After Urban Riots, a Long Road to Revival
In troubled American cities, such
as Baltimore, neighborhoods devastated by unrest seldom come back
By Christopher Caldwell in the Wall Street Journal
The Woodberry Kitchen, near Druid
Hill Park in northwestern Baltimore, is among the best restaurants in the
mid-Atlantic. It shares a renovated cotton mill with an art gallery and a
glassblowing studio. Washingtonians flock there. The restaurant website
recommends taking the highway, but there is a shortcut for those willing to
creep northward along Fulton Avenue in West Baltimore.
I suspect few patrons take that
shortcut twice. The jazz bandleader Cab Calloway and the Supreme Court justice
Thurgood Marshall grew up in the neighborhood, but it has, to put it mildly,
gone downhill since then. This is Sandtown, where dozens were arrested this
week in the rioting that followed the death in police custody of 25-year-old
Freddie Gray (on Friday, charges were
filed against the officers involved).
Unless you have been to the worst parts of Detroit or Camden, N.J., you are
unlikely to have seen anything like Sandtown.
More shocking, perhaps, is how
little distance separates sophisticated, 21st-century Baltimore—where you can
dine on wood-roasted Delaware River rockfish with pak choi and koshihikari
rice—from the left-behind, boarded-up Baltimore that Americans have been
watching on television with alarm.
The country can only hope that this
week’s damage remains limited to one wild night. The fate of Baltimore and
other troubled American cities often depends on how the violent parts get
rebuilt after rioting. In most cases, riot-torn neighborhoods don’t get rebuilt
at all.
Baltimore missed the boom of the
1990s. It has lost 120,000 residents in the last quarter-century. It has a
murder rate (37 per 100,000) that only New Orleans, St. Louis and Detroit can
match. A decade ago, under Democratic mayor (and now presidential candidate)
Martin O’Malley, reforms drove the rate down, but they required policing so
aggressive as to be unsustainable. In 2005, there were 108,000 arrests in a
city of 622,000 residents. Less than half of Sandtown’s working-age residents
work.
The city, which is two-thirds black,
has a black political establishment that has been entrenched for a generation.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and her police commissioner, Anthony Batts,
called last fall for a federal civil-rights probe of their own city. The
notion, heard on some talk shows, that the city’s leaders want to keep black
residents down can be dismissed.
In the wake of urban unrest,
well-positioned neighborhoods eventually attract private and public capital for
rebuilding. Both Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles have suffered riots that
were orders of magnitude greater than this week’s in Baltimore. Washington’s U
Street corridor, nearly destroyed by the revolt that followed Martin Luther
King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, is again a lively business hub.
But it took a very long time. U
Street didn’t see the first stirrings of revival until the 1990s. And
businesses were replaced, not restored. U Street was once the premier black
downtown in the U.S.; now it is a place for hipsters to drink microbrews and
smoke hookahs. That’s better than nothing, but U Street isn’t the hub it was.
It is a new hot spot on the site of the riots rather than any sort of
resolution of the problems that the riots revealed.
The legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles
riots, which followed the acquittal of four policemen videotaped beating the
black motorist Rodney King, is similarly mixed. A 2009 poll found that 68% of
the city’s African-Americans and 76% of its Latinos had a favorable view of the
city’s police department, formerly denounced for its paramilitary tactics.
But here, too, the process took
time, with the lost economic activity amounting to as much as $3.8 billion. A
20-year retrospective in the Los Angeles Times showed that the unemployment rate
in the neighborhood is now higher and median income lower than at the time of
the riots.
Less prominent cities tend to
languish after riots. Neither Newark nor Detroit ever recovered from the
post-assassination uprisings of 1968. Camden’s 1971 riots—sparked by the
police’s rough treatment of a Puerto Rican motorist, who later died—terrified
many residents. Some 60% of the white population left in the next decade. They
have not come back.
Reviving blighted neighborhoods may
be tougher in today’s prestige-based economy than in the old days of
manufacturing. Recall the desperate efforts of Newark’s city government to save
a Starbucks that
closed in 2008. Baltimore has its new-economy businesses (the investors T.
Rowe Price and
Legg Mason, the sportswear company Under Armour), not to mention the research
magnet Johns Hopkins University. It also retains some prizes from its
experiments in public-private development—its aquarium and sports stadiums, the
new Horseshoe Baltimore Casino. The port is thriving, if heavily automated.
But none of these offers much
opportunity for the undereducated workforce of Baltimore’s slums. And even the
city’s economic strengths are threatened by the hit to Baltimore’s reputation
over the past week. The casino’s general manager recently spoke of the need to
“communicate with the customers that this is as safe as any other place.”
Much hinges on whether it actually
is—and on whether Baltimore can impose order on its neighborhoods faster than
the neighborhoods spread disorder to the city.
—Mr. Caldwell is a senior editor at
the Weekly Standard
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