Let me repeat: Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has an opportunity to not only reverse the fortunes of Baltimore, but to give the entire metropolitan region a huge boost by mounting a bipartisan, city-suburban, public-private effort to address the deep-seated problems that surfaced with April's rioting and turmoil.
And Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has a chance to get her city back on track and save her scorched political career by joining in a partnership with the governor.
History — and voters — will judge both Hogan and Rawlings-Blake by what they do with the opportunity that adversity handed them in the spring of 2015.
No need for a task force: There are plenty of shovel-ready ideas in place, plenty of good works already underway that need to be expanded and better funded.
And the governor, the mayor and the state's political and business leaders will be handed a blueprint for the future on Monday with the public release of the "Baltimore Regional Plan for Sustainable Development." Three years in the making, it describes ways to help coordinate public and private investments in housing, public transportation and worker readiness, all in the vital effort to reduce economic disparities and get some of our poorest fellow citizens — and their children — to a more prosperous future.
The plan comes from the Opportunity Collaborative. That's a consortium of local governments, state agencies, universities and nonprofits that operated with the support of the Baltimore Metropolitan Council (BMC). The consortium is aptly named because the brightest, most civic-minded people among us recognize that the city's problems are everyone's problems — and that the problems in Baltimore are directly connected to a lack of opportunity for disadvantaged people stuck in the inner city, far from the jobs they need and the better housing and schools that could change their lives in a relatively short period of time.
Some very smart people have done the "opportunity mapping" of the region, showing the need for both affordable housing near job centers, many of them in the suburbs, and a better-coordinated transit system that connects people to work.
At a recent presentation for planners and architects at the Engineers Club in Baltimore, researchers emphasized the adverse effects of long commute times for people who rely on public transportation, a condition that advocates such as Jimmy Rouse's Transit Choices group have been working to fix. It was clear from data offered at the meeting that the Baltimore region has major obstacles to overcome in moving people to areas of greater opportunity.
As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the urban scholar David Rusk warned government and business leaders 20 years ago that Baltimore could not continue as a "poorhouse for the region's minority poor." Residents of the surrounding counties might believe they are insulated from conditions in Baltimore's poorest neighborhoods, but Rusk predicted that the whole region would be held back — never reach its true potential — if its central city did not reverse its downward course. I spoke to him recently, and he still believes that.
One solution, proffered by Rusk and others and realized by the settlement of a federal lawsuit, is public investment in rent-subsidy vouchers to allow people living in concentrated poverty to move to better, low-poverty neighborhoods. That effort has been underway for more than a decade, and the waiting list of eligible families seeking vouchers stands today at more than 7,000.
Even if that demand could be met in the next 10 years, people who earn well below the region's median income cannot move unless housing is decent and affordable. We should create some kind of regional authority to ensure more "workforce housing." And no plan will be sustainable without a mandate to include more of that kind of stock in future development in the city and counties. This is particularly important as the regional population grows, according to the BMC, by another 300,000 in the next 15 years.
Allow me to repeat something from an earlier column for people who do not support providing low-income families with an opportunity to move to better communities if they want to:
Generational poverty is a profound problem here. A comprehensive study of economic mobility in the U.S. ranked Baltimore just about last among 2,478 jurisdictions (cities, towns and counties) in getting poor children to a better place in life as adults. The study, by Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, looked at the income records of millions of families with children. It found that poor children whose families move them out of high-poverty areas early in life do better in employment, income, marriage and education than those who remain in poor neighborhoods. Baltimore's abysmal finish in this measurement should be an embarrassment and a call to action.
The governor and the mayor must respond — in ways bold and sustainable, in a partnership that transcends politics for the good of the city and region, and they need to get to it right soon. By this they will be judged.