating land where none existed before. If the same processes continue to operate as they have in the past, Cape Henlopen will join the inner breakwater of Lewes Harbor within the next 50 years.

Not all public officials consistently voted in favor of private wealth gain and neoliberal practices. In 2023 some government officials moved in the direction of increasing public benefit, joining our people’s movement for the social good. For example, state delegate Stephanie Smith consistently advocated for and acquired funding for organizations addressing the result of uneven development in Baltimore City. She fought for $11M in funding for community development and transit improvements across the 45th District, including funds for housing, the Pennsylvania Station redevelopment, and community retail spaces. City Council woman Odette Ramos led the fight for an Inclusionary Housing Bill, and won. The bill requires that any market-rate multi-family development building more than 20 units and receiving government subsidy must have more than 15% of their units as affordable housing (for 30 years). Read more about this legislation here. We look forward to continued public benefit from these individuals and hope that others do similar work in their capacity as public officials.

The year 2023 showed us the imbalance between private profit-driven elite institutions and public and non-profit organizations with a primary mission of assuring the social good in Baltimore and Maryland. The year 2023 also reminded us that those aware of the continued journey toward individualized wealth are rallying forward to stop these continued market-driven, winner-take-all strategies. Will 2024 move scales toward love and justice for the greater good or toward further competition, injustices, and satisfying the greed of the few? It’s up to us to decide how we will act toward justice and balance the social good and individual greed. Baltimore can continue building this people’s movement that aim to benefit the good by challenging the public officials who ignore their voters in favor of elite interests. This is an election year in the city and state and we have the opportunity to vote with our feet. Now that you see this, what is yours to do for the benefit of all?

Baltimore and beyond: where are the affordable housing?

A recent repot from Mc Kinsey Global Institute warns us “… Decent, affordable housing is fundamental to the health and well-being of people and to the smooth functioning of economies. Yet around the world, in developing and advanced economies alike, cities are struggling to meet that need. If current trends in urbanization and income growth persist, by 2025 the number of urban households that live in substandard housing—or are so financially stretched by housing costs that they forego other essentials, such as healthcare—could grow to 440 million, from 330 million. This could mean that the global affordable housing gap would affect one in three urban dwellers, about 1.6 billion people.”
McKinsey Report

Nationally the lack of affordable housing has been reported on by multiple sources, in Baltimore and beyond. The most recent figures suggest the largest lack of affordable housing in the US. “Like many American cities, Baltimore faces a serious housing crisis. Vacant lots and homes pervade the landscape, yet a large number of residents are struggling to find affordable places to live. Close to 50 percent of metropolitan Baltimore households are “rent-burdened” — defined by the federal government as paying more than 30 percent of income on housing. The once thriving industrial economy that powered this city, like so many across the country, has all but vanished, leaving in its wake a shrinking population and a dearth of well-paying jobs to afford the ever-increasing rent. Of 80 low- and moderate-income Baltimore jobs analyzed by the Center for Housing Policy, less than 35 percent make enough to meet the threshold of rent affordability for a two-bedroom apartment.”
alternet

The Atlantic

Baltimore Brew

And yet, we continue to build housing for the wealthy, gentrify our neighborhoods, displace our social challenges into someone else’s back yard, and guarantee profit for the rich.

Tonight neighboring cities Baltimore and DC are fed up. At a rally this evening in front of city hall in Baltimore residents and advocates called for a negligent city government to resist the continued privatization of public services: the most recent being water in the city of Baltimore. But the lack of affordable housing and living wage jobs due to corporate take-over of our public servants and and inadequate funding of our programs runs a close tie to the issue of water privatization.

water rally

In DC today, long-time residents are participating in a sit-in at Councilman Bowsor’s office. Why? Because their public housing rent has been increased more than 50%, some as much as $600/month, after the limit on affordability expired and city representatives allowed market forces to run public housing. This pattern of privatization is running like wildfire in our cities as strapped governments turn over their duties and responsibilities to corporations. In effect, they are continuing their negligence to the public by not only assessing lower tax rates on the wealthy, but also offering additional tax breaks for developers and corporations to build unaffordable housing, take over property and land with generous government subsidies, ignore equitable hiring practices, treat social challenges like dirt to be hidden from the eyes of the elite, and build schools which discriminate against the poor. When will we end these persistent injustices that sustain inequity? Perhaps we can take a lead from our DC sisters and brothers!
ONE DC

Holding Power Accountable: It’s a human rights issue

As privatization in development moves ahead in Baltimore, and government continues to pay tribute to private developers’ bottom line through public:private partnerships and tax subsides to the powerful, Baltimore and Maryland simply reflect a global trend-development which violates the human rights of individual citizens to participate and assure equitable benefit. Recent projects include the plan for privatization of public housing-subsidized by HUD- and transportation in the form of the Red Line in Baltimore and the Purple Line in the International Corridor (1, 2, 3, 4). Both are subsidized by federal and state dollars aimed at appeasing corporate power and threatening displacement and gentrification. This trend of public:private partnerships was highlighted at recent UN meetings on post-2015 sustainable development and the role of private power in drowning the voice of civil society, violating their human rights (4). They brought front and center the critical need to stop continued privatization and public:private partnerships which diminish democracy and minimize citizen participation, in its attempt to grow the profit of corporations.

In Maryland and nationally we continue to witness this same trend in non-sustainable development and public:private deals which drown out democracy and assure political and economic inequity. And just as the international civil sector demands greater accountability and transparency of public:private partnerships, tax subsidies, corporate profiteering, and lack of community participation, we demand the same. Specifically, the criteria offered to the UN to assure sustainable development post-2015 is an insightful framework for us to adapt in our call for public-lead development with a human rights-based ethic (5). Such criteria would investigate the powerful actors negotiating on their behalf while positing themselves as benefiting the local, national, and global economies and communities. The five criteria question:

– whether the private actor has a history or current status of serious allegations of abusing human rights or the environment, including in their cross-border activities;
– whether the private actor has a proven track record (or the potential to) deliver on sustainable development commitments emerging from the post-2015 process;
– whether the private actor has previous involvement in acts of corruption with government officials;
whether the private actor is fully transparent in its financial reporting and fully respecting existing tax responsibilities in all countries it operates, and not undermining sustainable development through tax avoidance;
– any conflicts of interest in order to eliminate potential private donors whose activities are antithetical or contradictory to the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the SDG [sustainable development goals] framework (6).

Locally we can adapt similar criteria in discovering who’s at the table negotiating on their profit-making behalf and the extent to which public dollars subsidize unequal benefit for private developers-growing the health and wealth gap. The future of sustainable development requires an assurance that equitable partnerships exist going forward and previous corrupt corporate entities and their affiliates do not lead development or benefit disproportionately from public contracting or sub-contracting (7).

Baltimore can begin with an analysis of past developments to include amount of tax subsidies and ratio of benefit to developers and local communities, amount of benefit in the form of local hire, economic growth, local business ownership, live-able wages and benefits provided by new developments, affordable products for historic communities, affordable housing, presence of historic communities in revitalized areas, health of communities displaced and in the revitalized areas. An entity exists in Baltimore to conduct such an investigation, the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC). BDC’s mission “is to make doing business in Baltimore, Maryland beneficial for the business community and the workforce so we can support continued economic growth, job creation and revitalization in Baltimore City”. In order to accomplish this mission they must evaluate the way development has occurred to assure future developments benefit all of Baltimore. We would like to see a report card. The departments of housing and community development, economic development, planning, transportation, health, parks and recreation can do similar assessments of impact of past and current development on their benchmarks. Such assessments would benefit from community participation.

Other ways to assure future development is participatory and respecting human rights include realistic community engagement at all levels of planning, implementing, and evaluating. Government funding for community leadership development and community organizing to ensure community leaders are informed and ready to participate would help to guarantee democratic participation. A city planning department with community organizers on staff working directly with neighborhood organizations to increase community engagement and social capital would begin to prepare residents for decision-making roles in current and future developments (8). If the city of Baltimore could do this in the 1960’s with some success, where is the political will to implement such community engagement practices in 2014?

Activism by citizens and community organizations remain key in assuring human rights is front and center of all development. Baltimore and Maryland is waking up to activism. Those still in by-stander activism mode can switch to engaged activism. We can vote elected officials out of office who maintain heads of departments who continue the same tried and true policies that support corporate welfare. We can publicly demand that such department heads who continue policies and practices which results in inequity in housing, economic, and community development, planning, health, transportation, public safety, parks and recreation, and education be placed on notice to show different outcomes in a specific period. We can be updated on these outcomes through annual report cards from these departments. We can call and email our public representatives each time we see the same patterns of development continue with inequitable outcomes.

Such opportunities for organized activism are upon us today. The Maryland Commission on Civil Rights offered a symposium last week on ‘Gentrification and Revitalization’. In regard an investigation of developer Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions’ expansion in East Baltimore over the past 60 years, HUD’s Baltimore office offered the audience direction in pursuing this. In a few weeks Baltimore’s Public Justice Center is hosting a discussion on residents’ demand for inclusion in housing policy and practices being administered through HABC and HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) project-“Democratizing Development” (9, 10). Casa de Maryland continues to seek support to combat displacement of immigrant businesses and residents because of the expansion of the Purple Line in one of Maryland’s most diverse immigrant community (3). It’s Our Economy is hosting a wealth-building conference to address poverty in Baltimore in May (11). Johns Hopkins Hospital service workers will rally for a livable wage on May 10 after the hospital neglects to return to the negotiation table (12). The recent announcement by Baltimore Development Corporation and Housing Authority of Baltimore City inviting proposals for development of a portion of the Old Town neighborhood in East Baltimore offers us an opportunity to practice with the criteria listed above (13). Why? There exists an organized group of local community leaders and stakeholders who have been meeting, organizing residents, and drafting a community-informed master plan for almost 10 years for this area-Change-4-Real (14). They have done the hard work of building a democratic and community participatory model supporting equitable benefit through community-focused economic development. Whether they receive the contract for development of this area will speak volumes to the use of the above mentioned international criteria for sustainable development with human and civil rights agendas. Baltimore and Maryland must begin to hold public:private power accountable through participatory development that respects the dignity of every individual. Anything else is a violation of all our human rights.

1. Privatization of public housing
2. The power of public:private partnerships
3a. Corporate welfare
3b. The greed of power
4. Purple line in the International corridor
5. Post-2015 development criteria
6. Sustainable Development Goals
7. Private developers benefit from public subsidies
8. Baltimore Sun. December 15, 1968. Renewal with a difference
9. Rental Assistance Demonstration project
10. Democratizing Development. Public Justice Center May 6
11. It’s Our Economy
12. Hopkins workers rally for livable wage
fly_mem_201404_Hopkins_May10_Allies_FINAL (1)
13. City announces plan for Old Town development
14. Change-4-Real

Study Circle Pamphlet: Race and class determine ‘who gets the land’

Dear friends,

The link below will allow access to a web version of a pamphlet developed for study circles addressing community organizing and community rebuilding in Middle East and East Baltimore. The ‘points of reflections’ on the last pages uses the book as a resource.
There is also a print version of this pamphlet which will print into a 2-sided pamphlet, front to back, and can be stapled for convenience. Please be in touch with me if you would like access to the print version.

Please use as a tool on this path of changing the status quo of rebuilding disinvested and abandoned communities for the white and middle and upper classes while neglecting low income and historic communities of color-and the acute and long-term trauma caused by these oppressive and discriminatory practices.

In spirit!

RebuildingMEBaltimore_PamphletWEB_FINAL2.pdf>

Rebuilding Middle East Baltimore:
Race and class determine ‘who gets the land’
Marisela B Gomez
www.mariselabgomez.com

Images: Groundbreaking for Hopkins student housing during 2 rebuilding projects in East Baltimore (1956 Broadway Redevelopment Project, black and white photo; 2001-current Johns Hopkins and EBDI Development Project, color photo). In both, more than 800 households, of low income and African American people, were displaced to make room for Johns Hopkins expansion. The legacy of this history of power imbalance continues today, in the people and the spaces of East Baltimore.

Harbor Point development points to powerful corruption and inequity again: let’s change the tide!

The project

The data we have on this current development is this: Harbor Point developers are proposing a 1 billion dollar price tag and expecting 107 million dollars in public assistance (in the form of tax increment financing, TIFs) to build an office tower for Exelon, housing, and a park subsidized by the city (another 21 million). Payment of property taxes back to the city would not begin until 2025. The promise from the developer is that the Harbor Point project would benefit the pockets of poverty nearby. Nearby is the Middle-East/Perkins Home Community with some of the worst social and economic indicators across Baltimore city. Demogra.Perk.Balt At the first public hearing on this proposed public subsidy, residents from nearby Perkins Home testified that the past developments in the Harbor-Inner Harbor and Harbor East- are not accessible to them because “we can’t afford the $6.00 ice cream cones sold there?”. They wanted to know how this proposed development would be one that was accessible to them and from which they could benefit.

Harbor Point subsidy hearing, Baltimore City Hall, July 10, 2013

Would these majority African American people be able to walk the sidewalks of this new development without scrutiny by police on segways or tourists. Or will it be another addition to the growing gentrification of Baltimore city with walls of police and manicured parks separating the rich and the poor? Would there be jobs with living wages which offer apprenticeship training and a career ladder out of poverty? Would there be affordable housing for low-income people? Would there be amenities priced for people of all incomes or would the pricing select out those who are welcomed to the new development? And would there be appropriate vocational and job readiness and treatment programs addressing all the social and health determinants of unemployment, homelessness and risk of homelessness, and poverty?

The promises

Will the new mixed-income housing which the developer promises will have teachers as neighbors of the wealthy be the extent of affordable housing? In the past years low-income housing has been conveniently replaced by work-force housing-targeting teachers, firewomen and others- affordable to a different income level than that of a family of 3 living on $19,000/year-considered poverty-level income by the US Federal Register. Will Harbor Point include housing to accommodate a family of 3 living on $19,000 per year? To this end will there be amendments to the Harbor Point tax incentive legislation requiring a percentage of housing accommodate this low-income population? The need for low-income housing is urgent as Baltimore continues to demolish existing very low-income and public housing in East Baltimore for gentrification projects (Johns Hopkins/East Baltimore Development Inc; Jefferson Luxury Apartments at Wolfe and Fayette; Brentwood Village). A report by Joan Jacobson in 2007 showed a 15-year period of decrease (42%) in occupied public housing in Baltimore city with little concrete plans for replacement. Housing Report Meanwhile the percent of female single headed households have increased over this same period.

The developer also promised 6000 new jobs from the Harbor Point development. Sounds familiar? Remember that 8000-job promise from the Johns Hopkins/EBDI project which delivered approximately 1000 in 12 years? Again, what will the city council legislate to hold this private developer accountable to the public subsidies that could otherwise be spent on recreation centers and parks in neighborhoods affected by closed recreation centers and firehouses and unkept parks? Instead this project is proposing subsidy for a park; similar to the public subsidy for the 7 acre park in the Hopkins/EBDI development.

Harbor Point developer promising jobs at hearing, Baltimore City Hall, July 17, 2013

Strategies for change

The promise to benefit the surrounding community by the developer for Harbor Point must be legally binding and specify strategies to address readying a workforce to access employment offered by the development. If the plan is to benefit the unemployed then the social and health determinants that lead to unemployment must be identified and remedied. Those unprepared to enter the workforce must be prepared; those addicted to drugs and alcohol or affected by mental illness must be offered opportunity for treatment and retraining. A comprehensive community development project must include programs and processes identified through Health and Environmental Impact Assessments implemented during the planning phase to prepare the local community to benefit from employment opportunity and determine the effect of building on a buried and capped chromium hazardous waste site. “Chromium testimony at July 16 Harbor Point public hearing”>

The patterns are stark as we continue to watch our public dollars subsidize the wealth of the powerful 10% while the gap between the rich and the poor grow. This continued trend of growing income inequality, racial and spatial segregation and its correlation with unstable economies continue to be documented both nationally and internationally. (Residential Segregation, Spatial Mismatch and Economic Growth across US Metropolitan Areas. Urban Studies. March 1, 2013 Urban Stud-2013) A growing body of evidence proposes improving these social inequities to improve rapid economic growth. It is time for Baltimore elected representatives and appointed government officials to stop corrupt and uninformed practices that continue to marginalize people of low-income and color by giving the ‘right of the city’ to a majority white and middle and wealthy class. A community reinvestment contract or community benefits agreement could target funds to the surrounding community to assess and address its needs. Unlike the failed promises of the Hopkins/EBDI project of ‘channeling 3 percent of any city bonds and other eligible public funds and up to 2 percent of income from commercial leases in the [biotech] park, along with a percentage of the money from the sale of any land to developers, into community reinvestment projects’ to benefit the surrounding community, a legally binding contract must be enacted to assure fulfillment. (Baltimore Sun, 16 April 2002)

Inequality leads to social tension and political instability, thus lowering certainty, investment, and economic growth. (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press. Been Down So Long: Weak Market Cities and Regional Equity. (2008) Been_Down_So_Long. Therefore social and economic subsidies which address the causes of social tension, income inequality and its causes, should be as primary as tax subsidies to the wealthy to incentivize economic growth in cities with high rates of health and wealth gaps. Instead of large tax incentives and government-private bonds to the developer, social impact bonds (SIB) can be investigated as credible ways to invest public and private trust in remedying social indicators which in turn lead to a competent workforce and communities ready to learn and become self sufficient. http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/07/social-impact-bonds And the return on this investment is no longer than the return on current tax subsidies to developers. More stable and equitable communities in housing, income, education, and race/ethnicity leads to an economy which can maintain resilience from changing market forces, regionally, nationally, internationally and stem the tide of growing inequality.Resilience in changing times The Harbor Point project, if used in a way to target much needed funds to the city’s most needy communities, could be the beginning of Baltimore moving away from its past and current history of race and class corruption and exploitation to one of shared economic benefit and good health for a broader population.

Changing the tide

History shows us that private interests take public subsidies and grow their wealth with little benefit to the surrounding communities of poor and low income. Or maybe we should call it by the more acceptable term of ‘neoliberal take-over of the city’: the continued takeover of community rebuilding processes where government gives up its responsibility to assure that public dollars in a community and economic development project assures that ALL the public benefits. Instead our government ‘leaders’ have been turning over subsidies to private developers who ‘say’ they will rebuild an area to benefit the city with no analysis or evaluation of whether they deliver on promised outcomes. Case in point is the debacle of continued inequitable growth in the Johns Hopkins/EBDI development in East Baltimore made transparent through the Daily Record’s investigative series. The inequity was evident by the lack of construction, jobs for local residents, affordable housing, and non-transparent financial accounting and embarrassed the city council to hold the private:public development board accountable for more than 500 million dollars in public subsidies.

If the city is willing to continue to subsidize private interests with public funds then it must be ready to mandate that the private interests subsidize government’s role to the public in addressing its responsibilities to the public. It’s the only just and economically sensible solution in a neoliberal state! Let’s make our voices heard and NOT let the Baltimore City Council off the hook on this public subsidy legislation by demanding legislation that assures equity to the communities most affected by wealth and health disparities. This type of political action is not only just, it is good for the economy and the health of the community. Let us point the way to equitable and sustainable development in Baltimore. The third public hearing on the Harbor Point development will be held August 7, 2013 at 5pm at City Hall.

Waiting in the heat outside Baltimore City Hall’s closed doors for the Harbor Point subsidy hearing, July 17, 2013

How public:private partnerships contribute to inequity in community rebuilding

Figure 1.roof

Urban redevelopment and neighborhood health in East

Baltimore, Maryland: The role of communitarian and

institutional social capital

critical pub health