And so it came to pass that, in the warm season of hope and renewal, the city of Baltimore opened its eyes and found $100 million in federal gifts with millions more in truly biblical proportions to be triggered in city, state and private sources.
Season of miracles, indeed.
You want miracles, you got one here, brothers and sisters. You have neighborhoods in East, South and West Baltimore, neighborhoods known best for poverty and out-of-work people standing aimlessly on street corners and trash in the alleys and abandoned rowhouses turned into shooting galleries for junkies and all the little side-products of such things -- murder, for example -- suddenly getting brand new leases on life.
You have the federal government, on the brink of convulsive cutbacks, all of a sudden acting like the barkeep in a crowded tavern moments before closing time. "Last round," the barkeep shouts. The line's too long for everybody to grab a final drink, but the city of Baltimore, against all odds, winds up at the front and grabs with both hands.
The alcohol metaphor's not so bad. Some think the city will get drunk on all this money and run through it like some juice-head on a binge. The rush is too intoxicating. It's the swan song for the do-gooder '60s, and everybody knows how the '60s turned out. It's the last hurrah of liberalism, and everybody knows what bone-heads the liberals are.
Or it's Baltimore's mini-renaissance II.
The skepticism's easy to understand. In the late '60s, in the wake of the riots, you couldn't turn a corner around here without bumping into some sort of anti-poverty program. The federal government, stumbling all over itself in a mix of good intentions, overdue guilt and fear, threw money around and waited for miracles to commence.
Instead, the feds belatedly discovered that generations of neglect and greed and stupidity weren't going to be wiped out so easily. The drug problem was worse than they'd ever imagined. The breakdown of families was staggering. When miracles didn't happen overnight, Washington decided to do other things with its money, implicitly declaring cities lost causes.
Try walking through some of these neighborhoods now, the places where the feds want to spend all these millions. The scenery makes your eyes hurt. West Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester's won deserved applause, but on streets all around it last week you could see people falling off the edge of the world. Around Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore, there's a palpable anger in the streets. In South Baltimore's Fairfield, a sense of abandonment.
The fashionable thinking now is that such neighborhoods are beyond redemption. Two years ago, the Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies put the number of vacant houses in the city at 27,222. Sixty percent had been abandoned for more than two years. Such things don't happen in places where a spark of hope still exists.
The new money arrives when the Republicans talk of cutting $57 billion in welfare benefits over the next four years. This would effectively deny assistance to half the families and children currently getting it. Why not? Everybody knows the welfare people are faking it, aren't they?
"Oh, sure," David Liederman was saying recently, with irony dripping from each syllable. Liederman's executive director of the Child Welfare League of America, and he was in town for an awards dinner at Loyola College sponsored by the Woodbourne Center for troubled youngsters.
"Nobody likes welfare," Liederman said. "So people run for office by saying they're gonna cut 10 million welfare people off the rolls. This is family values? People talk about mothers staying on welfare for the free ride. The truth is, 70 percent of all welfare mothers come off, by themselves, within two years.
"Why? Because welfare stinks. They don't want to be on it. The problem is, they go back on. They need health benefits, they need child care, their lives come apart. In Illinois, we're looking at 47,000 kids in foster care. And 40 percent of those kids come from just 15 neighborhoods in the city of Chicago."
It's a familiar pattern. A city assumes part of its reputation from the worst it has to offer. The three areas in Baltimore getting
the big federal windfall account for just 10 percent of the city's population -- but 21 percent of the murders and 23 percent of drug arrests. About 40 percent of their residents live below the poverty line.
So what's the answer? Kiss off these neighborhoods? The feds, in the last foreseeable gesture of belief in urban redemption, now extend a hand. City Hall shouts hallelujahs and gives great assurances nobody will be disappointed.
We shall see. For a long time now, the big-city mayors have said, in a kind of chorus, "Oh, what we could do if we only had money." Well, here's the money. Now let's see what will be done.