The great question after last week's gloomy U.S. Census Bureau report is this: Will the last person leaving the city of Baltimore please remember to turn out the lights?
When the second half of the 20th century dawned, more than 900,000 people lived inside city limits. As the century heads toward closing time, the figure is 703,057 and dropping like a body thrown out a window. Will the last person blowing town please leave a key under the mat (not that anybody's coming back) and then explain where everybody thought they were going?
Suburbia, yeah, sure. But it's no longer the suburbia of the great migration of the 1950s and 1960s, the Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties that once seemed so green and safe and climate-controlled and now begin to seem a little stale and iffy. They're knocking over old ladies at suburban shopping malls now. They're stealing cars right out of cul-de-sac driveways. Those pleasant county schools turn up kids stretching their allowances by doing a little side business in dope.
Now there's a migratory hopscotch effect: Skip the old promised lands, the Towsons and the Pikesvilles and the Severna Parks. Now the siren call, more and more, comes from Carroll or Harford or Howard county, each of which grew by at least 13,000 people in the last four years while the city was losing 33,000 souls.
Mostly, the ones leaving the city are middle-class families, struggling with property taxes, frightened of drugs and guns and crime, worried about their kids surviving a public school education, convinced that the thing we used to call a renaissance was mostly a mirage and nothing's going to get better in the city.
These migrants are black as well as white, equally anguished over the city's decay. As the middle class vanishes, what remains is a moneyed population, mostly white, that's grown weary and resentful about carrying the tax load, and a black population, heavily poor, frequently self-destructive and sending shock waves into every neighborhood with each new round of violence.
In the years 1992 through 1994, there were 1,009 homicides in this city. Of these, 86 involved white people.
Such percentages hold relatively constant for all manner of street crime -- the self-destructive numbers of the black underclass, locked out of the American mainstream. (Beginning tonight, there's a five-part series called "The Promised Land" on cable TV's Discovery Channel, an examination of the 5 million blacks who migrated from postwar Mississippi to Chicago. It bTC might as well be Baltimore. It's gripping TV that should be shown in every American classroom. The show's only problem: Like everyone else, it doesn't have any idea how to turn things around.)
A week ago, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action suit on behalf of 12,500 black families living in this city's public housing, claiming the old civil rights revolution failed to end sanctioned segregation here.
Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke naturally doesn't want to think of his city as segregated, either internally or from the rest of Maryland. But it's a fact that he would like surrounding counties to have their fair share of low-income housing. Baltimore is carrying everybody else's load. The counties want no part of it. The poor, once considered a burden, now are considered mostly a threat.
So the city grows poorer, more desperate, more sociopathic. Each builds on the other. The state is asked to pick up more of the city's financial burden, and in the places like Montgomery County, they wonder why. They should ask those in Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties, or Prince George's for that matter, where they're beginning to find clues.
There is no wall protecting them from the city's troubles, only ticks of the clock.
At City Hall, reaction to the new census figures was pathetic. The numbers must be a mistake, the mayor claimed. We're making progress, said a mayoral spokesman, progress toward "safer communities, better schools." It's the mayor's fault, implied the City Council president, saying the mayor's a nice person but hinting he's ineffectual.
The responses are all lamentable. It's the mayor's fault because he's the one nominally in charge. But he faces historic patterns -- generations of neglect, years of Washington indifference. "Safer" communities and schools? Somebody needs to open a window at City Hall and point out one neighborhood after another on the skids.
If the population is 700,000 now, where will it be at century's end? And who will be left? At this rate, no one of middle-class means. A few financially blessed folks for whom money is no big deal, living behind walls of security. And a vast, furious, self-destructive underclass wondering: Who turned out all the lights?