The soul of Baltimore is in its neighborhoods. There's Fells Point by the water, where the city began. Tree-shaded Mount Washington. Ashburton, home to many prominent West
Baltimore families. Or Highlandtown, a historic and present-day melange of Germans and Italians, Greeks and Poles and West Virginians, where cobblestoned streets run beside infinities of white marble steps.
It's true, of course, that these neighborhoods have often been fiercely defensive enclaves, rigidly segregated by ethnicity or race. But they have also been cohesive and supportive, offering a far stronger sense of community than American society typically does today.
The neighborhoods not only defined Baltimore. They helped open the city to successive waves of immigrants. And with their grit and character, they held the town together through good times and bad.
It wasn't surprising that when community-based economic development organizations sprang up in U.S. cities in the late '60s and early '70s, Baltimore groups won national recognition. From the Southeast Community Organization to the Greater Homewood Corporation to COIL (Communities Organized to Improve Life), many showed remarkable spunk.
Even William Donald Schaefer, the man who'd earn his national reputation remaking the Inner Harbor, began his mayoralty in the early '70s seeking to restore the city's flagging confidence by rebuilding pride in neighborhoods across the city.
Sadly, the Schaefer embrace turned out to be an oppressive bearhug for a number of community organizations. As his mayoralty flourished, and surely with an eye to keeping as many influential people as he could in his own happy political family, Mr. Schaefer started putting neighborhood activists onto city payrolls. Many of the city's once-vaunted neighborhood organizations became co-opted, losing their spirit and ability to carry off entrepreneurial projects.
Today, Baltimore neighborhood organizations almost never crop up in lists of the country's most active. Nor does Baltimore have strong networks of community development organizations comparable to those in such cities as Boston, Cleveland and Chicago.
There's one big exception. It is BUILD -- Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development, the church-based group that started making waves in the Baltimore of the '80s with unconventional challenges to the establishment.
While still mayor, Mr. Schaefer found BUILD so obstreperous he'd have nothing to do with it.
His difficulty in accepting and working with strong neighborhood organizations is a striking irony of recent-day Baltimore history. The Schaefer name would top any short list of mayors who grew up in humble neighborhoods, never moved away, and for years seemed obsessed with their welfare.
To this day, it's easy to get Baltimore's famed mayor-turned-governor to talk about the 600 block of Edgewood Street.
"I was on my block when I was the only person with an automobile," Mr. Schaefer told us. "I was there when low-income people moved in and there was broken glass all over. But then people started to take pride in it again. Now the house across from me is as pretty as any house in Roland Park.
"There are still some houses where nobody seems to care, just rent them out. The neighbor on my right -- he's dead now -- worked himself until he died of exhaustion putting his kids through college. I saw another neighbor sweep the gutter every darn day of his life. Across the street was a prostitute. Drug addicts and murders.
"My street's where I learned about teen-aged pregnancy, saw 14-year-olds having babies and treating them like rag dolls. I've seen kids dumped out of the house at 7 a.m. and let back in at night. I saw chickens dumped out of second-story windows. I didn't read about urban life. I lived it."
The several dozen Baltimore region leaders we met were as quick to talk about the city's neighborhoods and speculate about their future as the former mayor was to reminisce about his own home street.
And a clear difference of attitude struck us. On schools, Baltimore City's other compelling problem of the '90s, virtually no one was optimistic. Instead, we heard despair, sometimes disgust, never hope.
Yet when talk turned to neighborhoods, even if the diagnosis was just as serious, people started talking about the cure, as if it could happen.
Why? A consensus, however fragile, is forming around a common-sense strategy to help the city's most troubled neighborhoods. Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, BUILD, and James Rouse's Enterprise Foundation agree on the plan.
The idea is to reach, in a very personal way, the neighborhood people who need help the most. Examples might include a mother and her two children who lose their apartment in a fire. A young woman who is routinely beaten by a boyfriend. A teen-age dropout who knows there's no future in drugs, but still sells crack because he likes the cash. Or a young girl given no road to self-esteem except an early demonstration of her fertility.
The consensus says that however daunting the obstacles, these imperiled lives and families must be saved. Second, that the problems, from poor housing to drug affliction to poor schooling, are interconnected. Third, that standard social service referrals won't do the trick. That only personal contact is likely to break through. And that one needs a mediating institution -- a church, social club, community center -- to make the contact, and then, through good days and bad, keep it up.
Eventually, it's suggested, community residents must figure out that they -- not outsider "providers" -- have to look out for the people on their block, set the rules and standard for their neighborhood.
Baltimore's most concrete experiment along these lines is taking shape in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in West Baltimore, a 20-block area that's home to 12,500 of the city's poorest residents.
BUILD has taken the heritage of the late radical organizer Saul Alinsky and forged novel alliances. First there was BUILD's "Commonwealth Agreement" with the Greater Baltimore Committee aimed at dramatically improving performance in the public schools. BUILD in 1989 also launched a massive "Nehemiah" development of 300 new housing units in Sandtown-Winchester. And it became the catalyst to make Sandtown the first urban neighborhood to be organized wholly for and by poor people.
Kurt Schmoke, for his part, was the first mayor in the United States to commit his city so wholeheartedly to a neighborhood self-help model. We count that as significant, even though the city doesn't have as much money in Sandtown-Winchester as do the state and federal governments and BUILD. Mayor Schmoke also intends to give Sandtown residents a major say in how their local school is run, as part of an experiment in school-based management.
It's too early to celebrate a breakthrough in Sandtown-Winchester. Working with BUILD, Mr. Schmoke set up task force that has been charged to write what amounts to a neighborhood charter. It's supposed to incorporate what neighborhood residents want in Sandtown-Winchester on issues ranging from health care to employment, schools to substance abuse.
The examples of what might be achieved are pretty exciting: Local schools managed by the principal, teachers and parents -- not a central school bureaucracy. Tenant management teams to run public housing projects and develop citizenship centers. "Enrichment centers" to provide job training that might lead to middle-class futures.
BUILD is also anxious to see in Sandtown community-oriented policing -- police officers placed on permanent neighborhood assignment to prevent crimes, not just search out criminals and pick up the bodies. (See accompanying article).
This grand plan shouldn't require a lot more money that now flows into Sandtown for government functions ranging from welfare to Medicaid to food stamps.
The problem is that the money often flows into the pockets of outside providers -- middle-class social service agencies, for example, -- who all too easily, to local residents, resemble an occupying army.
And the spending is not always well coordinated. The Sandtown-Winchester experiment might serve as a national model for a more efficient use of public dollars in a poverty-plagued neighborhood.
But it remains very much an experiment. It depends on staying power from a mayor's office hardly known for crisp efficiency; it will require political protection; it will be in danger of sabotage by a raft of specialized government agencies whose turf it threatens.
Yet whatever the stumbling blocks, there remains a magical promise in the Sandtown-Winchester effort. It represents a refreshing way to reach people who're experiencing very troubled lives, in their own neighborhoods, speaking their own language. It places significant responsibility and expectations and trust in the residents to improve their own lives and community. It's a risky experiment.
But is it worth trying? There we see little question. If it works, if a good chunk of a neighborhood's residents can start their climb out of dependency, the whole region will have evidence that today's grinding, deep social divisions need not be forever.