We beef up law enforcement to attack crime, devote more funding to try and improve inadequate schools and tackle health disparities by getting more people to the doctor. But what if Baltimore could solve all of its persistent social problems by getting rid of poverty?
It’s not all that novel an idea, really. Plenty of research and data have long shown that low-income people fare worse in most lots of life and that pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps is not as easy as people make it sound. Remember the prominent Johns Hopkins study released in 2014 that followed the paths of nearly 800 Baltimore children and found that most of those who grew up poor were likely to end up at the lower end of the economic ladder as adults as well?
Yet no one has devised a way to lift mass scales of people out of poverty. The New York-based anti-poverty group Robin Hood Beginning wants to try to do that, and Baltimore is one of the cities where it is intervening with a strategy to identify and intervene at points in a person’s life that might influence if they get stuck in poverty.
As is true throughout the country, the city’s most insidious issues can likely be linked back to poverty. It is not really surprising that in Baltimore, where 22.1 percent of people lived in poverty in 2017, well above the state’s 9.4 percent, the crime rate is high, for instance. People will turn to burglary, shoplifting and other crimes to get through life if economic opportunities and jobs don’t exist. And there has been little investment in the areas of the city with some of the highest crime rates, according to research funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation that came out this week. Low-poverty neighborhoods receive one and a half times the investment of high-poverty neighborhoods, the analysis found. Neighborhoods that are less than 50 percent African American received nearly four times the investment of neighborhoods that were more than 85 percent African American.