I recently drove downtown along Reisterstown Road and Druid Hill Avenue and was shocked by the poverty and disorder I saw. Trying to better understand what had happened to the area, I went online to find anything that might explain how neighborhoods I knew years ago as vibrant and flourishing middle-class communities had fallen into ruin.
This led me to an Abell Foundation report entitled "The Dismantling of Baltimore's Public Housing." It suggested that much of the city's current dilemma can be traced back to the development of the "projects," which created cordoned off spaces of poverty, drugs and crime that police were unable to control and which bred even greater social problems.
Too many young people today continue to suffer as a consequence of this ill-conceived model of urban society. Yet despite this obvious reality, public education and the teachers unions are blamed for low achievement and high dropout rates among the children who are victimized by such dysfunctional urban settings.
If there is a solution, it might start with re-visiting the Abell report's recommendation to convene a group of private developers, city representatives and public housing experts to analyze the current state of public housing. Getting them all talking together would at least be better than doing nothing at all.
Edward J. Gutman, Baltimore