The Rev. Vernon Dobson stares through the gray light breaking through his church office window at vacant homes across the street, recalling "The Promise."
The Union Baptist Church pastor remembers former Mayor William Donald Schaefer and developer James Rouse touring Baltimore's African-American churches, asking for support to rebuild the Inner Harbor. The prosperity will spread, the ministers were told. Your neighborhoods will flourish.
Thirty years later, Dobson is still waiting. As the city heads into its final mayoral election of the century, many Baltimore neighborhoods continue to decompose.
Unemployment stands at 9 percent, double the national average. City planners estimate that 1,000 residents a month move out, while open-air drug dealing has become a burgeoning industry.
"The promise has never been fulfilled," says Dobson, a key player in the creation of the Baltimore United In Leadership Development (BUILD) citizens' group 22 years ago. "The next mayor needs to understand that if downtown is going to be a play area for people who don't live in the city, then they need to define what the rest of the city is going to be."
Candidates will be asked to address that concern and others when BUILD holds a mayoral forum at 4 p.m. tomorrow at St. Matthew's Roman Catholic Church, 5401 Loch Raven Blvd.
There -- and for the remainder of the campaign -- residents, given their increased activism this summer in such groups as BUILD, will be looking for a mayor who responds directly to them. As Schaefer was the "Inner Harbor Mayor" and Kurt L. Schmoke declared himself the "Education Mayor," residents will seek a "Neighborhoods Mayor."
"You'll never build a successful downtown if it's surrounded by poverty-stricken ghettos," said Jimmy Rouse, a downtown business leader and son of the renowned Inner Harbor developer. "I don't think to date that Baltimore has done a good job in finding creative solutions."
Of the 26 mayoral candidates, only City Council President Lawrence A. Bell III, City Councilman Martin O'Malley, and former East Baltimore City Councilman Carl F. Stokes have made neighborhood revitalization the focal point of their campaigns.
Register of Wills Mary W. Conaway has said she supports investing in "human capital."
"Let the tourism industry take care of the Inner Harbor hotels," she has said. "We need to focus on people."
'Back to Basics'
Bell began describing himself as the neighborhood mayoral candidate last year.
Bell held the first African-American Economic Summit, a gathering of minority small business leaders concerned about their inability to obtain business loans. He followed up the session with a council hearing on the need for the city to tap into the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a federal statute created in 1977 to ensure that banks provide lending in hard-hit neighborhoods.
In the last six years, cities across America have grabbed $1 trillion of the community reinvestment money, thanks to stricter government enforcement of the law. Prior to 1993, only $42 billion was spent. Currently, the law is under attack in Congress by U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who calls it another means of welfare.
Bell, 37, calls his campaign "Back to Basics, Block By Block" and is calling for the return of the $1 home program. Under the 1970s plan, neighborhoods such as Otterbein were rejuvenated by the city selling homes for $1 to owners willing to renovate them. The homes now sell for up to $200,000.
City Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson notes that the $1 house program worked in neighborhoods near the Inner Harbor, but doubts it can succeed in harder-hit areas. Yet Bell pledges to increase enforcement of city trash laws and housing codes to shore up those neighborhoods.
"We need to be one Baltimore," Bell said.
Funding the improvements
Bell was the first to call for Baltimore to use CRA funding, but O'Malley has been the candidate running with the idea.
O'Malley recently announced his plan to create a new three-person mayoral office responsible for improving city neighborhoods. The city would use taxes brought in by two new Inner Harbor hotels to create the office and recruit new neighborhood investment, O'Malley said.
The CRA program is working in other cities. Pittsburgh has secured $2.7 billion in CRA funding since 1988. Cleveland has attracted $1.3 billion through nine banks since 1991. In that same time, Baltimore has used $137 million in community reinvestment funds, less than 6 percent of the Pittsburgh funding.
The 36-year-old Northeast city councilman also proposes splitting the Baltimore Development Corp., the city's business recruiting arm, into two offices, creating a neighborhoods division. Baltimore should be as successful in recruiting neighborhood reinvestment money as it has federal housing money, O'Malley said.
"It's not a matter of money; it's a matter of mayoral involvement at the table with the banks," O'Malley said. "It's just like Danny Henson went after federal housing money; we have to have a mayor actively go after public money."
'Neighborhoods First'
Stokes calls his plan "Neighborhoods First." Although introduced first, it contains components of both the O'Malley and Bell platforms. Stokes wants to tap into the money that cities such as Pittsburgh and Cleveland have enjoyed, while also pushing the $1 house program and partnerships with churches and community development groups such as the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition.
Stokes pledges to make Schmoke's Neighborhood Services Centers -- created as liaison to city enclaves -- to be more responsive and concentrate revitalization efforts on 10 to 12 neighborhoods "on the cusp," including Poppleton and Patterson Park. The strategy includes restoring recreation centers.
Stokes calls the promise of spreading Inner Harbor prosperity spreading "a lie."
"We never intended it to happen," Stokes said of the pledge. "The city cut deals never intended to help the common folk."
'An easy target'
One has just to look at downtown to see the alleged disparity. Over three decades, billions in state, federal and city money have been spent for two stadiums, a convention center, hotels and the failed Columbus Center. And that doesn't account for the annual millions spent by the city to maintain police protection, sanitation and landscaping. In the last three years, the BDC has attracted $528 million in new city investment.
Yet a review of the agency's annual reports show that 75 percent of the new development, including two out of every three jobs created or retained, has occurred in city neighborhoods, figures that dispel the downtown spending myth.
"It's really a perception," Bob Embry, city housing commissioner under Schaefer. "The problem is that the Inner Harbor is an easy target."
Over the years, the city has equally poured billions into neighborhoods, including more than $250 million through the Schaefer years in addition to the $100 million in federal Empowerment Zone money and $300 million in federal housing dollars attracted by Schmoke. The aid remains less noticeable because it isn't concentrated as in downtown.
Yet Embry and other downtown economic development leaders agree that city neighborhoods are in desperate straits. The problem, they contend, is fleeing residents abandoning properties because of crime, woeful schools and high property taxes. The solution, economic development leaders suggest, is concentrating neighborhood redevelopment.
The BDC, like Stokes, believes the key to fulfilling "The Promise" is to target the cusp neighborhoods. Working with the city Department of Housing and Community Development, the BDC recently purchased a string of properties just east of downtown along East Baltimore Street for new office, warehouse and distribution space.
In addition to the building of the Pleasant View Gardens community and demolition of Flag House Courts housing project next summer, new commercial development will make a visible East Baltimore transformation that the agencies hope to extend north along Interstate 83 to the prison.
"It's a false choice between downtown and neighborhoods," BDC President M. J. "Jay" Brodie said. "What would give people hope in the neighborhoods is targeting resources."
To aid neighborhoods, Brodie contends, Baltimore should create a $10 million economic development fund created by corporate contributions. In Cleveland, the city raised $150 million in private money to help purchase land for redevelopment. With so many abandoned industrial sites, Brodie says, the city could buy the properties at minimal cost to redevelop it and attract new jobs.
The mayoral candidates' neighborhood positions will be tested Sunday at the BUILD forum. The labor, neighborhood and school group with 15,000 families gained national attention in the 1995 mayoral race by pushing candidates to support the first Living Wage legislation in the nation. Under the law signed by Schmoke, companies doing business for the city must pay its workers at least $7.90 an hour.
This year, BUILD will try to force mayoral candidates to pledge to spend 50 cents in neighborhood development for every $1 spent on the Inner Harbor. BUILD also wants companies receiving city subsidies to pay their employees the "living wage."
The neighborhood groups say they want their blocks to resemble the Inner Harbor with proper police protection, clean streets and thriving businesses. And the residents promise to make sure the next mayor remains accountable on city neighborhoods.
"You know how you feel when you walk into a neighborhood that is clean, lawns are neat, no boarded up houses; it's safe," said Rudy Adams, a Northeast Baltimore BUILD organizer. "You feel good about the neighborhood and you want to live there. That's what we want for every neighborhood in the city."
Pub Date: 8/07/99