CITIES that keep a large middle class grow and prosper. Those that don't become Newark.
That's our destination. You'd think the city would want to avoid this by seeking a merger with the county, where the middle class has fled, but it doesn't. Why? Race.
Baltimore City is 61 percent black; Baltimore County, 87 percent white. Kurt Schmoke doesn't care to run in a combined subdivision that would be only 37 percent black. As David Rusk says in "Cities Without Suburbs," black mayors "waited a long time to achieve real power at city hall," and they don't want to give it up. Nor do their constituents. Black voters have waited a long time to achieve real power at the polls.
Rusk understands but laments this state of affairs. His metaphor for Baltimore is the ship that hits an iceberg, whose white captain then turns over command to the black first mate and abandons ship. Rusk calls it "an empty promotion [and] no consolation to the poor [black] people stowed away in steerage who cannot get off the sinking ship."
There are a couple of other points that need to be made about this. One, the white politicians and voters in Baltimore County don't want to merge, either. And two, and this is important, Cap'n Kurt and the black folks in steerage know that it was white officers who ran the ship into the bleeping iceberg in the first place. So why put them back on the bridge and expect them to figure out how to save it now?
The problem is, the city doesn't have the resources to save itself. We're sinking down to Davey Jones' Locker, to rest with the S.S. Newark, the S.S. Gary, the S.S. East St. Louis and the S.S. Detroit.
The only solution is to neutralize the race issue. "Yeah, right," you say. I know. A problem impossible for your average pundit to solve. But easy for Theo. Merge with -- middle class Prince George's County, whose population is 53 percent black.
We're not contiguous, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Maryland's circuit) approved a congressional district in North Carolina part of which is no wider than I-95 that connects widely separated communities. We've got three big highways (I-95, the B-W Parkway and U.S. 1) connecting us and P.G.
This new Baltimore would be the 800-pound gorilla of Maryland politics. It would have a population of just under 1.5 million, double the size of next-largest Montgomery County.
So state aid would be much easier to win, and the new entity's local tax resources would be far greater than the old city's. Per capita income would rise by about 25 percent. Retail sales would about triple, as would the assessable property base. And crime per capita would go down by a fifth, and the percentage of high school grads would rise by a fifth.
Now, for old P.G. County, statistically speaking there would be a decline, but as Rusk has pointed out, mergers lead in the long run to healthier, wealthier city residents and suburbanites. Really, not just statistically.