Baltimore’s 2018 Sustainability Plan Lacks Realism

We can expect more of the same — crime, poverty, and injustice — if the 2018 sustainability plan is the city’s future.

(Note: underlined text links to further reading.)

Introduction

Baltimore is a troubled city in search of solutions. The Baltimore Office of Sustainability’s solution is its 2018 Sustainability Plan, which closed for public review on June 8 (the finalized version will be published soon). The plan provides a lot of insight into the city’s direction and the intentions of its current leadership. The plan’s very existence is a positive sign that Baltimore’s leadership has a long term, comprehensive vision for the city, and the passion of its authors for the well-being of Baltimoreans is evident throughout.

However, there are some shortcomings with the plan I want to explore.

Problem 1: The Plan’s Muddled Approach to Public Safety and Policing

Nothing is more important to a city’s environment than the safety of its inhabitants.

In 2017, Baltimore had the highest murder rate of any city in the US. This story made international headlines and is well known throughout North America, reinforcing once again the folk narrative of Baltimore’s violent streets. This violence is exacerbated by the appalling corruption of the city’s police force and the brokenness of its judicial system. There is an unsatisfied, ravenous hunger for justice in the city, complicated and compounded by decades of racial violence and oppression. The lack of safety in Baltimore is extreme enough that it’s a core concern of the sustainability plan.

To address the troubled relationship between the city and its police, the plan attempts to downplay the role of law enforcement in guaranteeing public safety. It argues that the importance of law enforcement is exaggerated, but makes the mistake of taking the opposite extreme. Page 82 states explicitly that “reducing violent crime” is less important than “building community trust” — that is, it’s more important that people feel comfortable around police than it is for police to reduce violent crime in the city.

Baltimore’s law enforcement has abused the trust of the public — the people it’s supposed to protect — time and time again, and no one should hesitate to call out these abuses. However, Baltimore has a truly savage crime problem, and the primary role of law enforcement is unquestionably to protect innocent people and remove bad actors from public life. Every trace of corruption and abuse needs to be weeded out of Baltimore’s police force, and this force needs to be tempered by morality, ethics, fairness, and respect for individual human rights. At the same time, law enforcement needs to be equipped, empowered, and emphatically supported by city leadership and the public at large. Law enforcement earns public trust when it does its job with precision and integrity, and does its job best when it’s supported and rewarded for good work.

All these truths need to be made explicitly clear in the sustainability plan. No amount of greening can compensate for the blood flowing in the city’s streets. Nothing is more important to a city’s environment than the safety of its inhabitants. The sustainability plan in its current form fails to adequately recognize the importance of personal safety and law enforcement to Baltimoreans.

Future iterations of the plan should address these shortcomings by explicitly promoting a culture of support and respect for precise, ethical, and moral law enforcement alongside calls for reform and improvement of community trust. Best practices for justice reform in other cities, both old and new, should be studied and explored by the Office of Sustainability. Every other aspect of the plan’s ambitious goals are terminally threatened by the city’s crime rate.

Problem 2: A Lack of Economic Realism

It’s foolish for a city with rapidly decaying infrastructure and unsustainable tax rates to increase the scope of its financial responsibilities.

Baltimore’s sustainability plan lacks economic realism. The plan’s treatment of economic concerns seems out of touch at best, and irresponsible at worst.

Two suggestions in particular illustrate the plan’s lack of economic realism. Page 33 calls for charging stations for electric cars in low-income neighborhoods, despite the fact that electric vehicles remain unaffordable and impractical for many middle-class families even with existing tax credits. Another page calls for Baltimore City to develop fitness tracking apps, despite the abundance of free-to-use apps that already exist like Strava, MyFitnessPal, and Google Fit.

Furthermore, the plan is filled with calls for more and more spending to fund things like art projects, solar panels and green roofs for private businesses, urban agriculture, and training for green careers without any thoughtful or realistic insight into how these new programs will be funded.

I want to make it clear that I’m not opposed to any of these sustainability projects. But it’s irresponsible for a city like Baltimore with such rapidly decaying infrastructure and unsustainable tax rates to increase the scope of its financial responsibilities. Perhaps if Baltimore had the budget of cities like Seattle, Dallas, or San Francisco, such programs would be worthy of consideration. But Baltimore is far from a position of such privilege. The city needs to focus on building up the basics — safety, economy, infrastructure — before adding to its already extensive list responsibilities. The city is quite literally falling apart.

Another shortcoming of the plan’s economic stance is its dishonest claim that disadvantaged people “rarely benefit from positive employment trends.” This claim is demonstrably false and intellectually dishonest. Furthermore, it’s directly contradicted by the new conditions created by the U.S.’s current economic boom: Black unemployment is at an all-time low, and a number of employers are removing college degree and experience requirements. Unemployment rates have also fallen sharply for people with disabilities. In towns with especially high demands for talent employers are paying prisoners full wages to work in their facilities. If growth trends continue, disadvantaged groups will continue to see increased need for their contributions, causing minority unemployment to fall to even lower levels. The same can and ought to be true for Baltimore.

While it’s true that a city’s low unemployment rate doesn’t necessarily indicate a just and healthy society, correlation between economic vibrancy and social well-being is strong, because it enables more people to achieve healthy living conditions. A healthy economy with strong labor demands places power in the hands of workers, enabling them to negotiate for better benefits and higher wages on their own terms. Employers in such economies need workers more than workers need them.

The economic solutions suggested by the 2018 sustainability plan are unlikely to positively impact more than a tiny fraction of Baltimore’s disadvantaged groups. In fact, they are more likely to further damage the city’s economy, which will disproportionately impact disadvantaged groups. The best way to empower these people is to strengthen the city’s job market by substantially lowering the city’s property taxes and removing barriers for entrepreneurial individuals of all demographic groups. It will take time, but a more positive regulatory environment is guaranteed to facilitate economic growth in Baltimore and help the city reach the capital it needs to achieve the sustainability plan’s great ambitions.