Thursday, February 22, 2007
The Spaces Of Utopia by Oscar Wilde
I have lived in Baltimore City for most of my adult life. I think of it as my home town and have accumulated an immense fund of affection for the place and its people. But Baltimore is, for the most part, a mess. Not the kind of enchanting mess that makes cities such interesting places to explore, but an awful mess. And it seems much worse now than when I first knew it in 1969. Or perhaps it is in the same old mess except that many then believed they could do something about it. Now the problems seem intractable.
Too many details of the mess would overwhelm. But some of its features are worth pointing out. There are some 40,000 vacant and for the most part abandoned houses in a housing stock of some 300,000 units within the city limits (there were 7,000 in 1970). The concentrations of homelessness (in spite of all those vacant houses), of unemployment, and, even more significant, of the employed poor (trying to live on less than $200 a week without benefits) are everywhere in evidence. The lines at the soup kitchens (there were 60 of them in the State of Maryland in 1980 and there are now 900) get longer and longer (30 percent of those using them have jobs according to some informal surveys) and the charity missions of many inner-city churches are stretched beyond coping : The inequalities - of opportunities as well as of standards of life - are growing by leaps and bounds. The massive educational resources of the city (Baltimore City has some of the finest schools in the country, but they are all private) are denied to most of the children who live there. The public schools are in a lamentable state (two and a half years behind the national average in reading skills according to recent tests).
Abandonment of the city: housing in Baltimore. In 1970 there were circa 7,000 abandoned houses in Baltimore City. By 1998 that number had grown to an estimated 40,000 out of a total housing stock of just over 300,000 units. The effect on whole neighborhoods has been catastrophic. City policy is now oriented to large scale demolition (4,000 were demolished between 1996 and 1999 and another 11,000 demolitions are planned). The 'official' hope is that this will drive the poor and the underclass from the city. The idea of reclaiming older neighborhoods - particularly those with a high quality housing stock - for impoverished populations has been abandoned even though it could make much economic and environmental sense.
Charity in the city: Our Daily Bread in downtown Baltimore. Our Daily Bread run by Catholic Charities feeds around 900 people daily. Visited by the Pope, it has long been a flagship operation for servicing the inner city poor. But in 1998, the Downtown Partnership, led by Peter Angelos, the multi-millionaire owner of the Baltimore Orioles (salary budget for baseball players at $90 million annually), began to agitate against poor people circulating in the downtown area because they supposedly fostered crime, devalued properties and deterred redevelopment. The Partnership urged the city to set up a `social services campus' for the poor away from the downtown area. Catholic Charities was asked to seek a less central location. In April 1999 it was announced that Our Daily Bread would be moved to a renovated building donated by Angelos, symbolically tucked away behind the city jail in an impoverished neighborhood. When local residents complained Catholic Charities abandoned that site and began looking elsewhere. The bourgeoisie, as Engels argued, have only one solution to social problems - they move them around while blaming those least able to deal with the burden.
Chronic poverty and all manner of signs of social distress reign in the shadow of some of the finest medical and public health institutions in the world that are inaccessible to local populations (unless they have the privilege to clean the AIDS wards for less than a living wage or have medicare/medicaid status or a rare disease of great interest to elite medical researchers). Life expectancy in the immediate environs of these internationally renowned hospital facilities is among the lowest in the. nation and comparable to many of the poorer countries in the world.
Poverty in the city: in the shadow of "Johns Hopkins Hospital". The Johns Hopkins hospital and its associated School of Public Health are rated as among the best in the world. Yet the life-expectancy of individuals in the city is abysmally low and the health statistics in the immediate environs of these institutions tell an appalling story of impoverishment, marginalization, exploitation, and neglect. The pawnshops, the crumbling storefront churches, the bailbondsmen, all in the vicinity of the hospital, signify the social distress. But a crumbling mural expressing the desire to 'Climb Jacob's Ladder' out of misery to a condition of selfacceptance and reliance provides a glimmer of utopian desire. The living wage campaign in the city), and in Johns Hopkins (with its slogan of 'Climbing Jacobs Ladder) give hope for one step up that ladder.
(63 years for men and 73.2 for women). The rate of syphilis transmission is the highest of any city in the developed world (according to WHO statistics) and there has been an explosion of respiratory diseases (more than doubling for all categories in the city between 1986 and 1996, according to data collected for the Environmental Protection Agency, but led by an astonishing increase in the asthma rate from around 8 to nearly 170 per 10,000 inhabitants). The only notable public health success recorded in the city is the dramatic curbing of TB infections. This happened by way of a public health commissioner who, having had military medical experience in Vietnam, saw fit to adapt the Chinese communist idea of `barefoot doctors' to urban Baltimore and thereby bring the city's TB rate down within a decade from its unenviable position of worst in the nation to below the national average.
The affluent (black and white) continue to leave the city in droves (at a net rate of over a thousand a month over the last five years according to the Census Bureau) seeking solace, security, and jobs in the suburbs (population in the city was close to a million when I arrived and is now down to just over 600,000). The suburbs, the edge cities, and the ex-urbs proliferate (with the aid of massive public subsidies to transport and upper-income housing construction via the mortgage interest tax deduction) in an extraordinarily unecological sprawl) - long commutes, serious ozone concentrations in summer (almost certainly connected to spiraling respiratory ailments), and loss of agricultural land. Developers offer up this great blight of secure suburban conformity (alleviated, of course, by architectural quotations from Italianate villas and Doric columns) as a panacea for the breakdown and disintegration of urbanity first in the inner city and then, as the deadly blight spreads, the inner suburbs. And it is there, in that bland and undistinguished world, that most of the metropolitan population, like most other Americans who have never had it so good, happily dwell. Residency in this commercialized `bourgeois utopia' (as Robert Fishman,1989, calls it) anchors the peculiar mix of political conservatism and social libertarianism that is the hallmark of contemporary America.
There has been an attempt of sorts to turn things around in the city. Launched in the early 1970s under the aegis of a dedicated and authoritarian mayor (William Donald Schaeffer) it entailed formation of a private-public partnership to invest in downtown and Inner Harbor renewal in order to attract financial services, tourism, and so-called hospitality functions to center city. It took a lot of public money to get the process rolling. Once the partnership had the hotels (Hyatt got a $35 million hotel by putting up only half a million of its own money in the early 1980s), it needed to build a convention center to fill the hotels
Bourgeois Utopia: suburban sprawl. Like many other metropolitan regions in the United States, Baltimore has exploded outwards at an extraordinary rate Impelled by a complex mix of fears of the city, compounded by racism and class prejudice, the collapse of public infrastructures in many parts of the city, and attracted by the 'bourgeois utopian' desire to secure isolated and protected comforts, the elect of this prop""" indivadualism has been to create a remarkably repetitive landscape of low-density sprawl coupled with total dependence on the automobile. The ecological impacts are strongly negative and the social and economic costs of tragic congestion and infrastructure provision are rising rapidly.
Developers'utopia: Baltimore's Inner Harbor renewal. Almost everything to be seen on the present skyline of Baltimore's Inner Harbor has been constructed since around 1970. The background buildings largely represent off office and hotel spaces with high rise condominiums (both of which proved hard to sell of except at cut-prices) guarding either end. The tall condominium on the left was built on valuable land 'given away' to the developer in return for promises of help elsewhere that never materialized. In the foreground are the leisure and tourist activities that focus on the harbor front (Rouse's investments in a series of Pavilions occupy the central corner oftheharbor).Built through a public-privatepartnership' much of the development has had a checkered history. The Hyatt Regency Hotel (center top) gave Hyatt a $35 million hotel for an investment of $500,000 (the rest was public moneys). While this investment eventually turned out successfully for the city, the Columbus Science Center (with the white fluted roofline center bottom) cost $147 million of publicly secured private moneys but its main function, a Hall of Exploration, was forced to close in 1997 after nine months of operation. Rescued from bankruptcy by a State takeover, the building is now run by the University of Maryland with a marine biotechnology center as a main tenant.
get a piece of what is now calculated to be an $83 billion a year meetings industry. In order to keep competitive, a further public investment of $150 million was needed to create an even larger convention center to get the big conventions. It is now feared that all this investment will not be profitable without a large `headquarters hotel' that will also require `extensive' public subsidies (maybe $50 million). And to improve the city image, nearly a half billion dollars went into building sports stadiums for teams (one of which was lured from Cleveland) that pay several million a year to star players watched by fans paying exorbitant ticket prices. This is a common enough story across the United States (the National Football League -deserving welfare clients -calculates that $3.8 billion of largely public money will be poured into new NFL stadiums between 1992 and 2002). The state spends $5 million building a special light rail stop for the football stadium that will be used no more than twenty days a year.
This is what is called `feeding the downtown monster.' Every new wave of public investment is needed to make the last wave pay off. The privatepublic partnership means that the public takes the risks and the private takes the profits. The citizenry wait for benefits that never materialize. Several of the public projects go belly up and an upscale condominium complex on the waterfront does so poorly that it gets $2 million in tax breaks in order to forestall bankruptcy while the impoverished working class - close to bankruptcy if not technically in it - get nothing. `We have to be competitive,' says the Mayor and that `if they fail then no one else will want to invest,' apparently forgetting that the higher tax bills on the rest of us (including those who might upgrade their properties) is also an incentive to join the exodus from the city to the suburbs that has long been under way.
There is, of course, a good side to the renewal effort. Many people come to the Inner Harbor. There is even racial mixing. People evidently enjoy just watching people. And there is a growing recognition that the city, to be vibrant, has to be a twenty-four-hour affair and that mega bookstores and a Hard Rock cafe have as much to offer as Benetton and the Banana Republic . A hefty dose of social control is required to make such activities viable and signs of such control are omnipresent (Plate 8.9). The wish to be close to the action brings some young professionals (those without kids) back into center city. And when `gentrification' in the classical sense of displacement of low-income populations has occurred (as it has mainly around the harbor) it has at least physically revitalized parts of the city that were slowly dying from neglect (Plate 8.10). Some of the seedier public housing blocks have been imploded to make way for better quality housing in better quality environments. Here and there, neighborhoods
Public investments in the city: stadiums and a convention center for the affluent. During the 1990s nearly a billion dollars went into two publicly-financed sports stadiums ($500 million), an extension to the Convention Center ($150 million) and other major downtown projects (e.g, the addition of a light rail stop for the football stadium to be used no more than twenty times a year for $5 million). The argument for such investments is that they create jobs and generate income. But a careful cost-benefit analysis by two respected economists (Hamilton and Kahn, 1997) showed a net loss of the baseball stadium investment of $24 million a year. Meanwhile, libraries have been closed, urban services curtailed and investment in city schools has been minimal.
Public subsidy and private gain: the story of Harborview. After the Key Highway Shipyard closed in 1982 (with the loss of 2,000 jobs), the vacant site (top) became a focus of lengthy controversy. Approval was finally given in 19871o build a series of high rises on the site, in the face offterce local community opposition because the sheer scale of the project threatened the intimacy of existing neighborhoods and because access to the waterfront would be compromised. Funding for the project, initially confused by a mortgage foreclosure and multiple transfers of developer rights, was finally (and abruptly) procured from southeast Asia (Parkway Associates, then awash with surplus funds, put up the money without question since the site reminded their agent of Hong Kong). The project immediately hit difficulties with the financial crash of October 1987 and never seems to have turned a profit after the first tower was opened to much fanfare ('a new style in urban living') in 1993 (penthouse apartments marketed for $1.5 million). Eventually bailed out by a $2 million tax relief package in 1998, the developers have thrashed around to find nd ways to make the site more profitable. Proposals included building three more towers to make the first tower more viable. In 1999, construction began on luxury town houses and 'canal homes'with some modest high rise construction layered in between on the landward side. Another tower may yet be built. ¶ 6:31 PM
I have lived in Baltimore City for most of my adult life. I think of it as my home town and have accumulated an immense fund of affection for the place and its people. But Baltimore is, for the most part, a mess. Not the kind of enchanting mess that makes cities such interesting places to explore, but an awful mess. And it seems much worse now than when I first knew it in 1969. Or perhaps it is in the same old mess except that many then believed they could do something about it. Now the problems seem intractable.
Too many details of the mess would overwhelm. But some of its features are worth pointing out. There are some 40,000 vacant and for the most part abandoned houses in a housing stock of some 300,000 units within the city limits (there were 7,000 in 1970). The concentrations of homelessness (in spite of all those vacant houses), of unemployment, and, even more significant, of the employed poor (trying to live on less than $200 a week without benefits) are everywhere in evidence. The lines at the soup kitchens (there were 60 of them in the State of Maryland in 1980 and there are now 900) get longer and longer (30 percent of those using them have jobs according to some informal surveys) and the charity missions of many inner-city churches are stretched beyond coping : The inequalities - of opportunities as well as of standards of life - are growing by leaps and bounds. The massive educational resources of the city (Baltimore City has some of the finest schools in the country, but they are all private) are denied to most of the children who live there. The public schools are in a lamentable state (two and a half years behind the national average in reading skills according to recent tests).
Abandonment of the city: housing in Baltimore. In 1970 there were circa 7,000 abandoned houses in Baltimore City. By 1998 that number had grown to an estimated 40,000 out of a total housing stock of just over 300,000 units. The effect on whole neighborhoods has been catastrophic. City policy is now oriented to large scale demolition (4,000 were demolished between 1996 and 1999 and another 11,000 demolitions are planned). The 'official' hope is that this will drive the poor and the underclass from the city. The idea of reclaiming older neighborhoods - particularly those with a high quality housing stock - for impoverished populations has been abandoned even though it could make much economic and environmental sense.
Charity in the city: Our Daily Bread in downtown Baltimore. Our Daily Bread run by Catholic Charities feeds around 900 people daily. Visited by the Pope, it has long been a flagship operation for servicing the inner city poor. But in 1998, the Downtown Partnership, led by Peter Angelos, the multi-millionaire owner of the Baltimore Orioles (salary budget for baseball players at $90 million annually), began to agitate against poor people circulating in the downtown area because they supposedly fostered crime, devalued properties and deterred redevelopment. The Partnership urged the city to set up a `social services campus' for the poor away from the downtown area. Catholic Charities was asked to seek a less central location. In April 1999 it was announced that Our Daily Bread would be moved to a renovated building donated by Angelos, symbolically tucked away behind the city jail in an impoverished neighborhood. When local residents complained Catholic Charities abandoned that site and began looking elsewhere. The bourgeoisie, as Engels argued, have only one solution to social problems - they move them around while blaming those least able to deal with the burden.
Chronic poverty and all manner of signs of social distress reign in the shadow of some of the finest medical and public health institutions in the world that are inaccessible to local populations (unless they have the privilege to clean the AIDS wards for less than a living wage or have medicare/medicaid status or a rare disease of great interest to elite medical researchers). Life expectancy in the immediate environs of these internationally renowned hospital facilities is among the lowest in the. nation and comparable to many of the poorer countries in the world.
Poverty in the city: in the shadow of "Johns Hopkins Hospital". The Johns Hopkins hospital and its associated School of Public Health are rated as among the best in the world. Yet the life-expectancy of individuals in the city is abysmally low and the health statistics in the immediate environs of these institutions tell an appalling story of impoverishment, marginalization, exploitation, and neglect. The pawnshops, the crumbling storefront churches, the bailbondsmen, all in the vicinity of the hospital, signify the social distress. But a crumbling mural expressing the desire to 'Climb Jacob's Ladder' out of misery to a condition of selfacceptance and reliance provides a glimmer of utopian desire. The living wage campaign in the city), and in Johns Hopkins (with its slogan of 'Climbing Jacobs Ladder) give hope for one step up that ladder.
(63 years for men and 73.2 for women). The rate of syphilis transmission is the highest of any city in the developed world (according to WHO statistics) and there has been an explosion of respiratory diseases (more than doubling for all categories in the city between 1986 and 1996, according to data collected for the Environmental Protection Agency, but led by an astonishing increase in the asthma rate from around 8 to nearly 170 per 10,000 inhabitants). The only notable public health success recorded in the city is the dramatic curbing of TB infections. This happened by way of a public health commissioner who, having had military medical experience in Vietnam, saw fit to adapt the Chinese communist idea of `barefoot doctors' to urban Baltimore and thereby bring the city's TB rate down within a decade from its unenviable position of worst in the nation to below the national average.
The affluent (black and white) continue to leave the city in droves (at a net rate of over a thousand a month over the last five years according to the Census Bureau) seeking solace, security, and jobs in the suburbs (population in the city was close to a million when I arrived and is now down to just over 600,000). The suburbs, the edge cities, and the ex-urbs proliferate (with the aid of massive public subsidies to transport and upper-income housing construction via the mortgage interest tax deduction) in an extraordinarily unecological sprawl) - long commutes, serious ozone concentrations in summer (almost certainly connected to spiraling respiratory ailments), and loss of agricultural land. Developers offer up this great blight of secure suburban conformity (alleviated, of course, by architectural quotations from Italianate villas and Doric columns) as a panacea for the breakdown and disintegration of urbanity first in the inner city and then, as the deadly blight spreads, the inner suburbs. And it is there, in that bland and undistinguished world, that most of the metropolitan population, like most other Americans who have never had it so good, happily dwell. Residency in this commercialized `bourgeois utopia' (as Robert Fishman,1989, calls it) anchors the peculiar mix of political conservatism and social libertarianism that is the hallmark of contemporary America.
There has been an attempt of sorts to turn things around in the city. Launched in the early 1970s under the aegis of a dedicated and authoritarian mayor (William Donald Schaeffer) it entailed formation of a private-public partnership to invest in downtown and Inner Harbor renewal in order to attract financial services, tourism, and so-called hospitality functions to center city. It took a lot of public money to get the process rolling. Once the partnership had the hotels (Hyatt got a $35 million hotel by putting up only half a million of its own money in the early 1980s), it needed to build a convention center to fill the hotels
Bourgeois Utopia: suburban sprawl. Like many other metropolitan regions in the United States, Baltimore has exploded outwards at an extraordinary rate Impelled by a complex mix of fears of the city, compounded by racism and class prejudice, the collapse of public infrastructures in many parts of the city, and attracted by the 'bourgeois utopian' desire to secure isolated and protected comforts, the elect of this prop""" indivadualism has been to create a remarkably repetitive landscape of low-density sprawl coupled with total dependence on the automobile. The ecological impacts are strongly negative and the social and economic costs of tragic congestion and infrastructure provision are rising rapidly.
Developers'utopia: Baltimore's Inner Harbor renewal. Almost everything to be seen on the present skyline of Baltimore's Inner Harbor has been constructed since around 1970. The background buildings largely represent off office and hotel spaces with high rise condominiums (both of which proved hard to sell of except at cut-prices) guarding either end. The tall condominium on the left was built on valuable land 'given away' to the developer in return for promises of help elsewhere that never materialized. In the foreground are the leisure and tourist activities that focus on the harbor front (Rouse's investments in a series of Pavilions occupy the central corner oftheharbor).Built through a public-privatepartnership' much of the development has had a checkered history. The Hyatt Regency Hotel (center top) gave Hyatt a $35 million hotel for an investment of $500,000 (the rest was public moneys). While this investment eventually turned out successfully for the city, the Columbus Science Center (with the white fluted roofline center bottom) cost $147 million of publicly secured private moneys but its main function, a Hall of Exploration, was forced to close in 1997 after nine months of operation. Rescued from bankruptcy by a State takeover, the building is now run by the University of Maryland with a marine biotechnology center as a main tenant.
get a piece of what is now calculated to be an $83 billion a year meetings industry. In order to keep competitive, a further public investment of $150 million was needed to create an even larger convention center to get the big conventions. It is now feared that all this investment will not be profitable without a large `headquarters hotel' that will also require `extensive' public subsidies (maybe $50 million). And to improve the city image, nearly a half billion dollars went into building sports stadiums for teams (one of which was lured from Cleveland) that pay several million a year to star players watched by fans paying exorbitant ticket prices. This is a common enough story across the United States (the National Football League -deserving welfare clients -calculates that $3.8 billion of largely public money will be poured into new NFL stadiums between 1992 and 2002). The state spends $5 million building a special light rail stop for the football stadium that will be used no more than twenty days a year.
This is what is called `feeding the downtown monster.' Every new wave of public investment is needed to make the last wave pay off. The privatepublic partnership means that the public takes the risks and the private takes the profits. The citizenry wait for benefits that never materialize. Several of the public projects go belly up and an upscale condominium complex on the waterfront does so poorly that it gets $2 million in tax breaks in order to forestall bankruptcy while the impoverished working class - close to bankruptcy if not technically in it - get nothing. `We have to be competitive,' says the Mayor and that `if they fail then no one else will want to invest,' apparently forgetting that the higher tax bills on the rest of us (including those who might upgrade their properties) is also an incentive to join the exodus from the city to the suburbs that has long been under way.
There is, of course, a good side to the renewal effort. Many people come to the Inner Harbor. There is even racial mixing. People evidently enjoy just watching people. And there is a growing recognition that the city, to be vibrant, has to be a twenty-four-hour affair and that mega bookstores and a Hard Rock cafe have as much to offer as Benetton and the Banana Republic . A hefty dose of social control is required to make such activities viable and signs of such control are omnipresent (Plate 8.9). The wish to be close to the action brings some young professionals (those without kids) back into center city. And when `gentrification' in the classical sense of displacement of low-income populations has occurred (as it has mainly around the harbor) it has at least physically revitalized parts of the city that were slowly dying from neglect (Plate 8.10). Some of the seedier public housing blocks have been imploded to make way for better quality housing in better quality environments. Here and there, neighborhoods
Public investments in the city: stadiums and a convention center for the affluent. During the 1990s nearly a billion dollars went into two publicly-financed sports stadiums ($500 million), an extension to the Convention Center ($150 million) and other major downtown projects (e.g, the addition of a light rail stop for the football stadium to be used no more than twenty times a year for $5 million). The argument for such investments is that they create jobs and generate income. But a careful cost-benefit analysis by two respected economists (Hamilton and Kahn, 1997) showed a net loss of the baseball stadium investment of $24 million a year. Meanwhile, libraries have been closed, urban services curtailed and investment in city schools has been minimal.
Public subsidy and private gain: the story of Harborview. After the Key Highway Shipyard closed in 1982 (with the loss of 2,000 jobs), the vacant site (top) became a focus of lengthy controversy. Approval was finally given in 19871o build a series of high rises on the site, in the face offterce local community opposition because the sheer scale of the project threatened the intimacy of existing neighborhoods and because access to the waterfront would be compromised. Funding for the project, initially confused by a mortgage foreclosure and multiple transfers of developer rights, was finally (and abruptly) procured from southeast Asia (Parkway Associates, then awash with surplus funds, put up the money without question since the site reminded their agent of Hong Kong). The project immediately hit difficulties with the financial crash of October 1987 and never seems to have turned a profit after the first tower was opened to much fanfare ('a new style in urban living') in 1993 (penthouse apartments marketed for $1.5 million). Eventually bailed out by a $2 million tax relief package in 1998, the developers have thrashed around to find nd ways to make the site more profitable. Proposals included building three more towers to make the first tower more viable. In 1999, construction began on luxury town houses and 'canal homes'with some modest high rise construction layered in between on the landward side. Another tower may yet be built. ¶ 6:31 PM
